The Yearning Annex: Education Listings

Who would have guessed that underneath the streets of Chelsea you could pretend to be a cowboy—a real cowboy, I mean. The West Side Rifle and Pistol Range (212-243-9448, westsidepistolrange.com) offers lessons for beginners, including a classroom safety course and firing range supervision. Kosiya Shalita

WRITING

Rafe: "You are so beautiful it hurts." Evelyn: "It's your nose that hurts." Rafe: "I think it's my heart." Randall Wallace, screenwriter for Pearl Harbor and author of this exchange, clearly never attended a dialogue seminar hosted by the Gotham Writers' Workshop. This one-day course (on September 11) helps aspiring scribes give clear, realistic voices to their characters. Presumably they also mention—listen up, Mr. Wallace—that dialogue should consist of things people would actually say (212-WRITERS, writingclasses.com). Cost: $150.

Along with food writing and pornography, travel writing is one of those gigs that sounds tantalizingly fun and simple—that is, until you actually try it. In truth, that latest Times feature on tracking howler monkeys in the Costa Rican rainforest or spa-hopping through Iceland probably didn't just flow intact from an inspired pen. Learn the practical aspects of turning your globetrotting ways into adventure tales in NYU's "From Traveler to Travel Writer: A Writing Workshop" (212-998-7171, scps.nyu.edu). Oct. 21–22. Cost: $290.

Wrapping your head around a class on how to write a "how to" book requires some mental metacrobatics; it's sort of akin to "Being a Dummy for Dummies." But seriously, let's say you know how to do something really well, but that something is not how to write a "how to" book. Better check out "How to Write and Sell Your 'How To' Book," a course at Hunter College (212-650-3850, ce.hunter.cuny.edu), starting Sept. 13. One wonders: How did the instructor learn how to? Cost: $200. Theo Schell-Lambert