Creative Writing (modular) MA - 2020 Entry

Course Structure

You will study a range of modules as part of your course, some examples of which are listed below.

Core

• Research Training and Professional Practice in Creative Writing

  This module prepares you for your dissertation project and supports the development of the research, scholarly and critical skills that it will require. You will be introduced to the idea of ethical practice and any students working on memoirs or verbatim work will be offered specific guidance. You’ll also master the ideas, concepts and issues around reflective practice and the vital role of research within creative writing.

  We’ll study in a cohesive group, bringing students on combined courses and those following different pathways together to create a wider forum; our discussions will focus on professional practice and research issues.

  This module will enhance your knowledge of library, archival and online research and it will develop your understanding of the creative process - taking you from first draft to final submission, including problem-solving strategies for creative blocks or obstacles. The module also places your creative work in the context of a professional literary world.

  Indicative study themes:

  • Understanding the Research Context

  • Library, Online and Archival Research

  • Scholarly Conventions

  • Creative and Professional Presentation

  • Research and Reflective Practice

  The Ethical Researcher

• Creative Writing Portfolio

  The dissertation module is your opportunity to develop an individual project that will lead to a fully-realised piece of creative work. You will be supervised by a specialist in your chosen area of interest.

  The creative work may be several pieces of short fiction, a radio play, a coherent collection of flash fiction, prose poetry, poetry, an extended personal essay/memoir/autofiction, or a continuous extract from a proposed novel or other book-length work.

  You will:

  • Generate the idea for a piece of creative work in your chosen form

  • Propose an independent reading plan

  • Draft no more than 5,000 words for initial tutor review

  • Take your creative project to fulfilment and present the finished work to a high standard - as appropriate for your chosen form (eg correctly formatted script)

  • Demonstrate your knowledge of relevant form, technique, and process by writing a 3,000 word reflective essay, including a full bibliography

  You will receive informal, verbal feedback during regular dissertation meetings with your supervisor. This will include suggestions for reading and research as well as feedback on the development of your creative project.

Optional

• The Personal Essay

  This module introduces you to the personal essay: a flexible, hybrid form incorporating elements of cultural and literary criticism, memoir, journalism, fiction and auto fiction. We will explore a number of modes of personal writing, assisting you in the development of a form that best serves your creative intentions.

  Taught via literature seminars and creative workshops, you will experience a range of literary techniques, including generative writing prompts and exemplar texts. You will also learn how to respond reflectively and creatively to feedback - to this end, one seminar each term will be replaced by a one-to-one personal tutorial.

  Indicative study themes:

  • The Writing 'I' developing a voice, the strategic I, literary personae, authority and double perspective.

  • Mode and register: memoir, documentary, reflection and commentary.

  • Scene setting and dramatisation: applying creative technique to 'real life' material.

  • Finding a subject the writing self and the world.

  • Autofiction, truth and artifice.

  • Developing a Form: The List Essay.

  • Developing a Form: The Braided Essay.

  • Developing a Form: Collages, shapes, mockuments and concrete essays.

  Rereading, rewriting, reconsidering: reflective editing and responding to feedback.

• New Media and Experimental Writing

  Exploring experimental modes of writing, this module focuses on form and mode whilst placing new media writings in a longer tradition of experimental writing. This gives you the opportunity to critically explore your own writing practice in relation to literary texts, new media texts, and experimental and collaborative practices.

  We will engage with and develop writing practices which correspond to a range of forms and media: the codex (book), e-lit or digital literature, games, visual media. And we will evaluate the range of critical responses to experimental literature, digital literature, remix culture and games narrative.

  Indicative study themes:

  • Experiments (1): Constraint and cut up

  • Experiments (2): word, vision, sound and text in media

  • Form and mode (1): from page to media

  • Form and mode (2): Geoff Ryman’s 253 as hypertext and print remix

  • Narrative and game dynamics (1): ergodic literature and writing machines

  • Narrative and game dynamics (2): Dear Esther

  • Remixing the book (1): Cortazar, Johnson, Danielewski

  Remixing the book (2): glitches, codes and uncreative writing

• The 21st Century Writer

  Led by your own interests, this module will enhance your knowledge of commercial and independent publishing, community writing and online publishing.

  You will contact and engage with an external organisation, person or literary context and then reflect on your creative writing in relation to this ‘world’ experience - you will be encouraged to expand your reflections to include wider social, cultural and economic issues.

  Skills acquired will include the ability to present yourself professionally in a literary, creative or cultural industry context and the means to assess the criteria for literary awards and competitions. You’ll also enhance your knowledge of community writing settings and the role of funding.

  Fortnightly presentations on aspects of the writing industries and various ‘writing worlds’ will be interspersed with seminar discussion of your projects or placements, including suggestions for further reading or background research.

  Indicative study themes:

  • Commercial publishing and the role of the agent

  • Live theatre and festivals

  • Writing in community settings

  • AHRC and funding

  • Independent and regional publishing

  • Competitions and journals

  eBooks and online writing

• Writing Radio Drama

  The aim of this module is to enable you to write drama for radio, developing your own scriptwriting style and gaining an awareness of the professional requirements of the genre. We will study exemplar radio dramas and use them to contextualise the creative choices in your own work whilst also exploring the effects of different structural and stylistic approaches.

  Peer and tutor feedback will guide the development of your creative portfolio as you work towards a single radio drama script of 25 pages. Reflective practice will help you to master the art of redrafting and editing and you will pen a 1,000-word essay placing your experience of this in the context of radio drama.

  Taught through a combination of seminars and workshops, we will initially focus on the key elements of writing for radio, with weekly tasks corresponding to study themes. Latterly, we will move on to more intensive workshopping of your own work.

  Indicative study themes:

  • The radio landscape

  • Narrators

  • Navigating through and creating soundscapes

  • Beginnings

  • Character creation and character voice

  • Story structure

  • Status shifts

  Script format (and software resources)

• Approaching the Novel

  The aim of this module is to allow students to explore the practical demands of writing long fiction, to develop their writerly and critical skills, and to develop their insight into the writing process. It will provide students with the opportunity to consolidate their learning about narrative fiction through the practical application of that learning. It is expected that by the end of the module, students will have gained substantial experience of the process of creative writing. These aims will be achieved through a variety of methods:

  Strand One: Seminars

  The bi-weekly seminar-sessions focus on an element of successful prose fiction.

  In each session, students will be expected to make group presentations on the following key areas of long fiction: Narrative Structure, Voice, Person, Point of View, Character and Description. They will use the set texts as a starting point for discussion, but will be encouraged to develop their points using books of their own selection. Presentations will be followed by convenor-led seminar discussions to develop and concretise the ideas presented.

  The second part of the seminar session consists of practical writing exercises tailored to the theme of the seminar, in which students are enabled to put into practise the ideas developed in the first part of the session.

  The final session of the year will also be tutor-led. Focusing on the challenges of and strategies employed in redrafting creative work, the seminar will take students through the process of moving from a first draft to a polished draft of a piece of prose fiction. This will function both as an exploration of the professional writer's practice, and individually-tailored preparation for developing assessed work.

  Strand Two: Workshops

  Bi-weekly workshop sessions are designed to develop the students own work-in-progress. Students will submit samples of their creative work through the VLE, for fellow students and the course convenor to access, read, and reflect upon. In the workshop session, students will receive formative feedback in tutor-led classroom discussion of the work, and offer their own feedback on others' work. This practice-led, workshop model of teaching Creative Writing is as recommended by both NAWE and the AHRC, and replicates the professional experience of responding to feedback from writing groups, first readers, editors and agents.

  Workshop and Seminar Sessions fall bi-weekly, so that students are enabled to apply the insight gained and skills developed in each type of session to the work undertaken in the other. The move from critical study to creative engagement has been found to be a useful creative strategy in the teaching of Creative Writing within the department, and is something we have been encouraged to continue and develop by external examiners.

  Strand Three: Personal Tutorial

  Personal tutorials are to be held at a mid-point of the course. At this point the student will have the opportunity to discuss their ongoing creative project and receive individual formative feedback on their work. This takes place at mid-point so as to give the student a moment of reflection and guidance at a useful point in the course, well in advance of assessment.

• Writing Poetry Today

  This module looks at poetry culture in the UK and beyond, preparing you to enter the world of the publishing poet by closely examining the prize culture, some of the significant prize- winning collections by new poets over the last few years, and current poetry journals.

  You will investigate current trends, learning what it takes to get your work read - by editors, publishers and the poetry-consuming public. And you’ll put together a publication package with the aim of building your own portfolio in readiness for the vibrant and varied poetry marketplace - which continues to defy predictions of its demise.

  Each seminar will be divided into reading and workshopping of your creative work in light of what we've read.

  Indicative study texts:

  Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (Faber, 1991)

  Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (Chatto 2015)

  Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet 2014)

  Sam Riviere, Kim Kardashian's Marriage (Faber 2015)

  Andrew McMillan, Physical (Cape 2015)

  Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber 2015)

  The Current Forward Anthology for that year

  A series of poetic journals (as chosen by your cohort)

  Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter (Cape 2013)

  Sinead Morrissey, Parallax (Carcanet 2013)

• The Contemporary Short Story: Expanding the Form

  The short story is a complex and malleable form, capable of so much more than the quintessential modern form, which explores an intense experience in a single moment in time. This module considers the multiple forms and styles of contemporary short fiction from a range of cultural backgrounds and nationalities.

  You will develop your understanding of short fiction by drawing upon contemporary writers as well as secondary and critical reading - which will also help you to build a critical and theoretical framework around your own writing.

  Peer and tutor review, both oral and written, will encourage you to work reflectively as a creative practitioner. And you’ll be encouraged to demonstrate your knowledge of the forms and genres used in contemporary short story writing by incorporating them in your own short story portfolio.

  Indicative study themes:

  • The longer short story of Alice Munro

  • The historical short story (eg The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher)

  • Myth and fairy tale in the short story

  • Magical realism and the fantastic

  • Formal experimentation

  • Hypertext

  • Science and the short story (the Comma Press 'Science into Fiction' Series)

  Politics and the short story

• Psychogeographical Investigations: Myth and Place

  'Psychogeographical' practices encourage the overlaying of history, story and myth and a deep engagement with urban and natural environments. This module provides a means for you to investigate space, place and narrative through such practices.

  We will draw out experimental approaches to the literary representation of place through practices of walking, inhabitation, site-specific practices, visual and textual materials. We will also study key critical and fictional texts.

  You will undertake writing tasks via creative workshops and benefit from the opportunity to further develop your research skills. You’ll also be encouraged to critically explore the interface between creative and critical modes of writing.

  Indicative study themes:

  • Myth and Place (1): Sinclair’s London

  • Myth and Place (2): the folk horror revival

  • Practices of walking (1): Solent’s Wanderlust

  • Practices of Walking (2): writing in the field

  • Hauntology (1): place as palimpsest

  • Hauntology (2): visual strategies

  • Landscape (1): hills, fields and coasts

  Landscape (2): urban psychogeography

• Flash Fictions

  This module introduces you flash fiction: a very short narrative form that works through compression, the use of imagery, and the omission of sequential narrative material. We will explore the form through exemplar texts from around the world and you will develop the editorial skills necessary to capture flash fiction’s brevity and imaginative power in your own work.

  Taught via literature seminars and practitioner workshops, you will experience a range of techniques, including generative writing prompts. You will also learn how to respond reflectively and creatively to feedback - to this end, one seminar each term will be replaced by a one-to-one personal tutorial.

  Indicative study themes:

  • How narrative shapes experience and memory

  • Starting points and how to develop them

  • Positioning the reader - narrative modes

  • Voice and cultural context - who is talking and how?

  • Language, imagery and metaphor

  • Allusion and allegory

  • Editing and compression

  • Exploring genre in flash fiction?

  • Flash fiction or prose poems

  • The triptych

  Making sequences

• Literature and Location: Space and Place in Creative Non Fiction

  How do writers recreate place - real or imagined? How do readers imaginatively inhabit place? This module explores elements of place writing and New Nature Writing, looking at domestic space, urban space, the countryside and the ‘edgelands’ that lie inbetween.

  We will encourage you to develop your own creative work and reflect upon the different dimensions of place writing and ‘literature-as-place’. A critical interpretation of texts will allow you to reflect upon the authorial decisions made and the effects you seek in your own creative projects.

  Bi-weekly seminar sessions enable you to gain critical insight and develop new skills before applying them to your portfolio of work in the alternating bi-weekly creative workshops.

  Indicative study themes:

  What is place, or ‘place writing’? Who invented it? How does that relate to ideas of space? Recent ideas of wilderness, the old emphasis on walking, the New Nature Writing.

  The archive, the curatorial and the imaginary museum. Key text: Jonathan Meades Museum Without Walls

  The city, the countryside, and the spaces in between. Key texts: Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts Edgelands, Jean Sprackland Strands

  Deep place – the natural world in our midst, and the nonhuman viewpoint. Key texts: Charles Foster Being a Beast

  Occupying imaginary worlds: cinema’s parallel universe, and the journey through landscape. Key text: Geoff Dyer Zona

• Seeing Things: Visualising Poetry

  This module aims to do two things: to encourage the student to think about contemporary poems in several different visual dimensions but always from the viewpoint of the practitioner; and it offers an opportunity for them to develop their own work in progress, while at the same time actively promoting their critical reflection upon the process of writing and the visual dynamics a poem can activate and contain. The module admits that the ‘how to’ approach might be of less use when it comes to writing poetry, and instead promotes and explores a wider sphere of influences, encouraging experiment and engagement. A critical exegesis allows the student to reflect upon the decisions made and the effects sought in their creative project.

Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research.