Creative Writing (modular)

The portfolio module is your opportunity to develop an individual project that will lead to a fully-realised piece of creative work. Typically, 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
• Develop and edit your creative project 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. When the portfolio is graded, it will be returned to you with detailed written feedback.

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 explore 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 aims to enhance your knowledge of library, archival and online research and 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

This module will allow you to develop an idea for a novel, select techniques appropriate to your genre, theme and style and prepare you to complete an extract or series of extracts from a novel in progress. Through reflective exploration of several contemporary novelists, targeted writing exercises and workshops, you will explore character, voice, point of view, genre, form, setting and place.

The module will be taught by a combination of interactive lectures on the set texts, plus workshops and individual feedback on work in progress from your tutors.

You will be assessed on the submission of a portfolio and a reflective essay.

This module will enable you to develop your understanding of prose writing for young people, with a focus on Children’s Fiction (8-12 years) and Young Adult Fiction (11+ and 14+). During the module, you will develop an idea for a manuscript suitable for one of these audiences. The manuscript will be informed by the critical discussion of the set texts, targeted writing exercises and participation in workshops. Together, we will explore voice, point of view, story structure, setting and place, as well as formulate conceptions of the role of gatekeeping, reader expectations, and current movements and trends in the children’s publishing landscape. You may come prepared with a manuscript idea you wish to work on, or you might build on an idea generated in class. Towards the end of the course, you will also be asked to write reflectively on your creative process.

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. These aims will be achieved through a variety of methods:

The short story is a complex and malleable form. This module considers the multiple forms and styles of contemporary short fiction from a range of cultural backgrounds and nationalities.

You will have the chance to 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

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, the braided essay, collages, fragments and mockuments. Rereading, rewriting, reconsidering: reflective editing and responding to feedback.

This module will introduce students to writing for games of all kinds, both digital and pen-and-paper. We will explore the basic principles of collaborative narrative experience as we seek to engage both critically and creatively with this new and extremely popular branch of contemporary writing. text currently is as follows could you kindly adapt new text please The weekly workshops are currently supplemented by a weekly, evening Games Study Night in the University Library to explore existing games, play-test your own, and enjoy the Library’s rich collection of board games.

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, having the chance to learn 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 typically 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 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 develop 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)

Science Fiction and Fantasy are two incredibly popular, historied genres. This module gives students the opportunity to study the particular techniques and processes employed by writers of SFF, and exposes them to a diverse selection of contemporary speculative texts. Students will be tasked with looking back over the rich history of both genres with a critical eye, tracing the sources of many of the genre traditions they will be familiar with, before recontextualising and interrogating those traditions in their own work, or working explicitly beyond them. This module explores forms commonly associated with Science Fiction and Fantasy, such as the trilogy and the series, but also looks at experimental and marginal forms, such as genre poetry. There are a tremendous amount of sub-genres, and ways of incorporating SFF into literature, and students will be encouraged to consider the broad spectrum of contemporary Science Fiction and Fantasy, and where their own work belongs in regard to it.