BA (Hons) Creative Writing

Introduction to Creative Writing

You will be introduced to the fundamental skills of creative writing through two core lines of investigation: the writer’s notebook (analogue or digital) and the creation of characters. You will develop your notebook through active engagement with a wide range of sources, including personal experience and the local environment, and recording lived experience through attentive use of the senses.

You will experiment with style, form, medium and genre, generating creative work through processes of critical reading, editing and revision, and be guided through the process of creative writing workshopping.

Introduction to Writing Short Fiction

You will build on skills and techniques acquired in the first semester: concrete imagery; writerly research; notebook gatherings; reflections on developing creative work.

You will encounter a variety of forms and voices in a range of examples from traditional and contemporary sources in both British and international short fiction.

The focus, however, will be on writing itself, finding and recognising source material and imaginative territories, and experimenting with voices, characters, dramatic structures, imagery, and genre.

This module forms the basis of a fiction ‘strand’ which can be developed throughout the course and intersects with a range of genre-specific modules. Themes covered include the digital world of a writer; writing across borders; finding a writer’s voice.

Creative Non-Fiction: Starting From The Self

This module introduces you to the versatile genre of creative non-fiction, in which writers employ skills transported from fiction to lend dramatic complexity to factual narratives.

Using autobiographical material as a base, you will generate dramatic scenes on a variety of topics and themes.

Writing Back: Poetry, Image Voice

This module aims to provide you with knowledge of how poetic genres have arisen and developed through time and the ability to engage with that poetry, imaginatively and critically.

This module begins with a discussion of originality and tradition in English poetry. It will then follow with a series of weekly studies of particular poetic forms, focusing on examples old and new.

It will study songs, elegies, ballads and Lyrics from the Middle English era to modern variants and kinds.

You will encounter a variety of forms and voices in contemporary, experimental and traditional poetry.

The focus will be on finding and recognising source material and imaginative territories, and on writing back, experimenting with voices, tones, imagery and sound.

Literature Now: Reading and Writing Modern and Contemporary Literature

How do we write and read our own moment? Exploring modern and recent literary texts and transformations of the literary (film, graphic novels, digital texts, gamification, etc.), this module introduces you to the contemporary cultural landscape.

Tracing multiple forms of writing and reading, you will gain the capacity to engage creatively with the present and to develop your own critical responses.

Flexible and expansive, this module allows you to test cultural forms, create your own written responses, and grasp your own experience of the present.

Make It New: Modernist Experimentation

On this module, you will confront the Modernist moment and use it as a springboard for creative and critical thinking.

Modernism is one of the most radical periods in literature and wider culture, with new approaches to writing about sex, gender, race, time, death, technology, and the human body and the human mind, and we can map it in interesting ways to the current age.

You will encounter a variety of forms and voices, models for your own writing and an important moment in literary history: late 19th-century horror, which reflects growing social unease about the secret self, about sexuality, about changing gender roles and ‘others’; and decadent literature, which reveals challenges to Victorian ideas about sex and creativity.

In this module, you will think about the city, urban isolation, and social collapse.

You will look at dystopian fiction which reflects deep unease about the new technological age, particularly after the First World War, write and respond to realist and experimental fiction which found new ways to describe racial and gender identity, humanity’s relationship with time, the human mind and the human body, and sex.

Agents of Change: Women’s Writing in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

This module explores the challenges made by women’s writing, both critical and creative, to established authority over the past two centuries.

Creative Non-Fiction: Writing Lives

This module introduces you to the versatile genre of creative non-fiction, in which writers employ skills transported from fiction to lend dramatic complexity to factual narratives.

Using autobiographical material as a base, you will generate dramatic scenes on a variety of topics and themes.

Poetry, Freedom and Tradition: 1300 to the Present

You will gain knowledge on how poetic genres have arisen and developed from the Middle Ages to the present day, generating skills in understanding of rhythm, rhyme, free verse, diction and particular verbal effects.

You will also develop skills in close critical analysis, and the creation of new, innovative and responsive poetic forms.

Experiments in Fiction: Magic, Detection, Sci Fi and Beyond

This module aims to provide you with an understanding of, and ability to recognise, a range of genres in prose fiction.

You will gain an understanding of genre as a means of classification and understand that the way a text employs genre shapes its meaning.

Fiction for Children

This module introduces you to writing fiction for children.

The module will extend and deepen your key writing skills as you learn to pay particular attention to such things as suitable and age-specific subject matter, appropriate language, a more active narration, faster pacing and the demands of greater immediacy.

Fiction: Stories in Motion

This module explores the dynamics of change in contemporary fiction, with particular emphasis on how research initiates and propels narrative movement.

You will examine a range of texts across different modes of fiction – such as the fantastic, experimental writing, and folktales – to explore and evaluate how stories are set in motion through moments of disruption, discovery, or transformation.

Through close reading and discussion, you will analyse narrative form and the techniques writers use to shape stories, create tension, and generate conflict. These include structural choices as well as stylistic devices that control pacing, focus, and momentum.

You will develop your skills of effective storytelling through research and a range of writing devices, including exposition, dialogue, patterns of imagery, metaphor, and suggestion. Attention will be given to how these elements work together to animate a story’s central concerns and themes.

The module aims to deepen your understanding of short fictional narrative forms and to inspire the production of original creative work that demonstrates control over both the technical and imaginative aspects of these genres.

Alongside creative writing, you will write a critical essay on one of the model short stories studied. This essay will focus on a specific writing device explored during the module, analysing its function and effectiveness in relation to the story’s central theme or themes.

Work Placement

The work placement module allows you to develop your skills in a work environment and gain vital experience to put you ahead in your future career. This allows you to gain experience in, for example, a workplace such as a local newspaper or as a writer-in-residence. You will then use the skills you have learnt on your course in order to reflect critically on the world.

Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries

After gaining knowledge of the earlier eighteenth century, you will study the Romantic period. This was a time of revolution: when the idea of ‘rights’ first emerged; when the ‘noble savage’ was imagined; when childhood was invented; and when an actress made love to a prince and wrote about women’s rights.

This module follows a chronological pattern but will teach the debates stimulated by the American and French Revolutions. It will examine their impact on the vibrant literature and ground-breaking thought of the time.

As well as covering the great works of the major Romantic poets, this module will examine the exciting genres and writers that have risen to prominence within the Romantic period relatively recently.

Reenchanting ‘the West’: Learning from Myth and Sacred Texts

In this module, you will examine the genesis, evolution and global context of Western literature through an internationalist and beyond realist lens.

European and world myths, folklore, legends, wonder tales and sacred texts will be read and discussed in relation to global, historical and contemporary beyond realist and social realist oral literature and texts. 

You will be asked to consider questions concerning hidden social histories; political power; psychology; mythography; poetics; narrative structure; cultural appropriation; and translation.

Ultimately, the module will empower you to confidently participate in creative and critical conversations and writing modes.

You will be introduced to ‘the Cauldron of Story’: core texts and oral literature in the fields of world myth, legend, folklore and wonder tale.

Seminars will invite you to read these stories in relation to contemporary texts in English and English translation: work ‘speaking back’ to traditional narratives, including poetry and fiction.

Uniting these disparate fields of study will be a critical concern with themes of gender, power, disability, war, the supernatural, faith and the beyond human world. Jung’s theory of the archetype and Campbell’s ‘The Hero’s Journey’ will be introduced as conceptual frameworks subject to feminist, queer, post-structural and decolonial critique.

You will critically evaluate mythic archetypes and stereotypes. Questions of universality will be contextualised in relation to specific historical contexts, including our own diverse backgrounds and shared cultural experiences.

Fairy Tales: Early Modern to Postmodern

Gain an informed historical and critical perspective on a powerful literary and cultural tradition beginning with the fairy tales written in early modern Italy, continuing through Perrault, D’Aulnoy, Grimm, Andersen to the work of more contemporary authors such as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. It also asks where we can turn to for modern fairy tales, through a focus on the use of fairy tale tropes in the work of J.K Rowling and Philip Pullman.

On this module, you may submit a critical essay or creative work.

Contemporary Short Fiction: Writing the Here and Now

This module will enable you to explore, as active writers and readers, the strategies, innovations and preoccupations of contemporary writers of the short story. You will read and analyse the craft, technique and rigour of three to four highly regarded short story collections from the last 15 years.

Digital Writing: Writing for the Community of Strangers

On this module, you will harness the skills developed in non-fiction modules in year one and year two to engage with new possibilities in digital writing, including:

• blogs
• games
• websites
• online journalism
• Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook
• texts
• podcasts
• comments forums
• campaigns
• hypertext

and the non-linear; e-books; apps; fan fiction; reviews, etc.

Dissertation

The Dissertation in Creative Writing gives students the opportunity to work independently on an imaginative writing project of their own choosing. This may take the form of a fiction project, a poetry project, a play or screenwriting project, or a creative non-fiction project. It will include a related essay in which you investigate a particular artistic, aesthetic or cultural issue of relevance to you as a contemporary writer OR the work of a particular writer who will be influential as you develop your own body of work for the Dissertation project.

Making It Strange: Writing the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Modern Gothic Novel

This module offers you the opportunity to develop your creative skills within genres that focus on worlds that lie beyond the tradition realm of ‘realism’. These forms of ‘Beyond Realist’ texts have a distinguished pedigree stretching back to humanity’s earliest myths, epic narratives, folklore and fairy tales. You will explore how to write within genres such as science fiction, fantasy and contemporary Gothic as you learn their specific complexities and intricacies.

Unforgettable Corpses: Literature, Cultural Memory and the First World War

This module will examine literary products of the First World War, the methods by which the authors reproduced, described and fictionalised their experiences.

The second half of the module will also consider the use of First World War tropes in literature produced in the latter half of the 20th century, compare the application of those narrative devices, and critically assess the later use of those devices.

Writing the Novel

On this module, you will write the first chapter of a contemporary novel, deepening skills gained on short fiction modules in Years 1 and 2. Having acquired skills in narrative, imagery, characterisation and theme, you will now be encouraged to develop these skills in greater depth while engaging with the demands and challenges of a longer form.

Fantasy Writing: Origins and Development

This module explores the landscape of fantasy writing from its origins to the contemporary.

This module will guide you through this rich and living tradition from medieval origins to modern greats like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

By the end of the module, you will be equipped to respond critically or creatively to fantasy writing as a genre.

Writing, Environment and Ecocriticism

This module will offer you the opportunity to explore the ways in which contemporary writers and critics engage with images, issues and concepts of the environment in novels, poetry and non-fiction. You will choose whether you wish to engage with the themes of the module as a critic or a creative writer.

Fairy Tales: Early Modern to Postmodern

Gain an informed historical and critical perspective on a powerful literary and cultural tradition beginning with the fairy tales written in early modern Italy, continuing through Perrault, D’Aulnoy, Grimm, Andersen to the work of more contemporary authors such as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. It also asks where we can turn to for modern fairy tales, through a focus on the use of fairy tale tropes in the work of J.K Rowling and Philip Pullman.