BA (Hons) Creative Writing

Creating Characters

This module introduces you to the basics of creating credible characters.

The module will prompt you to make artistic decisions about the history of your characters, the setting and time of your characters’ lives, character motivation and perspective.

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.

From Manga to Witch-Maidens: Storytelling in Visual Culture

This module explores the history and forms of visual storytelling and integrates the study of visual writing theory and practice, as you consider the narrative techniques and structures of miniseries, anime and manga.

Introduction to Writing Poetry

This module introduces you to the practice of writing poetry. You will focus on working in a variety of forms and voices, which explore imaginative territories and poetic processes.

Introduction to Writing Short Fiction

This module will build on skills and techniques acquired throughout your first semester, such as:

• 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.

Literature Now: Reading and Writing the Present Moment

This module introduces you to the contemporary cultural landscape by exploring recent literary texts and transformations of the literary (film, graphic novels, digital texts, gamification, etc.). 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. Students can submit a critical or creative response to this module.

Source and Exploration

The module will train your observation skills. You will learn to apply the world around you to inform your creative processes. You will also learn the value of the ‘concrete’ as opposed to the ‘abstract’ and discover how the ordinary can become extraordinary.

The Writer’s Notebook

This module introduces you to keeping a writer’s notebook and how to use this as a storehouse of ideas, images, research and drafts. You will also learn about the journey from rough idea to finished piece as you examine a selection of case studies of notebook entries, drafts and published work.

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.

Creative Writing: Poetry, Form and Freedom

This module will enable you to develop a variety of sophisticated traditional poetic forms and to develop experimental free verse poems within a reflective contemporary poetic practice.

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.

Poetry: 1300 to the Present

The module aims to develop your understanding of rhythm, rhyme, free verse, diction, particular verbal effects, timbre, tone and voice. It will encourage awareness of the centrality of genre to a wide range of poetic practice from the Renaissance to the present day.

Prose Fiction: The Dynamic of Change

This module will explore the dynamics of change in the contemporary short story.

You will examine model short stories and how they invariably dramatise a significant change in character, and/or situation.

In doing so, you will understand how to analyse the devices writers use to shape narrative, and to create tension and conflict.

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.

Writing for the Screen

This module introduces you to the craft of writing a short cinematic screenplay.

The module focuses on the building blocks of screenwriting, with a focus on:

• visual storytelling
• plot (using treatments and step outlines)
• scene-building
• research skills
• characterisation
• setting
• sound
• struggle
• movement
• layout.

You will experience the collaborative nature of screenwriting, and explore the role of the screenwriter within the broader institutional framework of the industry.

Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries

The module will also assess how far second-generation Romantic poets developed the key Romantic theme of reform, as you consider the influence of the French Revolution on the work of British writers during the 18th century.

You will study the work of renowned and revered Romantic poets including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Wollstonecraft, alongside the work of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen.

World Literature: Roots and Routes From Conrad to Afrofuturism

This module explores the role of literature in making the modern world. Using texts from around the world, you will consider a new sense of the globe, colonial relations and the new post-colonial world.

You will consider our sense of having roots in the world, especially national roots.

Charting a path through texts from the late 19th to the 21st century, the module does not aim to ‘represent’ the totality of world literature. Instead, you will study a selection of texts that engage with crucial issues. Within these, you encounter a variety of themes: from the violent imposition of imperial power, to the ecological challenge of global climate change.

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

This hybrid English and creative writing module presents wisdom and wonder tales from around the globe, and explores their influence on contemporary literature, including as inspiration for your own poetry and/or fiction.

You will have a choice of English or creative writing submissions.

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 Flash Fiction

‘Flash Fiction’ is an exciting new way of telling stories. By composing their own portfolio of very short fiction, you will be challenged to see the form from the inside, and to focus upon the creative challenges that are unique to ‘flash fiction’. These challenges will be brought into additional focus by workshops that require critical reflection upon the evolving work.

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.

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.