Creative and Professional Writing

There is another world, which is this world. Dystopias, futures and other forms of speculative writing offer us a new clarity on the some of the most pressing issues we face in our world today. Through examining four thematically structured units over the course of the term, you'll discover how the study of narratives that exist in ‘other worlds’ can offer insightful and nuanced analyses of complex questions involving environmental, political, historical, and/or societal concerns. You'll also consider how these broader contexts and concerns can be utilized to further interrogate the texts tyou read. Generic terms such as ‘dystopian fiction,’ or ‘science fiction’ will be understood both broadly and generatively and your studies will therefore cover both literary and paraliterary examples, as well as works in other media. TYou'll have the opportunity to respond to the other worlds you explore through creative and critical means.

How do writers emerge from, work within, speak to and challenge their cultural and creative contexts? How do those contexts shape our creative identity and practice? What are the varied professional practices and communities that form part of a critic and/or writer's work?

You'll be introduced to a range of methodologies to help you develop your identity and interests as a writer, be that critical, creative, or a mixture of the two. You'll explore approaches to creating and developing your own writing through conversation and exchange, broadly understood, as a starting point. This will include using research; intertextual practices; collaborative and editorial exercises; interviewing; and reviewing. You will reflect upon and analyse the current literary and publishing landscape, and how your work might respond and enter into it.

Your final portfolio of texts may include a range of forms, such as book reviews, manifestoes, short essays, articles, and your own poetry, fiction or creative non-fiction. You will learn skills that are essential to the work of a professional writer, and begin to situate their own writing in a 'creative commons’ of shared intellectual resource and exchange.

What does it take to be a creative writer today? How can you create exciting stories and relatable characters? And does your poetry really have to rhyme? By introducing you to the working methods of the contemporary writer, you'll develop skills in both fiction and poetry. Each week you'll learn an exciting new writing skill like composing a sonnet or developing plot diagrams. The purpose of creative writing is to make other people feel things and see the world in a new way. You'll become a much more confident writer, able to take readers on a meaningful journey.

What are the prose forms available to the creative writer today? What distinguishes flash fiction from the short story from the novella from the novel? Is there a boundary between fiction and non-fiction? How should we lay out dialogue? This module will explore storytelling techniques and strategies through history and introduce students to some of the different prose forms and narrative elements available to the creative and professional writer and encourage them to investigate each one and develop their skills in fiction, creative non-fiction, and a variety of short prose forms. By the end of this module, students will have a grasp on techniques of contemporary prose, be much more confident writers, and be able to compose coherent fictional narratives. 

Furthering your foundation in key Creative Writing techniques, this module will introduce a variety of short forms that your writing could take and experiment with, enabling you to construct complete short form pieces. These will range from micro-fiction and memoir to building your skills in showing through image with the short imagist poem.  

This module will embed and develop your proficiency with key skills in Creative Writing. You will be able to identify how key Creative Writing skills become structural and organisational devices in short forms to make cohesive whole pieces, examining model examples and applying critical and creative thinking to choose and experiment among these forms.  

How can you take your writing from page to stage, screen or sound booth? And what types of writing can be performed? This module lays the foundation for a number of strands of writing for performance: playwrighting, screenwriting and more poetic and experimental forms of performance writing. You will learn the foundations of these forms and develop dramaturgical and other creative strategies to engage your ideas effectively with live and screen audiences.  

You will share writing with your peers in the form of read-throughs, introducing professional industry concepts such as the ‘table read’ and ‘script in hand’ reads as a developmental feedback practice. There will also be opportunities to share as performance if you wish. The read-throughs will develop your ability to discuss and constructively criticise your work and that of others and expand your revising and editing skills. You will start to bring your written texts to life off the page.  

By the end of the module, you will have produced a piece or a number of pieces of text for performance that could be performed (either by you or actors/performance artists). 

Feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich suggested that poetry could be a space that allows ‘the structures of power to be described and dismantled’. Romantic poet P. B. Shelley called poets ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Can poetry help us reimagine and restructure our world? What forms might those imaginings and restructures take? What are you and your poetry, invested in? And what kinds of writing could your poetry be? 

You'll approach these questions from different angles. You will have the opportunity to discuss and learn how to write texts for sound performance, visual texts, traditional poetic forms, prose poems and lyric essays. We will explore what poetry can be and where it meets prose, art, and music, looking at a range of writers: from more traditional poetic texts to contemporary and experimental writing that defies traditional form and easy categorisation as a ‘poem’, and investigating how language can be played with through writing experiments and exercises. 

You'll think through the relationships between identity, intention, effect, and subject matter through a variety of different writing methods, techniques, procedures and approaches and forms. You will learn how to apply this thinking to your own writing: how, for example, might you want to write back against something that’s made you angry? Could a poetic procedure help you to take back or examine its power over you? Could you erase it, collage it, reduce it to it sound? You will be given the tools to learn how to identify how what is important to you could make an interesting writing project, and discover what forms of articulation can enable you to write this most effectively.

How do writers craft stories that are compelling, thought-provoking and original? What are the building-blocks of successful fiction writing, and what can we learn from writers past and present — including each other?

Each week, you'll explore a key concept of story-telling, such as point-of-view; characterisation; dialogue; plot; structure and planning; voice and tone; description and imagery; location and place; editing and re-editing; theme. You'll also take part in writing workshops, developing your skills as an editor of your own work and that of others.

You will reflect on and experiment with different choices — understanding these aspects of craft not as fixed rules, but as possibilities, frameworks and approaches that will help you to find your own voice and create robust, considered and meaningful works of fiction.

To have the right to the world is to have the right to write, read and construct the world; the right to make a different world. 

In this project-based module you'll investigate a range of literatures and arts that focus on the right to the world as related to displacement, movements and actions. Drawing on Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ and ‘right to difference’, you'll interrogate who has the right to the world, and explore the ways authors and artists have struggled to claim the right to construct the world they inhabit. In doing so, you reflect on the world we live in, and highlights the relationship between rights and internal/external displacement, social movements and political action that relate to local, national and global practices of creative activism. In order to equip students with an understanding of the right to the world and creative activism across contemporary and past struggles, the module introduces works in diverse forms (e.g. fiction/non-fiction, written, performative/audio-visuals, archival) that transitions between key moments, movements, mobilities. You'll finish by creating a self-devised creative or critical project that writes to the world and raises public awareness.  

What does it take to write a film? This module offers you an introduction to the terms, ideas and craft involved in the creation of screenplays and to the craft of screenwriting. Screenwriting is a unique form of writing with very different concerns from the novel, theatre and radio. Although the screenplay is a vital component of a film’s success, it tends to be neglected as a separate art form. In this module you will explore the conventions of dramatic structure, new narrative forms and short film variations. You are encouraged to think critically about screenwriting and you will have an opportunity to write your own screenplay. A selection of creative exercises will be used to take you through the writing process, from preparation and initial concept to final draft. By the end of the module, you will have gained practical knowledge and have started to develop your own creative voice.

How do you go about writing a play or text for performance? What writers and playwrights inspire you? And how can you learn from their approaches to help you find your own writing style?

These are some of the questions we will consider on this module, as you develop your skills in writing and your own creative approach. You will have the opportunity to look at a range of performance texts and learn how to closely analyse these, to help you understand the fundamentals of writing for performance.

You will develop your skills by writing your own material, and experience the results and effects of your writing by witnessing how it comes to life when it is performed by others. Through ongoing practice, discussion and constructive criticism from peers and lecturers, you will also develop an understanding of how important revision, editing and feedback are to the evolution of a piece of writing for performance.

On completing the module you will have developed your ability to recognise and discuss what makes a good piece of writing, produce compelling performance texts of your own, and apply your skills as a confident and creative communicator.

This is an opportunity for independent study on a topic of your own choice. Working on the project is a major part of your final year of study, taking place in Spring and Summer Terms, aiming to provide an appropriate environment for you to research in-depth subject relevant to your programme and the continued development of key skills. It will also challenge you to solve problems which involve the critical consideration of engineering relevant legal, social, ethical and professional issues and enable you to develop and practice a professional approach to the delivery and appraisal of written and oral presentations. You will be allocated a supervisor who will support you through weekly meetings and other communications.

To assist you to build necessary knowledge and skills as required in developing an engineering project, you will be provided with a series of lectures and workshops covering topics including design and production techniques, reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS), quality, safety and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), as well as ethical, environmental and EDI issues.

How has American crime fiction evolved from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to become one of the most important and popular genres of literature today? You’ll trace the story of crime fiction in the United States from the gruesome tales of Edgar Allan Poe to the contemporary moment. You’ll study fiction as a principal object but also discussing film and television. Along the way, we will discuss the conventions of the whodunnit, the emergence of hard-boiled fiction in the pulp magazines of the interwar period, and the flowering after World War Two of Black, queer and feminist approaches to the genre. You’ll consider what drives the evolution of mass genres, how they are related to their historical contexts, and how to describe and analyse their particular narrative forms. You’ll leave with a broad knowledge of American crime fiction across periods and a deep understanding of its perennial appeal.  

How has the Gothic retained its grasp on the literary imagination for over 250 years, remaining relevant and recognisable while undergoing a series of exhumations?

Explore the Gothic from its origins through various resurgences to its present-day incarnations. Through seminars we’ll discuss the birth of Gothic conventions such as threatened heroines, hauntings and transgressions and consider how tropes are reworked in key literary and historical moments in the genre’s development. You’ll think about how social, political and cultural contexts inform the Gothic’s various concerns about gender, sexuality, race, class and the law and how to use a range of theoretical lenses to analyse the texts. Consider how adaptations across film and television contribute to the Gothic’s capacity for laying bare contemporary concerns such as marginalisation, queer identities, the body and immigration. You’ll gain a deep understanding of the ongoing significance of the Gothic as an evolving fictional form and a broad knowledge of its functions across periods and geographies as a vehicle for political and social critiques.

How do writers tackle topics that are not always easy to put into words? We’ll explore forms of non-fiction that create space for writers to talk about the things that matter to them, including essays and lyrics essays, autobiography and hybrid memoir, autofiction and auto-theory. You’ll learn how to write in one of these forms and reflect on the ethics and politics of writing from and about real life that can be difficult to articulate. Alongside this you’ll consider the unconscious and the limits of language by discussing archives, desire and the hauntological. You’ll try different methods of writing practice related to discovering alternative ways of knowing, leaving the door open to the ambiguous and the paradoxical in order to investigate how to go about finding those things the nature of which is totally unknown to us.

What’s the best way to begin writing a novel? Should you plunge straight in and see where your characters and voice take you, or should you do a meticulous plan first? What should a contemporary novel be about? Does it have to be ‘publishable’, and what does that mean? You’ll learn how to work with your own experience, opinion, imagination and ideas to create engaging characters, dramatic situations, immersive locations and more. Make the most of your chance to experiment with different types of planning and writing before you commit to one project. Halfway through the term you’ll pitch your project to the class and get feedback before beginning to write your novel in earnest. You’ll emerge with the opening chapters of your own contemporary novel as well as a plan to complete it. 

On this module you will have the opportunity to adapt your favourite literary text into a film or television screenplay. Will your adaptation be faithful to the source material? Or will you use dramatic license to reimagine or reinterpret the original? The module will provide the close study of a diverse range of popular screen adaptations, considering how the conventions of dramatic structure and narrative form are modified for serialised TV and film. You will critically engage with adaptation studies by considering medium specificity, drawing out the key differences between literary form and screenwriting by focusing on features such as plot, characterisation, point of view and style.

Within your creative practice, you will consider the social, political and cultural contexts of adaptation. In studying the art of dialogue and action through screenplay, you will build your confidence in narratology and forms of storytelling, honing your ability to envision how a literary text can be expanded, condensed or transformed across mediums. Considering thematics, narrative treatments and iterations you will learn the craft of adapted screenwriting for industry. This module equips students with the critical insight and creative craft to bridge literature and screen.