Creative Writing BA (Hons)

Course modules

First year

• Exploring Creative Writing
• Writing Identity

Single honours only:

• Approaches to Reading and Writing
• Shaping Ideas
• Elective module
• Second year
• Word, Image, Sound
• Writing Place

Single honours only:

• Personal Projects
• Story Craft
• Elective Module
• Creative Writing in the Workplace
• Third year
• Portfolio
• Specialism plus Negotiated Study
• Professional Writing Skills
• Uncreative Writing and Artificial Intelligence

Single honours only:

• Portfolio Extension
• Elective module

Teaching and assessments

Overview

This degree programme is carefully designed to develop your potential by ensuring you encounter the full range of forms open to the 21st century creative writer, whilst also allowing you flexibility to focus, for assignments, on projects and genres that interest you most. We want you to learn that practicing a particular kind of writing can hone your craft in a different form (for example, dramatists learn so much about choreographing the natural movements of a voice on the page from writing free verse poetry). But, equally, Single Honours gives you the chance to develop longer work on projects grown from your own interests.

In the first year, the focus is upon shorter work, and the importance of developing your editing and re-drafting skills; and your capacity to accept and evaluate feedback from others. This process will enable you to take a critical and reflective approach to your work (Both creative and reflective writing will be assessed). But you will also practice shaping and developing your own ideas, and practice reading as a writer to learn new craft skills.

At second year the assignments lengthen, and the focus upon research intensifies as you are expected to situate your own writing alongside your reading of other writers in your field. This involves developing a more sustained writing practice informed by an understanding of the conventions of particular genres, and your management of readers’ expectations.

In the final year, such knowledge is pushed further by making you consider how your sense of the ways in which creative work is published and marketed will help you understand how your own practice might fit in – or resist – contemporary conventions.

In all years, the modules reinforce the knowledge that reading and analysing the work of other practitioners – your fellow students included - will help you understand and develop your own formal and technical abilities.

Contact hours

You will be taught through a combination of workshops, lectures, tutorials, group work and self-directed study. Assessment is mostly through coursework (Creative submissions, presentations, essays and projects), although there will be short tests in ‘Uncreative Writing and Artificial Intelligence’ and there may be tests or examinations in some elective modules. Your precise timetable will depend on the optional modules you choose to take, however, in your first year you will normally attend around 10 hours of timetabled taught sessions (lectures and workshops) each week, and we expect you to undertake at least 28 further hours of independent study to complete project work and research.