Creative Writing BA (Hons) module details

Year one

Block 1: Exploring Creative Writing

Both in workshops and through independent study, you will explore a wide range of short form writing including a range of modes from the following: international strict form poetry (for example, sonnet, rondeau, terza rima, ghazal, villanelle, sestina), free verse, flash fiction and historical flash fiction. Ethical questions of combining fact and fiction are addressed in an introduction to historical fiction. You might also explore the practice of review writing in a real-world context and digital short form writing on social media platforms which will enhance your transferable employability skills.

The focus on short form writing in a range of forms and genres enables you to learn clarity of expression and concision while practising re-drafting and editing and developing confidence in yourself as a writer. A range of exercises will be used to generate new writing. You will give one another formative feedback and evaluate the responses your work receives, thereby providing structured opportunities to consolidate writing skills for your final submissions.

Assessment: Collaborative Writing (20%) and Short Form Portfolio (80%)

Block 2: Journeys and Places

This module, with its focus on journeys and places, offers an opportunity for you to explore some of the key concepts underpinning your creative writing. You will take a post-disciplinary approach to your studies, using techniques from diverse areas to address key questions related to journeys and places in your creative work.

You will attend interactive lectures with students from across the School of Humanities and Performing Arts. You will have opportunities to apply the concepts addressed in these lectures to your creative writing within subject specific workshops, and through creative writing assessments.

The themes covered during the module may include journeys, spaces and the concept of welcome; (im)mobilities and journeys through time and space; representation and imaginative geographies; gender and placemaking; belonging and place attachment; journeys, places and identities; as well as themes related to sustainability and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Assessment: Subject-specific Coursework: 1 (30%) and 2 (70%)

Block 3: Multimodal Writing

This module enables you to examine in how reading of traditionally published texts and innovations within the digital sphere can inform and improve your own practice, creativity and resilience as a writer. These two strands: digitally engaged writing and reading for craft, will be introduced through core readings, drawing on materials from a range of countries and cultures, including published work from global majority writers and writing in translation.

You will develop your craft skills through analysis of traditionally published texts in areas such as voice, form and structure, pace and development, genre, and language. However, as every stage of the writing process is impacted by digital, a key aim of this module will be to help you optimise your use of and potential for writerly growth in the digital sphere.

In addition to producing new creative work, you will work individually or collaboratively on a ‘writers’ salon’. You will select material, lead discussions, and devise exploratory writing activities to enable your peers to read for craft and productively explore multimodality. By working with others, you will consolidate your own learning and develop employability skills which are transferable to a wide range of workplace situations, particularly in an educational setting.

Assessment: Writers’ Salon (20%) and Portfolio (80%)

Block 4: Shaping Ideas

This year-long module is devoted to developing your individual writing practices, founded upon your unique writing interests. The focus is on working with your existing creative projects and passions, but supporting you to plan, research, and develop these projects effectively. You will be supported to understand the importance of giving constructive feedback and how to apply feedback to your own work – key skills that reach beyond creative writing to a wide range of employment contexts.

You will gain an understanding of the stages of the writing process, including the different types of research undertaken by practising writers, which will underpin your own project and build a foundation for extended work.

At this early stage of your programme, it is expected that you will need to continue to be supported in your writing craft, for example, in the development of characters, how to use place writing techniques, structuring a narrative, how to use line breaks in poetry, and so on. Importantly, key activities will include workshopping your work (giving and receiving feedback) and discussion of the development of your ideas into a sustained writing practice. You will also gain experience in talking about your work to your peers and tutors.

Assessment: Feedback Report (20%) and Creative Work & Reflective Commentary (80%)

Year two

Block 1: Writing Identity

This module explores the negotiation of identity in writing as potential material for the creative writer. It involves exploring the identities of the fictional characters created by authors, and your own identity as a writer and creative thinker.

You will engage with a wide range of fictional, biographical, autobiographical, poetic, and theoretical material. As well as exploring memoir, biography and other forms of non-fiction, you will also explore the ways in which the raw material of memory, observation, experience and an informed imagination might contribute to producing poetry, fiction and essays. You might also choose to write about you own experiences of identity, exploring selfhood, personality, memory, and examining the degree to which any written identity has a fictional component. Implicitly, you will engage in critical, ethical and moral debates centred around identity in the twenty-first century.

You will consider the responsibility of writers to represent groups or individuals with care and intelligence, particularly in relation to equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI). Teaching delivery will embed discussions of identity in relation to issues such as place, race, gender and class, particularly the formation of postcolonial identities, and the role of intersectionality in the construction and negotiation of identity.

Assessment: Writing Identity Portfolio (100%)

Block 2: Exploring Work and Society

This module is designed to prepare and support you in pursuing post-degree pathways. It focuses on the specific skills, capabilities, and knowledge needed to adapt and thrive in professional environments. Emphasis is placed on enhancing core attributes, competencies, and transferable skills, as well as developing familiarity with the world and politics of work. The module equips you for diverse and dynamic workplaces beyond university by introducing reflective practices that will support your long-term professional development.

You will be introduced to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and encouraged to engage critically with themes such as race, gender, identity, and geopolitical issues. This will help you conceptualise a more equitable society and an environmentally sustainable world, in line with your career aspirations.

You will participate in subject-specific workshops to gain a deeper understanding of career pathways related to creative writing and its associated fields. The module includes lectures, seminars, group discussions, independent learning, tutorial support, and peer engagement.

Supported independent learning activities may involve responding to real-world briefs, placements or shadowing, engaging with community projects, or creating proposals for professional projects. These activities will be tailored to your Creative Writing programme.

Assessment: Written Portfolio or Recorded Presentation (100%)

Block 3: Story Craft

This module’s focus is story in the broadest sense - a subject with relevance in forms as diverse as poetry, hypertext, and all scripted work. Narrative remains a tremendously powerful tool in all aspects of media, in marketing, advertising, gaming, as well as all aspects of fiction. Main themes may include narrative arcs and structures, characterisation, pace, event, story-world, dialogue, clue-laying, revelation, and concealment, and means of involving the reader.

Initially, the module will focus on storytelling and prose, looking at story structure, narrative structure, and drive, and how writers compel us to turn the pages. It will consider how the art of storytelling has adapted to its contemporary setting and the relationship between form and content. You will gain skills and craft techniques to use in your wider creative practice.

On occasions, additional specialist study may include an exploration of story craft in other forms, genres, and cultures, for example, writing for stage and screen, both TV and film, but with a particular focus on structure and narrative.

You may use storyboarding and electronic forms of presentation (e.g., Padlet, Pecha Kucha) as learning tools. You will be expected to undertake analytical reading and practical creative tasks.

Assessment: Story Craft Proposal (40%) and Story Craft Creative Work (60%)

Block 4: Word, Image, Sound

This year-long module builds upon the skills developed in Shaping Ideas at level 4. It is therefore part of a pathway dedicated to the planning for, and management of, longer projects that culminates in the level 6 dissertation. Through in-depth study of form and wide-ranging research, you will explore how word, image and sound might be placed in creative dialogue in a variety of writing contexts.

This may include writing as varied as ekphrastic poetry, poetry films, podcasting, screenplays, comics, graphic novels, radio drama, hypertext, and audio-visual work. The module may also examine the impact of global new media and the international digital environment on contemporary writing practices. You will choose one of the forms taught in that year for your research and develop creative work informed by that research.

Workshops will provide a supportive and constructive environment as you begin to work on longer projects involving research. You will be introduced to ways of working, for example journal-keeping, that will prepare you for the level 6 dissertation. It is important in this module that you begin to develop your projects outside of the taught content and engage in targeted independent research.

Year three

Block 1: Screentime

The unifying theme of this module is writing for screens and with screens. In this module, you will develop skills in writing for a range of screen genres and platforms with a focus on optimising your writing practice in the 21st century writing and publishing context. Writing for and with screens provides the contemporary writer with an opportunity to revitalise creative processes, such as drafting, editing, publishing, reading and researching. Screen genres considered may include podcast, poetry films, TV and/or film scripts; web novels; flash fiction forms attached to different social media platforms; games.

You will also engage in collaborative work that replicates real-world writing contexts, for example an episode for TV sitcom, a collaboratively written web novel, or flash fiction collection for online publication.

Assessment: Screentime Reflection (30%) and Screentime Project (70%)

Block 2: Writing and Publishing

This module provides you with a range of appropriate professional skills and knowledge of the writing industry in its global context. Although some will be specific to the needs of creative writing practitioners, the knowledge and employability skills you gain will also be an advantage in a range of career options. Thus, it encompasses enterprise and entrepreneurship education by enabling you to develop the specific skills, capabilities and knowledge needed to adapt and flourish in different professional environments and contexts.

Topics may include discussions of international publishing trends, copyright, digital marketing, the selling of translation rights, developments in e-publishing, the global phenomenon of print-on-demand, and self-publishing. Provision may include contributions from industry professionals with a range of international links, for example, talks from visiting professors, independent publishers, or industry professionals.

This is a highly complex and successful module, that is annually singled out for praise from the external examiner.

Assessment: Marketing Plan (30%) and Publication Project (70%)

Block 3: Uncreative Writing

This module encourages you to rethink the premise of ‘Creative Writing’ as self-expression. It will heighten your attention to the language that surrounds them in everyday life and involve an element of self-transformation in your attitudes towards relations between art and life.

Creative Writing is founded upon notions of ‘original’ composition, and the quest to find a ‘unique’ voice. The ability to generate new writing that expresses creative thought and reflects upon experiences is one of the enduring definitions of what it means to be human. But there is an alternative, playful, history of ‘Uncreative Writing’ that challenges these ideas and welcomes kinds of writing practice open to celebrating the ‘materiality’ of language, chance procedures, collage, ‘conceptual writing’, ‘found’ and ‘appropriated’ texts, and experiments with artificial constraints. This alternate history is multi-disciplinary, and this module brings you into dialogue with a range of ideas, attitudes and practices that have been central to visual art, musical composition, mathematics, and Zen.

Key to the module is a celebration of the importance of play and experimentation as central tenets of creativity. You will be supported to develop a receptivity towards the creative resources of everyday life, and a willingness to transform everyday materials.

Assessment: Uncreative Portfolio (100%)

Block 4: Year-long: Dissertation

The final-year dissertation module provides you with an opportunity to work at length in a single form or genre of your choice. The aim is to produce professionally presented independent creative work. The precise composition of the dissertation will be negotiated with your tutor in accordance with departmental guidelines and must include written creative work accompanied by a critical reflective essay. You are expected to consider your own work in relation to current published work in the same and related genres.

You will be supported to learn from feedback, to edit, redraft and rethink your work. Working with a supervisor and response group, you will respond to feedback and provide feedback constructively over a longer period, mirroring more closely a real-world writing context. Working with others to manage your response groups and keeping your own records of supervision meetings will help you to develop skills which are of value in the workplace.

You will be managing a professional writing project from conception to completion; thus, the module also supports you to develop specific skills, capabilities and knowledge to adapt in different professional environments and contexts.

Assessment: Concept Testing (20%) and Dissertation (80%)

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