MA Creative & Life Writing

This is a two-and-a-half-hour workshop which runs throughout the year. In the first term, students are encouraged to experiment with a variety of genres in creative and life writing, and in the second term to develop their individual interests. Students are asked to consider works by significant writers in relation to their own writing practice.

Presentations of their work to each other, with an account of their aims and approach, forms one important element. The students meet a range of practices, concerns and, techniques. The workshop is also the place where the issues raised in the Contemporary Contexts module are further debated in relation to the students’ own practice.

Contemporary Contexts of Creative and Life Writing is a one-term, two-hour seminar module, and includes informal talks by visiting speakers, prefaced by guided seminar discussion. Such talks might be by practising writers, biographers, or practitioners (from both outside and inside the University). Topics raised in this module are wide-ranging and might include: the relation in contemporary fiction and biography of the two genres; the relation between fictional and non-fictional autobiography; writers and their readers; postmodernism; contemporary ideas about language; gender and writing. As in the workshop, students are asked to consider works by significant contemporary writers in relation to their own writing practice.

Students will submit in September a portfolio of work, including both their own writing, either creative or life writing, and a critical commentary (an explanation of aims and structure). The proportion between the student’s own creative or life writing and the commentary on it will be very flexible, to be discussed individually in tutorials. However, a minimum of 2,500 words and a maximum length of 4,000 words is suggested. The portfolio should be up to 20,000 words in length if prose including the critical commentary. The work must be accompanied by a bibliography. The length of poetry submissions is by negotiation with the tutor but a rough guide would be 20-30 poems.

Students will explore a wide range of aspects of fiction writing, with the aim of developing their writing craft and writing confidence.

The sessions will be split into two parts:

1. Workshop time, for individual students’ work in progress to be given constructive and considered feedback from the group and tutor.
2. The craft of writing: each week we will focus on a specific element of fiction writing, through discussion, targeted exercises, and close examination of a variety of selected extracts of both classic and contemporary fiction.

Areas to be covered will include:

• Language: the sentence
• Language: style and content
• Plot
• Dialogue
• Character and Setting
• Openings
• Process: first-drafting and redrafting
• Process: editing
• Point of View
• Vernacular

Particular emphasis will be placed on the idea of the writing process. Every writer works differently. There is no set way of creating fiction, but it is the discovery and development of a process that works for you that will enable you to fully realise your ideas, and the module intends to help you on your way to a greater understanding of your own method.

In this module, we’ll look at a range of examples of narrative non-fiction, consider the different strategies involved, and help students to refine their techniques through weekly workshops. Life writing demands many of the same skills as fiction - story, character, dialogue, theme, structure, etc. - but raises a set of other issues, too. How strictly must a memoir writer adhere to the truth? Isn’t the line between fiction and non-fiction often blurred? How does one ‘research’ private family history and reconstruct ‘real-life’ dialogue? What risks are there, and what advantages, in using one’s own life experiences directly as ‘material’? When is ‘confessionalism’ acceptable rather than prurient and exploitative? Is remembering the same as inventing? We’ll approach these questions through extracts from writers including Rousseau, Orwell, Lorna Sage, Tobias Wolff, Andrea Ashworth, Linda Grant, Joan Didion, Kathryn Harrison, Dave Eggers, W.G Sebald and Karl Ove Knausgaard. The emphasis will be on a memoir but there’ll be room to consider journalism, travel writing and poetry too – and to explore whether there’s any real difference between life writing and autobiographical fiction.

This module will consist of a mixture of writing, reading and discussion. Poems by published poets from the US, UK and Ireland will provide the springboard for some of the practical writing exercises, which are designed to inspire and suggest new approaches, and to introduce certain elements of the craft, including simile/metaphor, rhyme, metre, scansion, line and stanza breaks, style, and technical strategies in the free-verse poem. Topics for writing exercises will include work on beginnings/endings, narrative, the monologue, the lyric poem, and how fact becomes faction, fiction fact, for example. These exercises tend to start people off on work that is continued between sessions. That work is then brought back for comment and revision. The weekly assignments will provide a basis for the portfolio, although people have the option too of including poems that have been produced separately. Some poets we might read include: Louis MacNeice, Paul Muldoon, Louise Gluck, Sharon Olds, Alice Oswald, Carol Ann Duffy, C.K Williams, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Craig Raine, Alice Fulton, Elizabeth Bishop, Hugo Williams, Don Paterson, Nuala Ni Dhomnaill, Sylvia Plath, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carolyn Forche, Ann Lauterbach, Stephen Dobyns, Katherine Pierpoint, Ciaran Carson, Mary Baine Campbell, Mary Ruefle, Marie Howe and Roger Mitchell. Participants should be prepared to share their work with the group, bearing in mind that the emphasis will be on constructive criticism. Assessment is based on a portfolio of eight to 10 poems.

This module introduces the practice of writing fiction for children (Middle Grade, 9-12 years) and young adults. It offers you the opportunity to develop creative work in progress, give and receive feedback in weekly workshops and experiment with new forms, readerships and voices. It also encourages you to discuss the work of established writers for younger readers in relation to your own writing practice and consider the theoretical, social and cultural contexts of contemporary writing for children and young adults. The workshop will aim to allow you to develop your own interests and preferences. Critical analysis, close reading, workshop exercises and critical evaluation methods will be used to enable you to develop and demonstrate an ability to produce writing in different forms, from a number of different perspectives and to develop informed critical understanding in this field. You will be required to read widely and to follow current debates and research. You will explore a wide variety of fiction for readers to better understand the joys and challenges of writing for young readers. You will be encouraged to experiment with writing for different age ranges and genres to help you hone your individual writing interests, preferences and styles