Creative Writing MA

Royal Holloway, University of London

This module will describe the key principles of academic integrity, focusing on university assignments. Plagiarism, collusion and commissioning will be described as activities that undermine academic integrity, and the possible consequences of engaging in such activities will be described. Activities, with feedback, will provide you with opportunities to reflect and develop your understanding of academic integrity principles.

The Creative Writing Project arises out of work developed in the workshop. In all cases, this should be new work not included in previous coursework submissions however much it has been revised. It can be a different part, or parts, of the same body of work, such as a novel. An important dimension of the MA is to give you the opportunity to begin serious work on a major project that would prepare you for the submission of this work to a publisher or the basis for an application for a practice-based research of a PhD as applicable to you. The Creative Writing Project is a crucial element in this preparation. It will be researched and written mainly in the summer term and during the summer vacation. You should draw on and develop the skills, and the critical and creative contexts, acquired in the first two terms. You should also seek to demonstrate independence, self-direction and originality in your approach to the project?s completion.

An important dimension of the MA is to give you the opportunity to begin serious work on a major research project that relates to your practice. This could prepare you for an application for the practice-based PhD.

You will learn how to structure and edit your prose to a publishable standard while also developing an expert sense of how best to draw on the personal, the actual and the imagination. We have no house style, and encourage both experiment and rigour. In developing your analytical and editorial skills, you will sharpen your self-criticism. The content of the workshops will be dictated by the presentations of work in progress by the members of the group, and by the critical dialogue that develops from these presentations. Your tutor will draw up a schedule for this and work will be circulated in advance. You will read and annotate this work and come to class ready to discuss it. Reading of literary exempla and extracts will also feed into workshop discussions. Your tutor may set exercises or additional advance reading, and you will receive intensive feedback supported by individual tutorials.

You will explore the broad range of possibilities that literary non-fiction has to offer from memoir to manifesto, from the essay to the hybrid form. You can experiment with the interface between fiction and memoir, and discover how to write out of the self without a form in mind. You will be taught how to activate and deploy your research. You will learn how to draw on these to develop original work of your own to publishable standard. The workshop will include an exploration of the full range of approaches that non-fiction has to offer. We will encourage you to explore them all, and to draw freely on them in your own work, taking an interdisciplinary approach. We will also teach you how to use the tools and devices of fiction and poetry in the writing of non-fiction. The workshop is also where you present work in progress, and you will receive intensive feedback supported by individual tutorials.

This pathway foregrounds the writing in an expanded field of contemporary poetic practice. It offers a consideration of contemporary trends in innovative and experimental poetry: redefinitions of lyric writing, bookworks, visual poetics, performance, sound, conceptual writing, digital poetics and site-specific work. You will develop, and reflect on, your own practice in the context of an understanding of contemporary experimental practice in poetry from the UK and North America, and consider how contemporary poetry and poetics intersect with such fields as conceptual art writing, sound art, live art, digital poetics, book arts, installed texts and writing in relation to site.

This pathway is for writers of all kinds of poetry, who are focused on publication on the page. You will learn how to locate and refine your personal poetics, and how to develop a poem to its fullest potential. You will be taught how to revise and edit a poem, how to sustain a writing practice, and how to locate your poetry within a broader literary context. The workshop welcomes all styles and approaches to poetry focused on publication on the page. The content of the workshops will be dictated by the presentations of work in progress by the members of the group, and by the critical dialogue that develops from these presentations. Your tutor will draw up a schedule for this and work will be circulated in advance. You will read and annotate this work and come to class ready to discuss it. Reading of literary exempla and extracts will also feed into workshop discussions. Your tutor may set exercises or additional advance reading, and you will receive intensive feedback supported by individual tutorials.

This seminar is taught within pathway groups. Students propose texts (and non-textual works) for this syllabus, which is then devised by your tutor. You will make a short presentation on one of your chosen works during the term. The seminar encourages you to think about what it means to read as a writer, how the writer constructs the reader?s experience, and how this insight might inform your own literary composition. It considers different approaches to reading, and the relationship between practice and theory. You will learn how to demonstrate the ways in which reading contributes to your own developing practice as a writer.

This weekly one-and-a-half hour seminar is taught within pathway groups and focuses on a broad range of critical texts by practising writers among others. It aims to provide you with the appropriate critical and theoretical skills for discussing your creative work. The course also aims to prepare you for you dissertation. You will acquire a range of critical concepts and vocabulary, a range of critical and theoretical approaches, and the necessary skills to undertake sophisticated reflection and discourse.