Creative Writing (Taught)

The Creative Writing MA is a practice-led course, giving you the chance to develop your writing in chosen areas, or experiment with new forms and genres through exploratory writing and stimulating craft tasks and challenges. The course is designed to develop your writing practice in both research and professional contexts, including modules honing you craft, tackling practice research methodology, and your understanding of the industry. You will have the opportunity to graduate with an advanced understanding of your own writing practice, and how it sits in relation to the professional landscape, including how to use the skills you have acquired to forge a career in a range of contexts. The course also equips you with an ability to articulate your own preoccupations and interests as a writer, that helps with everything from Author’s Talks, grant applications, and Industry pitching.

The taught modules are uniquely delivered in seven-week blocks, this means you focus upon one element at a time, rather than dividing your attention between parallel modules. Teaching is timetabled on one concentrated day, though you also need to allocate independent study time for developing your writing, conducting research and undertaking the required reading for classes. You will shape and grow projects to a professional standard, while also learning how to provide a theoretical basis to discuss and conceptualise your practice. The programme culminates in a dissertation in which you will work independently on an extended creative writing project in a form or genre of your choice, with tutor guidance and feedback.

Key features

• You can exit the course with a Postgraduate Diploma, Postgraduate Certificate or an Institutional Credit award depending on the credits you have successfully achieved.

• Creative Writing postgraduate study at DMU is ranked first in the Complete University Guide 2023 for Creative Writing Graduate Prospects.

• You will join the diverse community of Leicester Centre for Creative Writing, where you’ll be taught by published writers, and experienced tutors, with expertise in a range of forms including scripting, fiction and creative non-fiction, poetry – and other hybrid forms, such as digital, and writing for games.

• You will benefit from involvement in Leicester Centre for Creative Writing’s research culture and public engagement events, such as annual independent book festival States of Independence.

• We will help you consolidate and expand your current practice in new directions

• You will graduate able to articulate how your writing skills equip you for a range of careers  and employment contexts

• You will learn to confidently present your work and articulate your processes and practice for a variety of audiences and industries

• You will benefit from the collaborative environment of workshops, gaining ongoing staff and peer feedback to help you achieve your independent writing goals.

• The focus on individual research, managing a long project, and nuanced understanding of practice research theory and methodology, provides ideal preparation for progression to PhD.

Modules

Block 1: Articulating Practice

This module explores the uniqueness of Creative Writing as a practice research discipline, allowing students permission to find innovative ways to articulate their individual practice. It challenges them to write creatively about this practice in ways that stretch the standard academic ‘analytical’ writing and yet encourage them to understand and articulate the research issues and questions that underpin their emerging sense of their creative priorities and thematic concerns). It gives students the opportunity to situate their writing, and thinking, amongst contemporary issues and ideas. These concerns may range across considerations of creativity, play, knowledge, gender, identity, sexuality, class, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Students explore alternative traditions of articulating practice from the manifesto to the experimental essay and the rich heritage of ‘poetics’ as a speculative hybrid discourse, a mid-point between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’.

Block 2: Icebergs and Audience

The focus of this module is on understanding and conducting research directly related to the production of a creative piece. It takes as its focus Hemingway's model of the creative working being like an iceberg: the reader only sees one-eighth of the craft, research and intellectual labour that goes into its creative production. Students will understand, through practice, how writers manage the seven-eighths of the iceberg that the reader does not directly encounter, in terms of the practical, historical, cultural, theoretical and speculative research necessary to bring a piece of creative writing to life. The module will involve looking at how writers build worlds, characters and stories; and how they research settings, time periods and ideas.

Block 3: Developing Your Project

This module uses exploratory techniques to develop the individual research projects begun in Icebergs and Audience. It rehearses an understanding of key craft elements (such as world-building, genre-choice, scene-construction, and the ability to transmute abstract ideas into concrete images, situations, and dialogue), but is inflected by the nature of the projects being developed by the individuals in the group. It continues the programme’s exploration of the unique behaviours of creative writing as a practice research methodology by addressing Italo Calvino’s conviction that ‘there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.’

Block 4: Writing Ecosystems

This module faces out from the experiments in individual practice to consolidate a professional focus. It acknowledges that writers operate within an ecosystem of networks that may include the following employment opportunities: industry publishing, pedagogy, self-publication, public engagement, community work, grant application, collaboration, presentation and performance. The module is underpinned by a conviction that the 21st writer must be multimodal and equipped to not only seize every existing opportunity; but to create new ones in this ever-shifting digital world. There will be a focus on markets, national and international, and the diverse world of publishing and production of written work.

Blocks 5 and 6: Creative Writing Dissertation

The final dissertation module is an extended creative project, which may take the form of a collection of poems or short stories, a novel extract, a creative non-fiction piece, scripts of all modes, a digital project, or an experimental cross-platform/genre piece. The dissertation will be supported by a critical or reflective commentary or poetics piece.

https://www.dmu.ac.uk/study/courses/postgraduate-courses/creative-writing-ma-degree/creative-writing-ma-degree.aspx

You will be taught through a combination of:

• Two-hour workshops: to initiate and develop work, individually and in groups; to give and receive feedback; to practise drafting and editing; to reflect upon creative process.

• 1-hour lectures/readings: to convey expertise, raise key questions of creative and technical practice, and to introduce you to the work of professional writers, publishers, agents, etc.

• Tutorials: to discuss your work and to question the feedback given by tutors and peers at greater length in a one-to-one or small group setting.

• The Virtual Learning Environment: to facilitate informal discussion and to extend the dialogue between tutors and peers between workshops, lectures and tutorials in an excitingly accessible way.

There is a varied mix of assessments including - alongside creative writing pieces – posters, oral and video presentations, experimental assignments, recorded performances, essays, author talks, reflections, professional dossiers, industry-standard submissions, negotiated pieces and longer projects. Where appropriate, there are co-creational opportunities for students to find their own appropriate assessment format aligned to their individual practice within a specific module context.