Creative Writing (modular) MA

Program Overview

Lancaster University's esteemed Creative Writing MA program nurtures writers in a picturesque setting, offering specialized workshops, mentorship from renowned authors, and a range of modules that explore writing forms from novels to digital media.

Program Outline

Degree Overview:

• Study close to the beautiful Lake District, home of the Romantic poets, and inspiration for many writers since
• Take part in small-group workshops to develop your novels, stories, poetry, novels, and scripts
• Explore the professional dimensions of creative writing, such as reading or performing your work, publishing, and marketing
• **Lancaster was one of the very first universities to teach creative writing.
Today we continue to lead in the discipline with our celebrated novelists, poets and playwrights.

• **Focused on your growth We’ve been helping writers reach their potential since 1970.
From day one, our focus has always been helping our students hone their own style and sharpen the skills they need for success.

• **This emphasis continues today so that the focus in all your modules will, ultimately, be your own writing.

• **With our wide range of optional modules, you can explore traditional forms such as the short story, the novel, poetry, or theatre, as well as digital media, life-writing, place-writing, and writing for young adults.

• **Support from experts You’ll work on a core writing project alongside studying the ethical and professional dimensions of publishing and broadcasting your work.

• **This is supplemented by lectures from visiting speakers, as well as one-on-one tutorials, workshops, and lectures with our esteemed visiting professors, currently Paul Muldoon and Mary Talbot.

• **In the third term, we assign you a genre-specific expert to help develop your final portfolio.
This is intended to be suitable for submission to literary journals or agents, setting you on the road to publication.

• **Your regular small-group workshops will be supplemented by sessions with all the students on the course.

Outline:

• Core Modules:
• Creative Writing Portfolio:
• Generate the idea for a piece of creative work in your chosen form
• Propose an independent reading plan
• Draft no more than 5,000 words for initial tutor review
• Develop and edit your creative project and present the finished work to a high standard
• Demonstrate your knowledge of relevant form, technique, and process by writing a 3,000 word reflective essay, including a full bibliography
• Research Training and Professional Practice in Creative Writing:
• Understand the Research Context
• Library, Online and Archival Research
• Scholarly Conventions
• Creative and Professional Presentation
• Research and Reflective Practice
• The Ethical Researcher
• Optional Modules:
• Approaching the Novel:
Develop an idea for a novel, select techniques appropriate to your genre, theme and style and prepare you to complete an extract or series of extracts from a novel in progress.
• Extended Prose for Young People: Develop your understanding of prose writing for young people, with a focus on Children’s Fiction (8-12 years) and Young Adult Fiction (11+ and 14+).
• Seeing Things: Visualising Poetry: Encourage the student to think about contemporary poems in several different visual dimensions but always from the viewpoint of the practitioner.
• The Contemporary Short Story: Expanding the Form: Consider the multiple forms and styles of contemporary short fiction from a range of cultural backgrounds and nationalities.
• The Personal Essay: Introduce you to the personal essay: a flexible, hybrid form incorporating elements of cultural and literary criticism, memoir, journalism, fiction and auto fiction.
• Writing Games: Introduce students to writing for games of all kinds, both digital and pen-and-paper.
• Writing Poetry Today: Look at poetry culture in the UK and beyond, preparing you to enter the world of the publishing poet by closely examining the prize culture, some of the significant prize-winning collections by new poets over the last few years, and current poetry journals.
• Writing radio and podcast drama: Enable you to write drama for radio, developing your own scriptwriting style and gaining an awareness of the professional requirements of the genre.
• Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: Give students the opportunity to study the particular techniques and processes employed by writers of SFF, and exposes them to a diverse selection of contemporary speculative texts.

Assessment:

• Creative Writing Portfolio: A final portfolio of creative work, including a 3,000-word reflective essay.
• Research Training and Professional Practice in Creative Writing: Assessed through a combination of coursework and a final portfolio of work.
• Optional Modules: Each module has its own assessment methods.

Teaching:

• Small-group workshops
• One-on-one tutorials
• Lectures from visiting speakers
• Lectures from esteemed visiting professors
• Genre-specific expert assigned in the third term to help develop your final portfolio

Careers:

• Publishing
• Journalism
• Writing
• Television and the media
• Teaching
• Librarianship
• PhD level study
• Academic career
• Develops a host of professional skills, such as researching, drafting, editing, listening, persuading and presenting

Other:

• **Each year we encourage our students to bring together and edit their own anthology of student work which is then celebrated in a reading event in the summer term.

• **This event is also a chance to meet summer school students from our distance learning Creative Writing MA.

• **We hope most of our students go on to publish their own work, and many of the Department’s alumni are now celebrated authors.

• **Recent success stories include Andrew McMillan, Nguyen Phan Que Mai, Martha Sprackland, and Daisy Johnson, the youngest-ever author shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2018).