Creative Writing

About

Due to current developments around the COVID-19 pandemic we have made the difficult decision to postpone summer study programmes at UEA for 2020, and have closed all applications. Details regarding future programmes will be released in due course.

Please email summerstudyabroad@uea.ac.uk with any queries, and register your interest for future short term study programmes on our website.

Want to explore your creativity or unlock your underlying passion for prose and poetry? This module is a fantastic opportunity for students with little previous experience of creative writing to learn the craft elements in Norwich, England’s first UNESCO City of Literature. Students will undertake a number of in-class exercises based on objects, handouts, discussion and visualisation, on occasion studying the work of established authors. Very often students will be asked to write about ‘what you know’, drawing on notebooks, memory, family stories, and sensory impressions.

In both prose and poetry students will concentrate initially on generating material. In prose, students will go on to look at character, dialogue, point-of-view, ‘showing’ vs. ‘telling’, plotting, etc. In poetry, students will begin to explore the possibilities of pattern and form, sound, voice, imagery, and ‘making strange’.

Students should equip themselves with a notebook for everyday use and a file or folder in which to keep handouts and all of their written work. They will be required to complete exercises in their own time and should be prepared to read their work in class. Students will finish the course by writing, editing, curating and publishing their own literary magazine for the end of summer school finale celebrations.

Field trips may include:
Watching a play by William Shakespeare at The Globe Theatre (London), Women’s Writers walking tour in Cambridge.

Course leader

Kate Moorhead-Kuhn

Target group

There are no specific entry requirements for this module but an expectation to participate.

Course aim

By the end of this module students will:
- Have learnt how to write prose fiction and poetry, learning to experiment and test their writing and realising that not everything will come off.
- Have developed their knowledge of the disciplines necessary to being a writer – observation, keeping notebooks, writing in drafts, reading as a writer, and submitting to deadlines.
- Have learnt how to be analytical – why do you like or dislike something in somebody’s writing? What is the problem with the writing? How might it be fixed? Why does it work if you like it?

Fee info