Creative Writing Project

The course focuses the student’s awareness of imaginative writing craft in a single genre: poetry, fiction, or literary non-fiction. It centers on the practice of intermediate to advanced technical and formal aspects of creative writing along with their theoretical and historical foundations, aiming to produce a writing student with an awareness of both craft and theory. This is on the understanding that the student has experimented and gained knowledge from the prerequisite courses and is now able to build on this wealth of experience. Furthermore, the course will, via reading and writing activities, increase the student’s sense of a wider literary/cultural context. This project course in creative writing is based on the practice of intermediate to advanced creative writing craft skills. Like most creative writing courses, it rests on the four pillars of writerly craft, literary analysis from a writer’s POV, language proficiency building, and self-expression. As in its prerequisites, Creative Writing I and II, you’ll acquire extensive and various transferable skills. However, unlike Creative Writing I and II, these are not the ultimate goals of the coursework. Whereas the previous courses are centered primarily in pedagogies of process, this course also emphasizes product, culminating in the production, or completion, of a substantial and polished project, such as a novella or brief short story collection for fiction writers or a chapbook for poets. This completed project should serve you well as a writing sample for graduate studies in creative writing or for other artistic and personal aims.