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Language » Writing Books

The best books on creative writing, recommended by andrew cowan.

The professor of creative writing at UEA says Joseph Conrad got it right when he said that the sitting down is all. He chooses five books to help aspiring writers.

The best books on Creative Writing - Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

The best books on Creative Writing - On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner

On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner

The best books on Creative Writing - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

The best books on Creative Writing - The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner

The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner

The best books on Creative Writing - Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett

Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett

uea creative writing ma interview

1 Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

2 on becoming a novelist by john gardner, 3 on writing: a memoir of the craft by stephen king, 4 the forest for the trees by betsy lerner, 5 worstward ho by samuel beckett.

How would you describe creative writing?

Creative writing is an academic discipline. I draw a distinction between writing , which is what writers do, and creative writing. I think most people in the UK who teach creative writing have come to it via writing – they are bona fide writers who publish poems and novels and play scripts and the like, and they have found some way of supporting that vocation through having a career in academia. So in teaching aspirant writers how to write they are drawing upon their own experience of working in that medium. They are drawing upon their knowledge of what the problems are and how those problems might be tackled. It’s a practice-based form of learning and teaching.

But because it is in academia there is all this paraphernalia that has to go with it. So you get credits for attending classes. You have to do supporting modules; you have to be assessed. If you are doing an undergraduate degree you have to follow a particular curriculum and only about a quarter of that will be creative writing and the rest will be in the canon of English literature . If you are doing a PhD you have to support whatever the creative element is with a critical element. So there are these ways in which academia disciplines writing and I think of that as Creative Writing with a capital C and a capital W. All of us who teach creative writing are doing it, in a sense, to support our writing, but it is also often at the expense of our writing. We give up quite a lot of time and mental energy and also, I think, imaginative and creative energy to teach.

It is hugely rewarding, engaging with the students, but it is hugely frustrating as well, because the larger part of it is engaging with an institution. I’m sure I’m not alone in being very ambivalent about what I do!

Your first choice is Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer , which for someone writing in 1934 sounds pretty forward thinking.

Because creative writing has now taken off and has become this very widespread academic discipline it is beginning to acquire its own canon of key works and key texts. This is one of the oldest of them. It’s a book that almost anyone who teaches creative writing will have read. They will probably have read it because some fundamentals are explained and I think the most important one is Brande’s sense of the creative writer being comprised of two people. One of them is the artist and the other is the critic.

Actually, Malcolm Bradbury who taught me at UEA, wrote the foreword to my edition of Becoming a Writer , and he talks about how Dorothea Brande was writing this book ‘in Freudian times’ – the 1930s in the States. And she does have this very Freudian idea of the writer as comprised of a child artist on the one hand, who is associated with spontaneity, unconscious processes, while on the other side there is the adult critic making very careful discriminations.

And did she think the adult critic hindered the child artist?

No. Her point is that the two have to work in harmony and in some way the writer has to achieve an effective balance between the two, which is often taken to mean that you allow the artist child free rein in the morning. So you just pour stuff on to the page in the morning when you are closest to the condition of sleep. The dream state for the writer is the one that is closest to the unconscious. And then in the afternoon you come back to your morning’s work with your critical head on and you consciously and objectively edit it. Lots of how-to-write books encourage writers to do it that way. It is also possible that you can just pour stuff on to the page for days on end as long as you come back to it eventually with a critical eye.

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There are two ways in which you can start to get that wrong and produce bad work. One is where you don’t allow the critic in at all. And so it is just a constant outpouring of unmediated automatic writing, which can become a kind of verbal diarrhoea. And the other side of that is where you allow the critic too much authority and the critic becomes like a bad dad who finds fault with everything and doesn’t allow the child to produce anything. And that results in a sort of self-sabotaging perfectionism, which I have suffered from. I got very blocked, and I read this book and it unblocked me.

Good! Your next book, John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist , is described as comfort food for the aspiring novelist.

This is another one of the classics. He was quite a successful novelist in the States, but possibly an even more successful teacher of creative writing. The short story writer and poet Raymond Carver, for instance, was one of his students. And he died young in a motorcycle accident when he was 49. There are two classic works by him. One is this book, On Becoming a Novelist , and the other is The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers . They were both put together from his teaching notes after he died.

On Becoming a Novelist  is the more succinct and, I think, is the better of the two. He talks about automatic writing and the idea, just like Dorothea Brande, of the artist being comprised of two people. But his key idea is the notion of the vivid and continuous dream. He suggests that when we read a novel we submit to the logic of that novel in the same way as we might submit to the logic of a dream – we sink into it, and clearly the events that occur could not exist outside the imagination.

What makes student writing in particular go wrong is when it draws attention to itself, either through bad writing or over-elaborate writing. He suggests that these faults in the aspirant writer alert the reader to the fact that they are reading a fiction and it is a bit like giving someone who is dreaming a nudge. It jolts them out of the dream. So he proposes that the student writer should try to create a dream state in the reader that is vivid and appeals to all the senses and is continuous. What you mustn’t do is alert the reader to the fact that they are reading a fiction.

It is a very good piece of advice for writers starting out but it is ultimately very limiting. It rules out all the great works of modernism and post-modernism, anything which is linguistically experimental. It rules out anything which draws attention to the words as words on a page. It’s a piece of advice which really applies to the writing of realist fiction, but is a very good place from which to begin.

And then people can move on.

I never would have expected the master of terror Stephen King to write a book about writing. But your next choice, On Writing , is more of an autobiography .

Yes. It is a surprise to a lot of people that this book is so widely read on university campuses and so widely recommended by teachers of writing. Students love it. It’s bracing: there’s no nonsense. He says somewhere in the foreword or preface that it is a short book because most books are filled with bullshit and he is determined not to offer bullshit but to tell it like it is.

It is autobiographical. It describes his struggle to emerge from his addictions – to alcohol and drugs – and he talks about how he managed to pull himself and his family out of poverty and the dead end into which he had taken them. He comes from a very disadvantaged background and through sheer hard work and determination he becomes this worldwide bestselling author. This is partly because of his idea of the creative muse. Most people think of this as some sprite or fairy that is usually feminine and flutters about your head offering inspiration. His idea of the muse is ‘a basement guy’, as he calls him, who is grumpy and turns up smoking a cigar. You have to be down in the basement every day clocking in to do your shift if you want to meet the basement guy.

Stephen King has this attitude that if you are going to be a writer you need to keep going and accept that quite a lot of what you produce is going to be rubbish and then you are going to revise it and keep working at it.

Do you agree with him?

Yes, I do. I think he talks an awful lot of sense. There is this question which continues to be asked of people who teach creative writing, even though it has been taught in the States for over 100 years and in the UK for over 40 years. We keep being asked, ‘Can writing be taught?’ And King says it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, but what is possible, with lots of hard work and dedication and timely help, is to make a good writer out of a merely competent one. And his book is partly intended to address that, to help competent writers to become good ones. It is inspirational because he had no sense of entitlement. He is not a bookish person and yet he becomes this figurehead.

He sounds inspirational. Your next book, Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees , looks at things from the editor’s point of view.

Yes, she was an editor at several major American publishing houses, such as Simon & Schuster. She went on to become an agent, and also did an MFA in poetry before that, so she came through the US creative writing process and understands where many writers are coming from.

The book is divided into two halves. In the second half she describes the process that goes from the completion of the author’s manuscript to submitting it to agents and editors. She explains what goes on at the agent’s offices and the publisher’s offices. She talks about the drawing up of contracts, negotiating advances and royalties. So she takes the manuscript from the author’s hands, all the way through the publishing process to its appearance in bookshops. She describes that from an insider’s point of view, which is hugely interesting.

But the reason I like this book is for the first half of it, which is very different. Here she offers six chapters, each of which is a character sketch of a different type of author. She has met each of them and so although she doesn’t mention names you feel she is revealing something to you about authors whose books you may have read. She describes six classic personality types. She has the ambivalent writer, the natural, the wicked child, the self-promoter, the neurotic and a chapter called ‘Touching Fire’, which is about the addictive and the mentally unstable.

It is very entertaining and informative and it is also hugely affirming. I identified myself with each one of the six types. There is a bit in each of them that sounded just like me. And I thought, well if they can get published so can I. You do often worry that you are an impostor, that you are only pretending to be a writer and that real writers are a completely different breed, but actually this book shows they can be just like you.

Your final choice is Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett .

This is a tiny book – it is only about 40 pages and it has got these massive white margins and really large type. I haven’t counted, but I would guess it is only about two to three thousand words and it is dressed up as a novella when it is really only a short story. On the first page there is this riff: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

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When I read this I thought I had discovered a slogan for the classroom that I could share with my students. I want to encourage them to make mistakes and not to be perfectionists, not to feel that everything they do has to be of publishable standard. The whole point of doing a course, especially a creative writing MA and attending workshops, is that you can treat the course as a sandpit. You go in there, you try things out which otherwise you wouldn’t try, and then you submit it to the scrutiny of your classmates and you get feedback. Inevitably there will be things that don’t work and your classmates will help you to identify those so that you can take it away and redraft it – you can try again. And inevitably you are going to fail again because any artistic endeavour is doomed to failure because the achievement can never match the ambition. That’s why artists keep producing their art and writers keep writing, because the thing you did last just didn’t quite satisfy you, just wasn’t quite right. And you keep going and trying to improve on that.

But why, when so much of it is about failing – failing to get published, failing to be satisfied, failing to be inspired – do writers carry on?

I have a really good quote from Joseph Conrad in which he says the sitting down is all. He spends eight hours at his desk, trying to write, failing to write, foaming at the mouth, and in the end wanting to hit his head on the wall but refraining from that for fear of alarming his wife!

It’s a familiar situation; lots of writers will have been there. For me it is a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is something I have to keep returning to. I have to keep going back to the sentences, trying to get them right. Trying to line them up correctly. I can’t let them go. It is endlessly frustrating because they are never quite right.

You have published four books. Are you happy with them?

Reasonably happy. Once they are done and gone I can relax and feel a little bit proud of them. But at the time I just experience agonies. It takes me ages. It takes me four or five years to finish a novel partly because I always find distractions – like working in academia – something that will keep me away from the writing, which is equally as unrewarding as it is rewarding!

September 27, 2012

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Andrew Cowan

Andrew Cowan

Andrew Cowan is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Creative Writing programme at UEA. His first novel, Pig , won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Betty Trask Award, the Ruth Hadden Memorial Prize, the Author’s Club First Novel Award and a Scottish Council Book Award. He is also the author of the novels Common Ground , Crustaceans ,  What I Know  and  Worthless Men . His own creative writing guidebook is  The  Art  of  Writing  Fiction .

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UEA Interview

Q uestions by Andrew Cowan, Course Director, MA in Creative Writing, UEA Richard, what was your background – what were you doing before you came to UEA?

Writing.  Working.  Too much working (games teacher, barman, exhibition attendant, manservant) not enough writing.  I’d been out of college for six years, had finished four novels, the third of which enticed a nibble from a couple of agents.  One of them sent it to three or four publishers but it came straight back.

What prompted you to apply for the MA?

I wanted to write another novel, but not in the same way, or as a very wise man once said: if you do what you always do, you’ll get what you always get.  So I wanted to do the same thing, write a novel, but make it better and get it published.  A friend of mine was on the Contemporary Literature MA at East Anglia, studying with Lorna Sage, and he we was very persuasive about Norwich and the MA courses on offer – he said they were stimulating places to be.

You did the course in 1994/95.  Can you describe how it was structured then, and who taught you and what sort of things you were writing?

1994/5 was Malcolm Bradbury’s last year in charge.  I think it’s fair to say that after a quarter of a century tolerating the delusions of bright young writers he was fairly tired.  He was also the founder and figurehead of a programme that had earned international recognition, and the structure of the MA was determined by a strong sense that however Malcolm wanted to do it was the way it should be done.

What Malcolm did was to convene a weekly workshop. There were twelve of us in the class, and for three hours every Wednesday afternoon three students would offer up 5000 words to the others.  These novel extracts and stories were read in advance and discussed for a carefully timed one hour each.  Malcolm was scrupulous about the timing, and in an eight-week term everyone was guaranteed to have their writing worked over at least twice. I had an extra workshop on BBC 2 as part of a tribute to Malcolm on The Late Review.  To fit in with the camera angles we made a tight circle for the ‘fake’ workshop, which was then edited to make us look like conspirators intent on world literary domination.  The UEA mafia, as seen on TV.

Malcolm’s ideal workshop was unsullied by any kind of formal tuition.  He did once give us a handout he’d written called ‘Starting a Novel’.  I still have it.  It makes a lot of sense.  He also, once, drew a graph on the whiteboard to represent the narrative graph of comedy (down then up) and the graph of tragedy (up then down).  It looked like a kite.

After Christmas, in the second term, we had Russel Celyn Jones, now Professor of Creative Writing at Birkbeck.  Russell was loyal to Professor Bradbury’s model, except without the handout or the whiteboard diagram.  He did once ride my motorbike, though, and he knew what he was doing – I didn’t have to check he had a license.

How would you describe the experience of being on the course?

More adversarial than I’d expected.  I’d been asked in the interview, by Rose Tremain, how I’d feel about eleven strangers publicly criticizing my work.  Didn’t sound so bad to me.  What she forgot to mention was that none of those critics would remain strangers for long.  Within a month my writing was in a cross-fire between seven friends, two idiots and a couple of people whose motives I never entirely trusted.  These proportions could change, of course, depending on the comments the others made in any particular week, and whether I agreed with them.

As a group we weren’t always very successful at separating the work from the person.  Having said that, from the point of view of publication it was a tremendously successful year, possibly the most successful ever.  John Boyne, Bo Fowler, Sue Hubbard, Janette Jenkins and Toby Litt are all published novelists,.

How soon after the course before you started publishing?  What happened next for you?

I signed a contract while I was still at UEA, in February 2005, based on the first four chapters of the novel workshopped under Malcolm’s supervision.  There was therefore a direct connection, to my mind, between the course and getting published. I continued living in Norwich until the book was finished, and it was published the following November by the now defunct HarperCollins imprint Flamingo.  Not unusually, as a young first-time published novelist, I expected life and writing to be a breeze from there on in.  Bring on the dancing girls.

Do you think you might have gone on to publish regardless of having done an MA in Creative Writing?

I hope so.  I was already moving in the right direction, and had worked out the importance of being productive, of sitting down and sitting still and writing.  The MA then accelerated the process by providing a mixture of validation and reputation.  Getting on the course in the first place made me feel I must be doing something right.

Then there was the famous agents-and-students-party.  I remember this as a variation on Pimps and Strippers, everyone dressed to type, and I hope a version of this magnificently tense occasion still exists.  I met an agent among the black polo-necks and glasses of white wine, and for a professionally timid soul like me this manufactured interaction was invaluable.  I was never going to crash London literary parties wearing a green carnation – much easier to move to Norwich to write and learn among committed fellow students and have London come to us.

Y our novels tend to be written to specific constraints, which require you to find inventive solutions.  For instance, all the nouns in your second novel Damascus are taken from one day’s edition of The Times.  Can you say a little about this method, what lies behind it and how you feel it determines the work?

My method in the early novels was strongly influenced by the ideas of the OuLiPo, a group of writers whose most famous members are Georges Perec and Italo Calvino (the terms of the OuLiPo explicitly state that death is not an obstacle to membership).

Damascus is a good example of how constraints can generate text.  Every noun in the novel comes from the Times newspaper of 1 November 1993.  There are many excellent reasons for this.  Among them, and true to lived experience, the main characters have to take life as they find it, meaning in this case the restricted possibilities offered by the limited nouns in one specific newspaper.  All they can do (all any of us can do) is to construct a life by re-arranging the arbitrary ingredients of every day as we encounter it.

I liked this constraint because it seemed democratic.  Anyone can take the same idea, even the same newspaper, and come up with a completely different story.

Finally, it’s worth saying that true to the vision of the OuLiPo the originating constraints should, as far as possible, remain concealed.  My first book X 20, A Novel of (not) Smoking , has a fiendish number-generated structure, but is essentially an old-fashioned story about desire, risk, repression and denial (the story of cigarettes).  Damascus is a love story with a happy ending.

In your third novel The Cartoonist the constraints are both self-imposed and legally imposed.  What happened there?

Some people enjoyed arguing that the constraints used to generate X 20 and Damascus were essentially arbitrary, and the books therefore suspect if not downright irrelevant.  I was looking for an elegant way to challenge this rather dim assumption, and settled on the constraints of real-life copyright and libel law.

The Cartoonist is set in EuroDisney © ™, and follows the adventures of an aspiring cartoonist and his firebrand social-activist teenage cousin, who is full of inventive ideas for sabotage.  The original story I wanted to tell takes place in the true-to-life theme-park which is visited by five million Europeans every year.

Before publication I then had re-write the novel, adhering strictly to copyright and libel laws, genuine down-to-earth, real-life, uninvented, unarbitrary constraints.  I discovered that it is not legally possible to set a novel (a made-up and fanciful story) in EuroDisney, even though that gated space outside Paris with its copyrighted characters is a location very much relevant to the world we live in now and the way we write about it.

There are therefore two versions of The Cartoonist .  The original, unpublishable novel.  And then the second, published version, as generated by the legal limitations I was constrained to observe.

In 2003 you moved into non-fiction with Muddied Oafs, a book about rugby and you and the professionalisation of the game.  You followed this with another book about sport, Manly Pursuits: Beating the Australians.  Did this move feel like a radical departure, or do you find continuities with your fiction writing?

While I was at UEA I played full-back for Norwich.  Later, when I was playing for Geneva, I frequently turned down opportunities to promote my novels because an important match was always coming up.  My exasperated agent eventually suggested, if the game was so important to me, that I write about my nomadic rugby life.  Good idea, I thought, and so did everyone else: nonfiction is the new fiction.  It didn’t take long to realise that what I was writing slotted very firmly into the category known as creative nonfiction.

I wasn’t writing a textbook, nor was I making stuff up, but my experience as a novelist meant I couldn’t help shaping the material to create an engaging narrative.  In that sense, the technical skills of novel-writing – in particular structure and character – are put to creative use in my nonfiction books.

Besides publishing seven books, you’ve also done a fair bit of teaching.  Are your methods very different from those employed when you were on the MA?

I have great respect for Malcolm’s ideal of the liberal, constructive, nurturing  workshop, and can’t think of many better ways to get the instant hit of coherent critical reaction to a piece of written prose.  I also think the workshop is a good place for writers to learn to defend and justify their creative choices, and so to fortify feelings of ownership over their own work.  However, the value of the workshop can vary depending on the stage any piece of writing has reached.  Discuss a story too soon and you’ll hear what you already know – it needs more work.  Workshop it too late, when you’ve already moved onto another project, and you won’t care enough to live and learn.

In my own teaching I’ve found that students often want more help in the I-know-it’s-not-ready-stage.  I’ve therefore developed a series of presentations and writing assignments that are designed to suggest, at the very least, what might be added or taken away, what can be re-ordered or re-thought.  In that sense, my teaching is more directive than the method I encountered at UEA..  It also has its weaknesses.

You taught for several years at the University of Tokyo.  You’ve also lived and worked in Hong Kong, Paris, Geneva, Strasbourg.  Can you describe how this might influence your writing – your outlook or sensibility, perhaps, your take on the world?

It can make me flighty.  I worry that this rootlessness means I never give myself the chance to observe deeply, or deeply enough over time, a single unique environment.  But then to paraphrase another wise man: trees have roots, people have legs.

On a good day, when the sun’s shining, I can convince myself I’m seeing more and doing more and generally taking care of the living half of the writer’s dilemma about how much to live and how much to write.  Travelling itself doesn’t count as living, I know that, but wherever I am I try to get involved.  In the end I don’t know how or how much it influences me and my writing, but if I could have been a better writer by staying put in Old Town, Swindon, then it’s too late.  I’ll never know.

Can you say a little about your latest book, Becoming Drusilla: One Life, Two Friends, Three Genders, what it’s about, how it came about?

Becoming Drusilla is a biography, a travelogue and a portrait of a friendship.  I used to go camping at least once a year with my friend Drew Marland, until she announced she was having a sex change.  We knew each other well enough to share a tent in January, so it wasn’t easy to accept that in a very important way I hadn’t known her at all.  My first reaction was to read the literature, but the technical transgender stuff was as impenetrable as literary theory, and the first-person testimonies usually followed a limiting and familiar pattern, ending with a jolly Hollywood resolution of self-acceptance and the sunset.

This didn’t reflect how it was for Dru, either how it had started or how it would end up.  There were also no books written from a friend’s point of view, so I decided to write what I couldn’t find to read.  After Dru’s operation we dusted off the tent and went walking again.  Our rainy and eventful trek around Wales is the frame for the story of what happened to Dru, and what it means for our friendship.

What’s next for you – what are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel, but then I’m always working on a novel.  Fellini used to complain that he could always get funding for his last film.  He meant that his backers were happy to fork out if the next film looked just the same as his most recent success, whereas Fellini wanted every next film to be different.  I always want to write something new, and this creates difficulties.  The first is that agents and publishers despair.  The second is that for every book I write I have to learn a new box of tricks, because all the solutions I learnt for the earlier books apply only to the problems those books created.

I’ve recently surprised myself by starting to write stories, which is something I’ve never properly done before.  I seem to have collected a stack of ideas that suit a short story of about seven to eight thousand words.  As any agent will tell you, this is a suicidal length at which to aim – there are hardly any UK magazines that can publish a story of this length.  Maybe that’s exactly why I find the idea liberating.  I don’t know, but when I arrived at UEA I thought all writing could be explained in terms of ambition and architecture.  These days I’m beginning to see it may be more mysterious than that.

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uea creative writing ma interviewRadio 4’s “Today” programme on Thursday (2nd May), in a show recorded at the University of East Anglia, almost 50 years since its prestigious Creative Writing MA launched.

Self said: “If you want to do it and you’re not too concerned about making a living in the future then it’s probably a good idea. The paradox is, in the modern university, everyone is encouraged to tailor their courses towards employability but it’s certainly not clear what the pathway is into literary fiction – possibly into genre fiction, or possibly people can use the writing courses just to develop themselves as writers to write video games or something else, that’s a possibility.”

In regards to the UEA course’s famous alumni, he said “who’s to say they wouldn’t have been great writers anyway?”

“We had a literary culture before creative writing courses and you don’t necessarily want to go back to the 19th century and say ‘you need to go on a creative writing course to reduce the length of your sentences’… ‘Hey Joseph Conrad, stop employing those tedious maritime metaphors in your novels’.”

The show's host John Humphrys asked if the course was a professionalisation of writing but without the real life experience.

Self replied: “It’s a deprofessionalisation, that’s the problem. The people coming out of these courses are never going to make a living as novelists, certainly not in literary fiction though that’s a somewhat suspect term. Basically writers are chasing too few readers at the moment. I think literature is morphing into something else, it’s morphing into a conservatoire form, into a more privileged form in many ways, morphing into a giant quilting exercise where people read and comment on each other’s writing…. This is predicated on the digital and making things, in a lot of ways, more mutual.”

Apple Tree Yard author Louise Doughty who studied at UEA under Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury acknowledged that the issue was “still controversial”. She told the “Today” programme that her tutors believed the students had “raw talent” but that the course enabled them to be “even more writers”. She said “Even just spending nine or 10 months being taken seriously as a writer, giving up your job maybe, ignoring your family, giving it that dedicated time is a wonderful experience. I was very young when I went on the course and benefited from it enormously, I think it was the crucible through which I was formed as a novelist.”

Fellow alumnus Sharlene Teo described as “a year-long apprenticeship of taking writing and language seriously and developing a community of fellow writers and learning how to approach a text critically”. She added: “It’s a humbling process.”

Many of the publishing industry complained about Self’s comments.

Elizabeth Morris, events manager at Waterstones in Gower Street, tweeted : “WHY give elitist Will Self the space to talk about the death of his narrow view of the novel when INSTEAD you could speak to 1 of many innovative, newly published writers who are making reading more egalitarian & inclusive.”

"Write video games" is what Will Self on #r4today thinks creative writing courses are useful for. Tell that to the 65 students from @cbcreative who have publishers and many have won awards and been bestsellers. Any endeavour that encourages creativity should be supported. — Jonny Geller (@JonnyGeller) May 2, 2019
Professional controversialist Will Self having another go at CW courses because no one is reading his kind of late 20thC postmodernism anymore. On my MA in Creative Writing @birkbeck_arts I see students from diverse backgrounds successfully writing and publishing great novels. — Julia Bell (@JuliaBell) May 2, 2019

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Creative Writing: Prose Fiction

Entry requirements.

Degree Subject - Any Subject

Degree Classification - Bachelors (Hons) degree (2.1 or equivalent preferred)

For more information see our website .

Months of entry

Course content.

The MA Prose Fiction at UEA is the oldest and most prestigious Creative Writing programme in the UK. Solely focused on the writing of fiction, we take a rigorous and creative approach to enable you to develop your ideas, voice, technique and craft.

You’ll experience an intensive immersion in the study of writing prose fiction. You will take core creative modules but can also choose from a wide range of critical modules, and benefit from our proven strengths in modernism and creative-critical studies, among others.

Graduates of our MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction have enjoyed extraordinary success in terms of publications and prizes. Our alumni include Nobel Laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Baileys Women’s Prize-winner Naomi Alderman, Emma Healey and Tash Aw. The continuing success of our graduates means we are fortunate in being able to attract the best writers from around the world – writers like you.

While you are at UEA, the focus will very much be on exploring your creative potential, in a highly supportive and well-resourced environment.

In 2011, UEA’s Creative Writing programme was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in recognition of our continuing excellence in delivering innovative courses at a world-class level.

Information for international students

For more information for international students, please go to UEA’s website .

Fees and funding

Find out more about UEA’s funding options .

Qualification, course duration and attendance options

  • Campus-based learning is available for this qualification

Course contact details

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MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction

University of east anglia uea, different course options.

  • Key information

Course Summary

Tuition fees, entry requirements, university information, similar courses at this uni, key information data source : idp connect, qualification type.

MA - Master of Arts

Subject areas

Narrative Prose Writing

Course type

Our course will transform you as a writer, giving you a surer sense of the technical and emotional complexes that underpin any act of writing.

You’ll study the craft of prose fiction with an internationally excellent cohort of other writers, and you’ll be taught by an outstanding and committed faculty – which includes Andrew Cowan, Naomi Wood and Tessa McWatt, to name a few – alongside internationally recognised visiting writers – recent examples include Tsitsi Dangarembga, Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith, Caryl Phillips and Preti Taneja.

We will challenge you to explore your notions about writing and being a writer, provoking you into play, experimentation and risk, with the intention of making you the best writer you can be.

After this intensive year, you’ll leave the course confident of technique and craft, as well as your own voice. It’s no wonder that our students’ success is unparalleled, with many of our graduates going on to publish their own work – with others moving into publishing, journalism or teaching.

The MA Prose Fiction at UEA is the oldest and most prestigious Creative Writing programme in the UK. Solely focused on the writing of fiction, we take a rigorous and creative approach to enable you to develop your ideas, voice, technique and craft.

You’ll experience an intensive immersion in the study of writing prose fiction. You will take core creative modules but can also choose from a wide range of critical modules, and benefit from our proven strengths in modernism and creative-critical studies, among others.

Graduates of our MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction have enjoyed extraordinary success in terms of publications and prizes. Our alumni include Nobel Laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Baileys Women’s Prize-winner Naomi Alderman, Emma Healey and Tash Aw. The continuing success of our graduates means we are fortunate in being able to attract the best writers from around the world – writers like you.

While you are at UEA, the focus will very much be on exploring your creative potential, in a highly supportive and well-resourced environment.

In 2011, UEA’s Creative Writing programme was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in recognition of our continuing excellence in delivering innovative courses at a world-class level.

UK fees Course fees for UK students

For this course (per year)

International fees Course fees for EU and international students

Bachelors (Hons) degree - 2.1 or equivalent preferred in any subject. Candidates will be expected to submit a portfolio of writing for assessment of between 3000 and 5000 words, which could be part of a novel in progress or a piece or pieces of short fiction.

The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a world-renowned university known for its high standard across both taught and research postgraduate courses. Based in Norwich, in the county of Norfolk, the university has an excellent international reputation for the high standard of its research output. UEA is home to over 17,000 students, of which around 25% are postgraduate students. UEA is part of one of the biggest research communities in Europe... more

MA Creative Writing (Non-Fiction)

Full time | 1 year | 23-SEP-24

MA Creative Writing Crime Fiction (Part Time)

Part time | 2 years | 23-SEP-24

uea creative writing ma interview

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BA (Hons) Creative Writing and English Literature

Key Details

Chat to us on Unibuddy

Any questions? Chat online with current students, staff and experts. This is your chance to ask anything about UEA, university life, Norwich and more.

Why you should choose us

In the UK for Creative Writing

The Complete University Guide 2024

The Guardian University Guide 2023

The Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide 2023

Course Overview

The writer's world has never been more diverse, exciting, and collaborative than it is today. UEA – which became the first UK university to teach creative writing over 50 years ago – has played a major role in shaping this world. Since then, countless writers have emerged from our seminars and workshops and made a lasting impact on the field of contemporary literature. Are you ready to join them?   

As a student of Creative Writing and English Literature, you'll hone your writing skills while exploring literatures from a host of genres, countries, and periods. You’ll take the same creative writing workshops as our English Literature with Creative Writing students. In addition, you'll dive into modules that will take your writing practice out of the classroom and into the working writer's world. Through seminars, workshops, and placements, you'll develop skills across disciplines and media, in community engagement, and in publishing and presenting your own work. In other words, you’ll be primed to enter a writer's world that is collaborative, thrillingly diverse, and endlessly exciting

‘To write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading.’ So wrote Susan Sontag. In a similar way, at UEA we believe that good readers make good writers. It’s for this reason that we combine the study of Creative Writing with the study of Literature at all levels of our degree programmes. In this way, your creative and literary training go hand-in-hand. 

In addition to the creative writing workshops offered by our pioneering and world-famous English Literature with Creative Writing degree, this course offers you a suite of modules designed to help you enter the working writer's world once you graduate. You’ll become familiar with collaborative practice, working with makers and thinkers in other disciplines. On our innovative creative non-fiction module, you’ll experience writing in real-world contexts and learn how to make that world your subject. As your degree reaches its climax, you’ll learn how to produce, publish and perform your work to a professional standard.  

All along, you’ll be studying at a university rich in famous alumni, including Booker Prize winners Ian McEwan and Anne Enright, Forward Prize winner Mona Arshi, and Nobel Prize winner Sir Kazuo Ishiguro. You’ll draw inspiration from this lineage, while working closely with our many practicing novelists, scriptwriters, poets in seminars and workshops. 

In your study of English literature, you’ll discover a wealth of writers from the classical past right up to poets and novelists writing now. You might explore diverse literary traditions from across the globe, and you’ll tackle a heady mix of genres, which currently range from the gothic to contemporary fiction, crime writing to children’s literature, early modern women’s writing to modern Japanese fiction.  

Whichever modules you choose to study, you’ll be taught by our world-leading writers and critics. UEA’s School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing is famous for innovation in teaching and for cutting-edge research – that’s why in the most recent Times Higher Education Analysis (REF2021), UEA was ranked 19th in the UK for the quality of its research in English Language and Literature. 

When you’re not in the classroom, you’ll be able to explore the glories of Norwich, an extraordinary place in which to be a writer. Not only is it jaw-droppingly beautiful; it’s also England’s first UNESCO City of Literature – awarded in recognition of the city’s vivid literary heritage and vibrant contemporary writing scene – and home to the National Centre for Writing . You’ll immerse yourself in this community, perhaps sharing your work with a packed audience of students and professional writers at our UEA Live: New Writing series, or attending literary festival events with internationally renowned figures.  

We say that UEA is the place where literature lives – when you join the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing , you’ll join a unique and supportive community of critics, writers, and drama practitioners, who bring literature to life every day.  It’s a pretty good place to be, and you can find out more about the activities in our School by following us on Instagram . 

Placement Year and Study Abroad

You have the option to apply to study abroad for one semester of your second year. Study abroad is a wonderfully enriching life experience – you will develop confidence and adaptability, and will have the chance to deepen your understanding of writing while learning about another culture. At UEA, you’ll be surrounded by the many students we welcome from around the world to study with us.  

For further details, visit the  Study Abroad section  of our website.  

Study and Modules

During your first year, you’ll take three bespoke Creative Writing modules, in which you’ll develop your range of skills as a writer. The first semester is all about cultivating your craft, testing out the possibilities of different forms and techniques, pushing your boundaries as a writer, and using writing exercises to help you generate material. In the second semester, you will experiment with avant-garde techniques and engage with genre, while developing the ability to critically reflect on your own creative practice. 

You’ll also explore writing as a collaborative practice, working with UEA students from other disciplines – which might include media, or medicine, or environmental science – to broaden your scope as a writer, working on new forms for new audiences. At the same time, you’ll improve your skills as a close reader of literary texts and begin to get to grips with the span of English Literature in core literature-based modules. This is the start of the exciting interplay between reading and writing which you’ll draw upon throughout your degree. 

Compulsory Modules

Creative writing: beginnings, creative writing: experiments with genre, new forms: writing in collaboration, reading literature in history, reading now, slow reading.

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the modules listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the annual monitoring, review and update of modules. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes and their constituent modules, the University will endeavour to consult with students and others. It is also possible that the University may not be able to offer a module for reasons outside of its control, such as the illness of a member of staff. In some cases optional modules can have limited places available and so you may be asked to make additional module choices in the event you do not gain a place on your first choice. Where this is the case, the University will inform students.

Teaching and Learning

Teaching 

Nurtured by our world-leading creative writing tutors (in seminars of around 15 people), you'll start to get to grips with creative writing's fundamentals, including strategies for creating character, writing dialogue, determining mood, and maintaining atmosphere. You'll be mentored as you collaborate with students in other disciplines – your first taste of the contemporary working writer's world. Lectures on literature will surprise you with new ideas, and seminar discussions led by your tutor will shape your thinking about what you've read that week. You'll meet your academic adviser who'll support you through your whole degree with everything from choice of modules to launching your career.  

Independent Learning 

You’ll spend time on your own writing and your collaborative projects. You'll throw yourself into the whirlwind of extra-curricular creative writing events and activities. You'll read some extraordinary books, with a framework of guided tasks to help you get the most out of them, and discover a wealth of new resources in the library. By the end of this year, you'll be equipped with the fundamental skills necessary for your creative and literary journey. 

Assessment  

Throughout your degree, all modules in Creative Writing and in English Literature have no exams – we believe that the best way to express your thoughts about literature and to show off your creative development is through carefully crafted pieces of written coursework. On the creative side, you'll start by writing your own prose and poetry, developing fundamental skills in drafting, keeping a writer's notebook, and submitting to deadlines, before embarking on more experimental exercises. You'll produce work collaboratively  and reflect on the collaboration process, developing a critical awareness of your creative practice. In your studies of literature, you'll develop renewed enthusiasm for writing academic essays, and express your thinking in a diverse variety of forms, from reviews to personal reflective writing.  

Feedback 

You'll receive feedback on your writing (creative and critical) from your tutors (e.g. in one-to-one tutorials) and your peers. Feedback on assessed work will be returned within 20 working days (after it has been carefully marked and moderated). As your first year does not count toward your overall degree result, it's a great time to experiment and take risks.  

You’ll begin to focus your creative writing on particular forms, choosing from prose, poetry, and scriptwriting modules. You’ll share your writing with your peers and with a published author in our creative writing workshops, receiving feedback and learning how to give constructive criticism to your peers, too. You might also take a module in creative non-fiction, which will develop your skills in life writing and hybrid forms, working both in the classroom and through a short placement that will give you direct experience of writing in the world.  

As a literary critic, you will be able to choose from all the available literature modules, gaining a grounding in a variety of literary periods and traditions. You might also choose to experiment with our innovative creative-critical modules, where the reading and writing of literature go hand-in-hand. Over the course of this year, you’ll take a module on Shakespeare or an historical period of English literature from before 1789.

Optional A Modules

Victorian writing, european literature, critical theory and practice, contemporary fiction, literature studies semester abroad (spring), medieval writing: quest, fable and romance (pre-1789), shakespeare (pre-1789), romantic transformations: 1740-1830, early modern writing 1600-1740: the making of english literature (pre-1789), optional b modules, reading and writing in elizabethan england (pre-1789), making it public: publishing, audience, & creative enterprise, literature and philosophy, i am/we are, reading and writing contemporary poetry, reading and writing translations, words and images, the writing of history, transatlantic literatures, the writing of journalism (aut), the short story (aut), lgbt and beyond: sexual cultures, queer identities, and the politics of desire, arts and humanities placement module, optional c modules, writing in the world: placements, podcasts, creative nonfiction, scriptwriting: tv/film, creative writing: prose fiction (spr), scriptwriting: stage/audio, creative writing: prose fiction (aut), creative writing: poetry (aut), scriptwriting: screen and stage.

Teaching  

Your creative work will now be taken to the next level through the 'workshopping' process (pioneered in the UK by UEA), where you'll get feedback on your writing from your peers under the direction of one of our creative writing tutors, and learn the art of offering constructive critique to your fellow writers. You might bring your writing into the wider world through a placement with an organisation or community group, supported by our creative writing team. Lectures and seminars will immerse you in particular eras of literature, and you may also take seminars in more vocational subjects like journalism or publishing (using our state-of-the-art Media Suite).  

Independent Learning  

You'll deepen your confidence in the craft of creative writing, gain real-world experience of the demands and exhilarating rewards of collaborating with others, continue to enrich your writing through the study of literature, and finish the year with a real sense of how your degree might open out into future careers.

You'll continue to submit 100%  coursework for all your creative writing and literature modules. Your creative writing will flourish as you produce more substantial pieces of prose (a 1250-word short story or longer 2000-word narrative), portfolios of poetry, or scripts for stage or screen (20-30 minutes in length), and write reflective pieces to understand better your own creative processes. Your writing will be energised by encounters with real-life subjects as you experience the writer’s world first-hand, and you'll write reflectively about the ethics and complexities of drawing on real life subjects. You'll continue to hone your critical essay writing, and you might experiment with 'creative criticism', for instance by writing a short story which reveals your critical understanding of that form.  

Feedback  

You'll continue to have the support and feedback of all your tutors, and your creative work will be deepened by your immersion in the workshop environment, where you receive feedback from your peers and learn to give feedback on their work, an enormously valuable skill in many careers.

.  

In your final-year creative writing modules you will focus intensively on your own practice. You’ll take a workshop, modelled on our world-famous Creative Writing MA. This will give you the chance to further develop your work in a particular form: prose, poetry, or scriptwriting. You’ll also have the chance to write a creative writing dissertation, in which you produce a substantial piece of poetry, prose or script, with one-to-one support from a tutor. Or you can choose a module in which you will be able to publish your own book  and develop skills in performing your own work for an audience. On the literature side, you’ll choose from a dazzling array of specialist modules organised into two option ranges – currently we offer topics covering everything from the global Middle Ages to contemporary children’s literature. 

CREATIVE WRITING: PROSE

Creative writing dissertation (aut), writing television drama, publication, production, performance, creative writing dissertation (spr), creative writing: scriptwriting, creative writing: prose (aut), victorian literature in migration, shakespeare's dramatic worlds (pre-1789), the business of books (pre-1789), literature dissertation: post-1789 (spr), women's writing in early-modern britain: the emergence of female authorship (pre-1789), reading modern japanese fiction: translation and canonisation, literature dissertation: post-1789 (aut), latin american narratives, nervous narratives, writing the medieval world (pre-1789), race, writing and identity in post-war britain, literature dissertation: (pre-1789) (aut), monsters, marvels and creative medieval heritage (pre-1789), the birth of the gothic: romance, revolution, empire, banned books, literature dissertation: (pre-1789) (spr), new narrative: queering genre, urban visions: the city in literature and visual culture, ghosts, haunting and spectrality, the art of murder, children's literature, imaginary endings: british fiction and the apocalypse, mythos: rewriting the classics (pre-1789), feminist writing, after nature: literature and the environmental crisis, adopting/ adapting/ updating, culture and performance, the art of emotion: literature, writing and feeling.

Your immersion in the writer's world culminates as you're mentored through the intensive editorial and revision process needed to ensure your work meets industry standards for publication or performance. You might take a three-hour workshop led by a member of our creative writing team, or choose to work one-on-one with a creative writing tutor to produce a substantial creative dissertation. Either way, you’ll be writing with confidence and a real sense of your writerly identity. Alongside this, you'll have the chance to explore cutting-edge literary topics in real depth, in three-hour seminars taught by specialists passionate about their subject.   

You'll work with increasing confidence and independence as a literary critic, and you'll have the option to bring together all your experience as a creative writer to complete the year (and the degree) with a tangible product of everything you've been learning – your own book and recorded performance piece.

You'll continue to be assessed by 100%  coursework. You'll have the option to take a module in which you turn your work into a book and performance piece that meets industry standards, and which is a full reflection of the writer you have become. You can also choose to participate in another workshop or to embark on a creative dissertation (6000 words writing / 2000 words reflection), the culmination of your achievements as a writer. Alongside your creative work, you'll have the chance to produce in-depth explorations of literature (3500-5000 words), and if you wish, you might continue to experiment with the forms in which you express your ideas about literary texts, writing Shakespearean sonnets or experimenting with the new boundary-defying genre of ‘auto-fiction’. 

You will continue to receive in-depth written and oral feedback, from both tutors and peers, in both workshops and one-on-one supervisions. All the feedback you've received will enable you to graduate with highly developed transferable skills in writing across a host of forms and for an array of audiences, together with an ability to give sensitive but incisive critique of others' work. 

Entry Requirements

A Level - ABB (subject specific requirements apply)

BTEC L3 Extended Diploma - DDM (subject specific requirements apply)

UEA are committed to ensuring that Higher Education is accessible to all, regardless of their background or experiences. One of the ways we do this is through our contextual admissions schemes.  

You are required to have Mathematics and English Language at a minimum of Grade C or Grade 4 or above at GCSE.

Applications from students whose first language is not English are welcome. We require evidence of proficiency in English (including writing, speaking, listening and reading):  

IELTS: 6.5 overall (minimum 5.5 in all components) 

We also accept a number of other English language tests. Review  our English Language Equivalencies  for a list of example qualifications that we may accept to meet this requirement. 

Test dates should be within two years of the course start date. 

If you do not yet meet the English language requirements for this course, INTO UEA offer a variety of English language programmes which are designed to help you develop the English skills necessary for successful undergraduate study:  

Pre-sessional English at INTO UEA   

Academic English at INTO UEA   

Most applicants will not be called for an interview and a decision will be made via UCAS Track. However, for some applicants an interview will be requested. Where an interview is required the Admissions Service will contact you directly to arrange a time.  

We welcome applications from students who have already taken or intend to take a gap year.  We believe that a year between school and university can be of substantial benefit. You are advised to indicate your reason for wishing to defer entry on your UCAS application.  

This course is open to UK and International applicants. The annual intake is in September each year.    

Additional Information or Requirements

Extended Diploma: DDD plus A in English Literature including English Literature or one of the subjects listed: English Language and Literature, English Language, History, Ancient History, History of Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Classical Studies, Politics, Government and Politics, Sociology, Drama, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Media Studies, Psychology or Law.

Diploma: DD plus A in English Literature or one of the subjects listed: English Language and Literature, English Language, History, Ancient History, History of Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Classical Studies, Politics, Government and Politics, Sociology, Drama, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Media Studies, Psychology or Law.

Extended Certificate: D plus AA to include one of the subjects listed: English Literature, English Language and Literature, English Language, History, Ancient History, History of Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Classical Studies, Politics, Government and Politics, Sociology, Drama, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Media Studies, Psychology or Law.

Special Entry Requirements

Candidates who are shortlisted will be asked to provide a sample of their creative writing:  we ask for around 5-7 pages of work, which can be on any subject and in any genre of the candidate's choice. Most choose to send poetry, prose, or a mixture of the two.

If you do not meet the academic requirements for direct entry, you may be interested in one of our  Foundation Year programmes such as - 

https://www.uea.ac.uk/course/undergraduate/ba-english-literature-with-a-foundation-year

We welcome and value a wide range of alternative qualifications.  If you have a qualification which is not listed here, or are taking a combination of qualifications, please contact us via Admissions Enquiries . 

International Requirements

We accept many international qualifications for entry to this course. View our International Students pages for specific information about your country. 

INTO University of East Anglia 

If you do not meet the academic and/or English language requirements for direct entry our partner, INTO UEA offers progression on to this undergraduate degree upon successful completion of a preparation programme. Depending on your interests, and your qualifications you can take a variety of routes to this degree: 

International Foundation in Business, Economics, Society and Culture (for Year 1 entry to UEA) 

International Foundation in Humanities and Law (for Year 1 entry to UEA)

Admissions Policy

Our Admissions Policy applies to the admissions of all undergraduate applicants.  

Fees and Funding

Tuition Fees   

View our information for Tuition Fees .  

Scholarships and Bursaries  

We are committed to ensuring that costs do not act as a barrier to those aspiring to come to a world leading university and have developed a funding package to reward those with excellent qualifications and assist those from lower income backgrounds. View our range of Scholarships for eligibility, details of how to apply and closing dates. 

Course Related Costs

Please see Additional Course Fees for details of course-related costs. 

How to Apply

Apply for this course through the  Universities and Colleges Admissions Services (UCAS) , using UCAS Hub.  

UCAS Hub is a secure online application system that allows you to apply for full-time undergraduate courses at universities and colleges in the United Kingdom. 

Your application does not have to be completed all at once.  Register or sign in to UCAS  to get started.  

Once you submit your completed application, UCAS will process it and send it to your chosen universities and colleges. 

The Institution code for the University of East Anglia is  E14 . 

View our guide to applying through UCAS for useful tips, key dates and further information: 

How to apply through UCAS  

Employability

After the course.

You will be a first-rate writer and an advanced critical thinker with an independent cast of mind; you’ll know how to manage your time, how to work collaboratively, and how to operate as a writer in the world of work. With the support of our Careers Service throughout your degree, you’ll have honed your CV and sought out internships. You’ll have attended Working with Words, an annual event in which you get to meet UEA alumni working in the creative industries. You might have got involved with the UEA Publishing Project, or its student arm,   Egg Box , or undertaken independent research in UEA’s British Archive of Contemporary Writing . In an increasingly text-based world, these skills and experiences are highly valued by employers.    

You could go on to work as a prose fiction or non-fiction writer, poet or scriptwriter, or go into many careers in arts, media, publishing, politics, charities and NGOs, teaching, or the commercial sector.  You’ll also be well placed to study for a postgraduate degree, including one of our world-famous Creative Writing MAs. Regardless of the direction you choose, you will be superbly placed to start writing your own story. 

A degree at UEA will prepare you for a wide variety of careers. We've been ranked 1st for Job Prospects by StudentCrowd in 2022.

uea creative writing ma interview

Examples of careers you could enter include:  

Freelance writer   

Scriptwriter  

Publishing   

Community and Arts-related Projects 

Marketing  

Communication and PR  

Discover more on our Careers webpages . 

Related Courses

Ba (hons) english literature.

UEA is the place where literature lives – from ancient epic storytelling to contemporary bestsellers, and from different countries and traditions around the globe. Whether you love twenty-first century crime fiction or Shakespeare and his contemporaries, our flexible English Literature degree allows you to explore a wealth of exciting texts, reading in new and inventive ways as you develop a confident critical voice. You’ll benefit from studying in the historic and creative city of Norwich – England’s first UNESCO City of Literature – and graduate as a passionate and skillful reader and thinker, with everything you’ve learnt preparing you for a host of fulfilling careers.

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BA (Hons) American Literature with Creative Writing

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BA (Hons) English Literature and Drama

Immerse yourself in the practices of reading, writing and performance on this interdisciplinary English literature and drama degree. You’ll gain a thorough academic grounding in prose, poetry, and drama, and delve deep into the world of dramatic production, acting, and contemporary theatre. Your dramatic training and developing knowledge of stagecraft will be complemented by your study of literature from across centuries, genres, and cultures, from established classics to new works being written and published today.

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Unite creative writing and performance in this exhilarating and immersive course at UEA. You’ll study a wealth of writing for theatre, cinema, television, and radio, and hone your dramatic writing craft. You’ll also explore acting, directing and all other aspects of stagecraft, equipping you with all you need for a successful career as a writer with a firm grasp of, and impressive flair for, theatre and the performing arts.

Creative Writing and English Literature starting September 2024 for 3 years

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