In this module, you will explore and develop key skills and techniques needed to help you curate a personal, sustainable writing practice. Working with tutors who are practising writers and researchers, you will investigate creative-critical approaches to writing, creative writing processes, reflective practice, and core skills for working independently.

This module invites you to experiment with form, develop your understanding of the relationship between creative and critical writing, and explore your motivations, inspirations, and aspirations as a writer.

You will explore a range of hybrid creative-critical texts that move between forms and modes, and experiment with form in your own writing to produce a manifesto that reflects on your writerly identity and your creative-critical influences. You’ll explore key ideas about the texts that have paved the way for your writing, why you write, and the topics that are important to you.

This module helps you to consider the wider context of contemporary creative writing: publishing models, prize culture, and reviewing. Who wins book prizes, who gets reviewed, and who appears on the ‘best of’ lists?

Through a series of case studies and critical readings, you’ll expand your knowledge of the contemporary publishing landscape and consider the contexts and publication routes for your own creative writing. We help you to gain the knowledge and skills needed to write reviews and essays, and understand routes to publication, including how to pitch to relevant publications.

You consider and frame your writing within contemporary contexts, developing the skills you need to thrive as a professional writer in the world. You explore some of the many ways and contexts in which writers work, and the skills required to make an income as a writer or enjoy a sustainable writing life.

We help you to gain the knowledge and skills needed to market, publish and/or self-publish your writing; and we give you insights into the many other ways in which you can work with others using writing, from work in schools and the community to therapeutic settings. If you are already a teacher or writing facilitator, this is an opportunity to reflect on your practice and develop it further. If you are just starting out, we will help you to acquire the tools and skills you need. We will guide you towards the development of a professional plan that you could go on to implement after the course is over. In the past, students have used this module as a springboard to launch professional web sites, writing retreats, podcast series, workshops, events and festivals.

You explore the connections between creativity, writing and the self, and reflect on the idea of the self in the writing process and use key ideas and theories drawn from literary autobiography, life writing, autofiction, narrative theory and the psychology of creativity to develop your work and process.

Writing exercises, prompts and selected readings are designed to help you to let go of any unhelpful self-concepts about yourself as a writer that may be getting in the way of you producing imaginative work. Ideas explored in this module often help people to overcome blocks, access greater fluidity and flexibility in their writing, develop imaginatively and creatively, and rediscover the sheer pleasure of the writing process. You explore approaches such as writing identity, writing the body, fictionalising from self-experience, objectifying and shaping the stories of our lives on the page and exploring personal metaphor. Concepts such as personal truth, inner dialogue and helpful distance allow you to deepen your writing and write from a felt sense.