This seminar offers an introduction to Creative Writing with a special focus on discovering your original stories and paths for your future. The course focuses on storytelling and elements of craft for creative writing in English: fundamentals and advanced studies that help you to shape, frame and discover your writing, along with your own life-story, in ways that will take you by surprise.

We will look across genres for you to experiment with forms fluidly in creative writing: practices that will let your writing evolve and thrive. Workshops, readings, and individual supervision will offer writers in the class an opportunity to create the stories and narratives that have been “waiting” for your attention and discovery, as well as those that fall outside initial expectations. No previous experience is necessary.

Writers in the class will have a chance to practice especially the art of revising your stories and memoirs and, equally important, the practice of holding an audience: shaping a work of contemporary art in the contexts of literary studies and history.

Writers will find their attention directed toward reading, writing, and designing; choosing words in relation to sound, history, shape, length, depth, and pause, for example. They will explore topics such as character, dialogue, profluence, epiphany, scale and perspective. Each writer in the class will develop a set of customized readings, write along with fellow writers, and select, over time, materials for an individual portfolio of creative work.

 

This course will not only help to develop skills in creative writing but those of critical analysis. Writers in the class will develop an expertise in writing and close observation that will contribute to critical studies and theory in other courses and specializations.

 

Histories of “genre,” form, and storytelling in English; Critical and comparative perspectives on the institutions and historical developments of critical and creative writing in North America, the UK, Asia, and more; elements of craft in English storytelling, including Rising Action, Point of View, Literal and Essential Actions, Plot, Sequence and Structure, Convictions and Endings

 

Workshops and assignments will include exercises for the eyes, ears, memory, and participation in history with other writers. Learning how to sharpen observation as a writer and to revise your manuscript as an editor will inform work in other classes and disciplines. There will be class exercises, reading assignments, homework exercises, and guided work toward a final portfolio.

The portfolio will include class exercises, edited work, and selected stories: a body of work determined by each writer. In addition, writers in the class may have a chance to participate as interns for the HKU GUILD; the literary journal, SLYCE: A New Journal of Creative Writing and Multilingual Arts; the HKU International Poetry Prize, or other literary endeavours and internships in creative writing.

 

Assessment for this course is 100% coursework.

 

Readings include work by the writers Guare, Murakami, Gardner, Ishiguro, Burroway, among others, along with short works, for example, by Kincaid, Hampl and Gill. A reader or handouts will also include poems, interviews, and personal essays, with a focus on current publications in Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and much more.