This seminar offers an introduction to Creative Writing with a special focus on discovering your original stories and paths for your future, across fields and professions. The course focuses on storytelling and elements of craft for multilingual writers focusing at the moment on creative writing in English: fundamentals and advanced studies in historical and multilingual creative context that help you to shape, frame and discover your creative 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 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 original writing in contemporary contexts of print and multimedia platforms
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. At the same time, creative writers in the class may also, under advisement after enrollment, choose to participate in The HKU GUILD; www.hkuguild.com
This course will not only help to develop skills in creative writing but those of historical analysis inseparable from contemporary contexts of digital and multimedia platforms and perception. Writers in the class will also develop an expertise in writing and close observation that will contribute to critical studies and theory in other courses and specializations in undergraduate studies.
Histories of “genre,” form, and storytelling in English and comparative contexts; fresh perspectives on the institutional and historical developments of critical and creative writing in Asia, North America, the UK, Asia, and more; elements of craft in narrative, including: Rising Action; Multiple Points of View; Literal and Essential Actions; Time, Plot, and Action; Sequence, Repetition and Structure; Blueprints, Convictions, Beginnings and Endings, and more.
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 Creative 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: including the literary journal, SLYCE: A New Journal of Creative Writing and Multilingual Arts; the HKU International Poetry Prize, or other endeavors and Internships in creative contexts and writing.
Assessment for this course is 100% coursework.
Readings include selected work by the writers Guare, Murakami, Gardner, Ishiguro, Burroway, among many 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.