Creative Writing

Creative Writing

The creative writing course began by looking at ghost stories, focusing on Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. After deciding whether they wanted to pursue a more supernatural tale like the former, or one with a rational explanation as revealed in the latter, students then worked with a range of texts to look at how different authors have approached the narrative arc, styles of narration, setting and characterisation. This analysis, of texts as diverse as Lawrence Sterne’s 18^th century Tristram Shandy and Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic To the Lighthouse, has allowed students to harness new techniques to improve their own narratives. The engagement by the students, with challenging texts that often feature on undergraduate reading lists, has been extremely impressive, while their original work shows great promise. A pleasure to work with such a dedicated group!