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Paws and Prose: An undergraduate in Creative Writing

Shannon

As some of you know, I study Creative Writing at the University of Derby and I’m in my final year. Yay! I still don’t know if my degree will say Creative Writing, which was the name of the course when I signed up, or Creative and Professional Writing, which was the new course name in my second year. But, as you can imagine, it involves writing stories.

It’s been a great experience, and I love my course and my lectures. I’ve managed to deal with problems along the way and passed all my modules at this point. It has also really helped me frow as a person and gain some much needed confidence.

I thought I’d let you know what I am currently doing for my degree.

This semester, I am on three modules:

Genre Fiction

I love these modules, Genre Fiction gets me out of my comfort zone and I have to say, I do groan when we are told to write a story in a genre I only watch, not read. My first week I was told to write a story that was either in the cowboy genre, detective or a mixture of both. I think I’ve only ever seen two cowboy movies, and one of them was a flop (hint: starred Jonny Depp) and the only detective stories I was familiar with were from Film noir.

Never the less, I gave it a go along with the other genres – metafiction, ‘the random’, and Sci-fi and this week, it is a ghost story.

Since the Metafiction class, I have had a story in mind. I take an existing character of mine but focus primarily on her thoughts as she discovers that everything that has happened to her, everyone she has lost, is because of her author.

She loses her adoptive mother to cancer, loses her husband at sea and is forced into a lifestyle that she has been trying to run away from as a child so when she finds out that it is all because of  ‘Author,’ she is outraged. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it will turn out. However, I’ve read a lot of bad dystopian stories lately, I might try my hand at one.

edit: yikes! I remember trying this now. Ended up scaring myself. I submitted a sci-fi story about a clone instead. Far less scary! Actually really liked this story, maybe I can develop it into something else after my PhD.

Creative Practice Professional Development

For my CP5 class, we covered several topics too. My favourite one so far is child’s writing, where you look at how a child writes: their lack of grammar and spelling; how they use narrative to tell stories; the vocabulary they use – and use it in your own story. A bit like the author of Room does with Jack. All the sentence structures of the novel are from his point of view.

So for this module, I am thinking of writing a story set in the future. Technology has taken over, but not in the same way as stories like iRobot or the Matrix. People just depend on it. Where my character is set, no one knows how to read or write because they use technology to do that for them. Need to send a letter? Just tell the computer what you want it to say.

My protagonist is a child herself, but relatively wise. Children in her world have to work for a living and so she has aged quicker than children in the present. She finds this old, abandoned box that was once a time capsule in some dirt. Inside is a letter from a child but she cannot read it. She is curious as to what it says so she sets out to find out what it could contain.

I’m not sure what I am going to do in terms of conclusion. Whether she finds an underground network of people who just never gave up on the old tech (books) or whether it is a hopeless case for the character, but it would be interesting to explore both options.

Independent Study

My final coursework is for my independent study, which is the Creative Writing way of saying a dissertation.  I am doing a screenplay surrounding the industrial revolution in Birmingham, and have some amazing books to read for research material. It’ll be 60 pages long as it will be the pilot of a TV historical drama.

I don’t know what my character is going to go through yet, but I know he works in chandlery at a time when mass production is becoming more and more common. I love the idea of him working in a chandlery, it seems to fit him.

So those are my ideas. What do you think?

Edit: the screenplay ended up exploring corruption through the character as he fights to get the life back that he once knew. You can read more about it by looking at Iron Wick in my portfolio.

Thanks for Listening

I hope you enjoyed this post. If you have, why not read some other content, both for writing, and student-related posts.

And please do follow me on here, Facebook and Bluesky.

Edited: my degree says Creative and Professional Writing. Dunno why I was making a big thing about it at the time, but hey I was 10 years younger (that’s scary… does anyone have a watch that stops time?).

I miss my undergraduate days but am really happy with what I have achieved since and I have almost now finished my PhD. I have a chapter in a non-fiction book published by a stellar non-fiction press; I’m qualified to teach undergraduate students and I have a novel that is very near ready to be sent out to agents and publishers. The future is hopeful!

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