MA Creative Writing & Publishing

What We’re Looking For

For MA in Creative Writing and Publishing we are looking for able, innovative, and articulate students who like to read as much as they like to write, and who will work well in a group, offering constructive criticism to their peers.

Equally, you will be able to work independently, developing your own work in response to feedback from fellow students and tutors. You will also need to be commercially and digitally aware; ready to learn new publishing software and apply it to practical, real-life projects.

In this course, you will be taught by a range of staff with relevant expertise and knowledge appropriate to the content of the unit. This will include senior academic staff, qualified professional practitioners, demonstrators, technicians, and research students. You will also benefit from regular guest lectures from industry.

Core Units

• Writing Fiction: The creative writer must learn to critically examine their work and the work of others. Here, in a workshop environment, you will develop your skills as a writer of prose fiction by developing your own writing and responding to critical feedback from your peers.
• Narrating Identities: Self, Text & the World: This unit aims to provide you with a sophisticated knowledge and understanding of cultural and critical influences on a range of texts and literary media, exploring how literary, philosophical, and aesthetic movements have been used to define, construct and represent the self across the 20th and 21st centuries.
• Interactive Storytelling: Using a narratological and creative approach, you will study the development and nature of the art of storytelling in the context of digital-interactive media.
• Publishing Cultures and Materialities: From the eras of Cuneiform to Kindle, you'll study public writing as material objects, which have an economy, history, and culture. Publishing as we know it stems from a specific iteration of those conditions and is now shifting into online news. To take advantage of the opportunities and challenges this development affords, you'll therefore look at fiction from this material sociological perspective.
• Marketing & PR for Writers: This unit will equip you with the knowledge and marketing skills needed by writers and publishers, regardless of the format. You will develop your own ‘brands’ online and will have the opportunity to work on real-life projects for Fresher Publishing, devising marketing and PR strategies to raise awareness/sales of the Fresher Writing Prize and the Fresher Writing anthology.
• Design, Editing & Publishing: The aim of this unit is to enable you to evaluate and practice the significant processes of professional publishing. It seeks to equip you with the knowledge and skills needed by writers, editors, and other professionals in the publishing industry by engaging in real publishing projects for Fresher Publishing, the university’s own publishing press.
• Dissertation/Major Project: You may choose between a purely theoretical, academic dissertation or a major creative writing project supported by either a reflective or ‘route to publication’ rationale. By bringing together the skills, craft, theories, knowledge, and critical insight you have developed during the program, you will hone your individual strengths and establish lines of inquiry that may take you onto further doctoral study or into future careers.

The majority of assignments are all individual coursework, although the publishing semester will include group work. You will work on real-life publishing projects for the university’s publishing press, Fresher Publishing, and will have the opportunity to be involved in the administration of The Fresher Writing Prize and New Media Writing Prize.

Resources

MA Creative Writing and Publishing students are immersed in a vibrant media culture and have access to an extraordinary range of multimedia facilities, including radio studios. This offers the potential for students to produce audio clips for their author websites (produced in the Marketing and PR unit) and even full-length audiobooks.

You will be working on industry-relevant software, including Indesign and Photoshop, and will also have the opportunity to use the university’s own software – Generator – for producing interactive narratives.

Program Specification

Program specifications provide definitive records of the University's taught degrees in line with Quality Assurance Agency requirements. Every taught course leading to a BU Award has a program specification that describes its aims, structure, content, and learning outcomes, plus the teaching, learning, and assessment methods used.

Whilst every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the program specification, the information is liable to change to take advantage of exciting new approaches to teaching and learning as well as developments in industry. If you have been unable to locate the program specification for the course you are interested in, it will be available as soon as the latest version is ready. Alternatively please contact us for assistance.

In this course, you will learn the advanced craft of creative writing plus the business and practice of publishing. You will also analyze cultural and critical influences on the writer and the industry. Learned skills will be put into practice in group publishing projects for the university’s own publishing press, Fresher Publishing.

Potential Roles and Sectors

This course will provide you with a wide range of skills for employment in the media and communication-related industries including:

• Authorship
• Media Writing
• Publishing
• Journalism
• Advertising
• Public relations
• Teaching

Further Study

If you want to continue your studies after achieving your Master’s, you can look into our range of doctoral programs.