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BA Hons creative writing


Difficulty and accessibility thumb

Difficulty and accessibility

As I left the exhibition I passed an advert screen headed Mindfulness suggesting viewers should attend evening sessions to find out how art can “calm body and mind.” What! I want art, whether it’s visual or written to stimulate body and mind, not calm it.

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Using your rhythm section thumb

Using your rhythm section

One of the first things you may have taken on board, as a new creative writing student, is that it’s not only poets who needs to pay attention to a beat or metre: all prose must have a rhythm – the rhythm of the words, sentences and paragraphs. During Part Three of Writing Skills, we look at speech– the spoken monologue, the interior monologue, dialogue within prose and dialogue as script.

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How can writing connect with people and affect their lives? thumb

How can writing connect with people and affect their lives?

When a Prime Minister is confronted with a piece of art in the hope that it forces them to change policy, or political approach, then that work of art has gone beyond the creative endeavours of artists. It has become a cog in the machinery of the real world and it can affect peoples lives. I, Daniel Blake, shows how writing can truly connect with people. But how did it do it?

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Creating imaginary creatures thumb

Creating imaginary creatures

A fantasy setting is usually closer to the world as we know it than a science fiction one. It’s more accessible, and consequently more attractive to a child who is still awed by things that are all too familiar to an adult. Fantasy is unlikely to change gravity, or body chemistry, or a breathable atmosphere, so the creatures that populate that world would be at home in ours.

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Rhythm and rhyme thumb

Rhythm and rhyme

I’m always amazed when students who have probably mostly grown up with the rhythms of pop music in their ears, say they can’t detect strict rhythms in the poems they read, or reproduce those rhythms in the poems they write. But perhaps if we don’t get used to rhythms through hearing and reciting a lot of nursery rhymes from day one, then it’s harder to recognise and reproduce strict metre when we come to write metric poetry later in life. Without continuous practice from birth onwards we may well lose our sense of perfect pitch and our sense of rhythm.

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How to crack the reflective essay: Part 1 thumb

How to crack the reflective essay: Part 1

The reflective essay is one part of the assignments that generates a lot of discussion! Getting in touch with the creative part of ourselves and expressing that through engaging prose is a challenge of itself. But for the creative writer who is undertaking serious study though there is no getting away from cracking the reflective essay.

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What is flash fiction ? thumb

What is flash fiction ?

Flash exists all over the world, and is known by a variety of different names which are often used interchangeably: flash fiction, micro-fiction, nano-fiction, sudden fiction, short shorts…

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On winning second place in the 2016 Yeovil Literary Prize thumb

On winning second place in the 2016 Yeovil Literary Prize

The moment I gave my character a name (it flew unbidden into my head) he became a widower working at Arrivals and Departures in a busy airport. I made him a curmudgeonly old boy who couldn’t get used to his rebranded title of Facilities Engineer. He’d never had a decent conversation in all the 40 years he’d worked at the airport. As the story opens, he’s five days away from retirement, and about to clean the disabled toilets.

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