ENGLISH 313: Types of Creative Writing / Fall 2024
Short-Form Writing
MW: 1:30-2:45, Saunders 242
In this generative writing class, we will practice and harness our utmost creative capabilities with the focus, precision, and clarity needed to engage in short-form writing as readers and storytellers. We will engage in close reading and analysis while also experimenting with language, form, style, and structure across genres with both rigor and a sense of play. Our readings will provide a diversity of models and approaches that will serve as inspiration and prompt our own writing, reading work as short as a sentence and as long as 9,000 words, with genres ranging from poetry and nonfiction to flash fiction and the short story. With scaffolded assignments helping us building out our story shapes and sizes in between, we will learn how to find entry points and angles into our work by developing our imaginative capacities, thus crafting the themes and premises we need to write with curiosity, urgency, and excitement. Likewise, we will learn how to engage in the practice of revision, how our work will transform as we do.
Writers will learn to see themselves as artists and to cultivate an artistic practice and community with intention, openness, and discipline. We will become better thinkers, observers, and listeners and work with one another in the spirit of collective care and collaboration. We will learn how to engage with your readers, and we will each provide feedback for each other’s work in small workshops. Students will create a chapbook of creative work, polished pieces of writing ready to submit for publication, and reinforce their artistic vision with a foundation your future creative pathway.
Learning Outcomes
- Demonstrate critical close reading skills in description and analysis of artistic techniques in diverse contemporary texts.
- Practice and compose works of creative writing in myriad forms and genres, from poetry and nonfiction to flash fiction and the short story.
- Contribute constructive, collaborative feedback of classmates’ writings.
- Cultivate revision strategies and practices, producing both early and reimagined, revised works.
- Nourish the curious, humble observer that lives within us all.
- Engage with current conversations around artistic ethics, creative inheritance, and our kuleana to ourselves and to our greater creative communities.
Required Texts
(available at the UHM Bookstore and online)
Short Form Creative Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology
Majority of our readings, excerpts from short story collections, will be available as a PDF (Laulima) or online