Creative Writing Minor Summer Reading 2019-20 _________________________________________ WELCOME TO THE CREATIVE WRITING MINOR AT NCH! As a student of Creative Writing you will undertake a guided practical study of the craft of writing poetry, short fiction, dramatic scripts and creative nonfiction. You will also work in a variety of writing modes that combine, blur or challenge these formal distinctions. All skilful writers (‘creative’ or otherwise) are also skilful readers. Confident creative writers are capable of distilling insights from their reading that enhance their understanding of their craft. Reading as a writer is a unique skill, and one that you will hone as a student of Creative Writing. NCH422 THE WRITER’S CRAFT (30 credits; taught over the whole year) In the first-year course, NCH422 The Writer’s Craft, you will develop your compositional and editorial skills in three primary forms: poetry, the short story and drama. In this way, you will gain a solid foundation for more advanced work in the second- and third-year courses. 1) SUMMER WRITING TASK: START YOUR ‘COMMONPLACE BOOK’ In all Creative Writing courses at NCH, you are required to keep two notebooks or exercise books. These should be no smaller than A5 and are for the following uses: A) 1 x Writer’s Workbook for writing exercises conducted in class and for homework. B) 1 x Commonplace Book for copying out your favourite or exemplary passages of writing encountered in your reading for the course. A) During in-class writing exercises, you are required to write by hand in your Writer’s Workbook, unless you require special dispensation to use a laptop computer or other device. As this is a writing minor degree, expect to be doing more writing than that required for other courses. B) A Commonplace Book is a notebook in which writers enter snippets or passages of writing they most admire or enjoy, or indeed that enrapture them. These include memorable turns of phrase, sentences, dialogue, paragraphs and so on. Think of it as a ‘close-reading diary’. Your Commonplace Book doubles as a source of future inspiration and a way of focusing your attention on the nuts and bolts of writing creatively. You will be asked to submit your Commonplace Book to your Course Leader in Week 4 for formative appraisal and tutorial discussion. Please feel free to commence this task over the summer. Here is what you will be asked to do to start your Commonplace Book: Take a ruled notebook of your choice, and enter into it by hand the following items (in any order), followed by their source details (author, title and year if possible): 1 CREATIVE WRITING MINOR READING LIST (NCH422 THE WRITER’S CRAFT) ______________________________________________________________________________________ • 2 x complete poems that you have read and enjoyed • 4 x stand-alone sentences that you admire from works of fiction (novels, short stories) • 1 x complete paragraph of prose from any source (fiction or nonfiction) • 1 x passage of dialogue from a stage play (minimum 14 lines) These items can be taken from the Course Reading if you wish. You will continue to add to your Commonplace Book during the course. 2) READING LIST FOR NCH422 THE WRITER’S CRAFT 2019-20 (OVER PAGE) Below you will find the Reading List for The Writer’s Craft. In this course will study two kinds of texts: 1) Examples of the literary forms studied (i.e. poems, plays, short stories); for NCH422 The Writer’s Craft, the set examples for the year amount to approximately: • 30-40 Poems • 12-15 Short Stories; and • 3-4 Play scripts 2) Instructional works, in the form of book chapters or articles written by experts, that offer explicit guidance on technical and other elements of the writer’s craft, both generally and with regards to specific literary forms (i.e. on writing poetry, dramatic scripts, and short fiction). SUMMER READING ADVICE: 1) You are encouraged to make a start on the year’s reading in the summer before matriculation. It may be most useful for you to make a start on the PLAYS and SHORT STORIES in particular, as these tend to be the most time-consuming readings for students during the year. 2) Two COURSE READERS for NCH422 The Writer’s Craft (one for each term), which contain most of the following readings, will be available upon request from August 1. We hope you enjoy exploring the Reading List for The Writer’s Craft below (and the COURSE READERS), and look forward to seeing you in Michaelmas Term. Jaya Savige Head of Creative Writing and Lecturer in English New College of the Humanities 2 CREATIVE WRITING MINOR READING LIST (NCH422 THE WRITER’S CRAFT) ______________________________________________________________________________________ NCH422 THE WRITER’S CRAFT—READING LIST 2019-20 MICHAELMAS TERM PREPARATORY READING WEEK MT 0 GETTING STARTED Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (London: Harper Perennial, 2013), pp. 3-21. David Morley, ‘Reading and the individual writer’, in The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 25-33. Julia Bell and Paul Magrs, eds., ‘Getting Started’, ‘Training the Eye’, in The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 3-19, 20-24. ELEMENTS OF POETRY (A) (Michaelmas Term Weeks 1-5) Set Primary Reading A (Examples) and B (Instructional) below MT 1 POETRY and THOUGHT; IMAGERY, METAPHOR and SIMILE On Writing Poetry: Ted Hughes, ‘Learning to Think’, in Poetry in the Making (London: Faber, 2008), 56- 73. Mary Oliver, ‘Imagery’, in A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry (San Diego: Harcourt, 1994), 92-108. Poems: Billy Collins, ‘Introduction to Poetry’, in The Apple that Astonished Paris (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996), p. 58. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Fish’, in Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, pp. 95-7. (above) Sylvia Plath, ‘Blackberrying’, in Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 1. Modern Poetry, ed. by Jahan Ramazani and Richard Ellmann (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 602. Seamus Heaney, ‘Trout’, ‘Waterfall’, in Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber, 1991), pp. 26-7. MT 2 POETIC FORM AND FREE VERSE; PROSODY (METRE); LINE On Writing Poetry: Stephen Fry, ‘Metre’, in The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (London: Arrow Books, 2007), pp. 1-23. Poems: Philip Larkin, ‘This Be The Verse’, in The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. by Archie Burnett (London: Faber and Faber, 2013). William Carlos Williams, ‘Danse Russe’, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, ‘Poem’, ‘This is Just to Say’, in The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1951), pp. 148, 277, 340, 354. Edna St. Vincent Millay, ‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why’, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. by Philis Levin (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 120. MT 3 THE SONNET A (STANZA, RHYME) On Writing Poetry: Strand, Mark and Eavan Boland, ‘The Sonnet’, in The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 55- 3 CREATIVE WRITING MINOR READING LIST (NCH422 THE WRITER’S CRAFT) ______________________________________________________________________________________ 72. Rhian Williams, The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry, 2nd edn (London; New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 162-78 (‘Rhyme’). Poems: Sonnet examples in Course Reader 1. The Petrarchan Sonnet (by Wyatt, Browning, Millay, Donne, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Cullen, Bolton) 2. The Spenserian Sonnet (by Spenser) 3. The Shakespearean Sonnet (Contemporary & Modern: by Light, Alexie, Campo, Duffy, Yeats, Brooks; Historical: Davies, Shakespeare, Clare, Keats) MT 4 THE SONNET B (available online) On Writing Poetry: Don Paterson, ‘Introduction’, 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), pp. ix-xxiv. Rhian Williams, The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry, 2nd edn (London; New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 215-35 (Ch. 6 ‘Wordplay’). Poems: Sonnet examples in Course Reader 4. The Hybrid Sonnet (by Yeats, Merril, Heaney, Owen, Cummings) 5. Other Sonnet Forms (by Shelley, Owen, Cummings, Lowell, Rodriguez, Collins, Jarman, Berrigan, Duffy, Dove). MT 5 TOPICS IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY Poems: John Ashbery, ‘Myrtle’, Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), p. 129. Kayo Chingonyi, ‘The Colour of James Brown’s Scream’, Kumukanda (London: Chatto & Windus, 2017), p. 1. Sharon Olds, ‘Sex Without Love’, in The Poetry of Sex, ed. by Sophie Hannah (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 179. Amorak Huey, ‘Mick Jagger’s Penis Turns 69’, in The Poetry of Sex, ed. by Sophie Hannah (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 197. Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edn., ed. by M. Ferguson, M. J. Salter, and J. Stallworthy (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 1101. Daljit Nagra, ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 32. Adam Zagajewski, ‘To Go to Lvov’, Without End: New and Selected Poems, trans. by Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), pp. 79-81. DRAMATIC SCRIPTWRITING (Michaelmas Term Weeks 6-11) Set Primary Reading A—Plays The following three plays will be read over the final six weeks of Michaelmas Term: 1. Lucy Prebble, The Effect (London: Bloomsbury, 2012; repr. 2013, 2016). 2. Harold Pinter, The Dumb Waiter, in Harold Pinter: Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), pp. 111-49. 3. Polly Stenham, That Face, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). Extra: Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000). Set Primary Reading B—On writing dramatic scripts In addition to the plays above, instructional readings on the craft of writing dramatic scripts will be taken from the following sources (any one of which is worth purchasing): 4 CREATIVE WRITING MINOR READING LIST (NCH422 THE WRITER’S CRAFT) ______________________________________________________________________________________ Rib Davis, Writing Dialogue for Scripts: Effective Dialogue for Film, TV, Radio and Stage (London: A&C Black Publications, 2008) Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing, newly rev.