Compulsory modules

Writing Fiction
This module introduces you to key characteristics of fiction. You will gain an understanding of how these can be employed to explore the meaning of a text. Engaging with prose writers from all over the world, you will learn how to analyse core elements such as narrative voice, structure and the evocation of place, and develop your own ability to write short, creative prose pieces. You will attain a solid foundation for writing longer prose pieces in the future. 

Writing for Children
It starts at a secret location. You receive a blank book and start to write. It’s a journal: you submit it later, alongside your creative or critical piece. Back in Keele you look at children’s writing from different periods and cultures. You consider imagination and myth, the politics of representation, the construction and subversion of gender roles. You think about voice and vision. Your expressive skills flower as you explore storytelling techniques and the transformative power of narrative. 

Delivery, Performance, and Other Platforms: All the Writing Selves
This module prepares you for studying creative writing at university, introducing you to all the ‘writing selves’ needed when seeking publication and building an authorial profile. You will explore how self-narratives, new journalism, guerrilla-writing, and broadcasting platforms foster ways to extend and complement your practice outside traditional routes; how to deliver manuscripts to publishers, agents, and competitions, including how to respond to commissions via authentic briefs. You will also gain a practical foundation in performing your work publicly on/offline.  

Writing Poetry
This module introduces you to the characteristics and structure of poems, through an examination of 5 key ‘modes’ of poetry, looking closely at how these achieve their ends. You will learn how to identify these characteristics and structural elements through lecture input, discussion and consideration of example poems by a range of authors. You will also learn how to deploy this understanding into the writing of your own poetry, and share/discuss your own creative work with your fellow writers.  

Writing Scripts
This module will introduce you to the key dramatic principles required to write scripts for stage and screen. Drawing on texts from contemporary theatre, film and television, you will learn a series of fundamental skills, developing your understanding of character, dialogue, and structure. You will engage in a combination of lectures, seminar groups, and practical writing workshops, and guided by feedback from peers and tutors alike, you will work towards writing your own original script.   

Optional modules

History in Media and Film: The Presentation of the Past in Contemporary Culture 
The past is presented in many different ways, including in contemporary film and media. In this module you will consider ‘public history’, examine representations of the past in visual culture, and discuss the importance of these representations to collective memory, constructions of identity, and contemporary politics. Working with students from different subjects, you will begin to develop key skills for Humanities students, including how to evaluate and interpret sources and communicate your arguments to audiences of all backgrounds.

Popular Music & Platforms 
This module introduces key theoretical and practical aspects of popular music, exploring its socio-cultural context, functions, performers, markets, and scenes. It challenges cultural assumptions about sound and listening, examining popular culture, fandom, and sound recording. You will learn about music dissemination, consumption, and sharing on digital platforms, covering ethics, strategies, methodologies, and realities in today’s music world.  

Becoming a Cultural Citizen 
This module provides you with the foundational tools and skills you need to develop your student profile. You will learn about the different pathways in your cultural or creative field while developing your own identity as a cultural critic, creative, and citizen. You will explore and map out your personal and professional development goals and plans, ensuring you make the most of your time at university and beyond. You will gain professional skills in communication and team-working. 

Voices and Audiences: Building Your Professional Communication Skills 
This module introduces you to the many ways that your literary knowledge and communication skills will be useful in future employment. Studying a range of poems, speeches, and plays, you will learn how to employ effective rhetorical strategies to communicate professionally with different audiences, enabling you to give speeches, design lesson plans or exhibitions, or run social media campaigns. The module includes masterclasses from professionals working in, for example, museums, theatres, and social media. 

Compulsory modules

Genre, Forms and Modes 
This module will develop and deepen your understanding of how narrative forms, genres and modes are used in creative writing. It introduces you to forms of creative prose besides fiction.  It asks questions about how genre writing and creative nonfiction are formed, how writers read other literary texts – not as critics, and not necessarily as fans, but as practitioners – and aims to equip your own texts with the structures and techniques which are necessary to develop your own writing. 

Sources of Writing
This module will develop your knowledge of key ideas about the creative processes behind the writing of original texts (poetry and prose). You will explore these processes, increase your understanding of the influences and sources that inspire new writing, and enhance your understanding of writers’ workshops gained in your first year at Keele. Through the production of your own prose, poetry and critical analysis, the module will prepare you for your independent study project in your third year.

Optional modules

Local Literature in Action
This module reflects on what writing can do in the world. It develops your place-writing skills, supporting you to create vivid settings that are closer to home (Stoke or elsewhere). It thinks about form, genre, and voice (regional/global Englishes). Building on writing’s capacity to shape and reshape people’s lived experiences of cities, towns and regions, the module includes practical training to equip you with the skills to conceive and plan your own ways of working with communities outside university.

Screenwriting: Principles and Practices  
This module forms a gateway to the worlds of professional screenwriting and story development. It introduces you to key screenwriting concepts, which you will explore in practical, writing-based seminars. You will analyse a range of film and TV industry texts as well as producing a number of screenplay samples which respond to the theme of the seminars, receiving feedback in regular writing workshops. You will develop your own creative project plan, which will provide an invaluable basis for any project work in your final year.

Literature and Society 
Building on your first year, in this second-year module you will extend your knowledge of different literary approaches and theories, exploring topics such as feminism, race studies, ecocriticism, and the history of emotions. You will explore how literature reflects and influences social issues, both those contemporary to the literature you study and those relevant in today’s society. You will deepen your skills in critical analysis as you apply your literary understanding to real-world debates and situations.

Literature, Creativity and the Cultural Industries 
This module builds on L4 introductions to cultural platforms/industries and to adaptation/script-writing, enabling a focused study of how the New Vic Theatre adapts texts for the stage; you will explore how the theatre as cultural industry produces social value through programmes of research and creativity; you will use this knowledge to reflect on societal impacts of cultural industries more widely, for example music, film, creative writing. You will be assessed in ways that enable you to reflect on your own creative and critical practice. 

Promotional Cultures 
Why is brand culture so ubiquitous in how we understand ourselves and our society, and the way we live our lives? You’ll investigate the histories and politics of marketing, advertising and consumerism, considering how and why promotional culture became such a key component of contemporary economies and societies. You’ll think critically about the social and political impacts of brand culture, including environmental harm, exploitation, and inequality. You’ll identify, discuss, and critically analyse key themes and trends in contemporary promotional culture. 

The American South: US Summer School (Level 5) 
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support. 

Pathways with Creative Writing: Developing Your Profile 
This module broadens your knowledge of the variety of career pathways open to you, enabling and enable you to identify, analyse, and showcase your degree skills and experiences effectively. Through completing and reflecting on problem-based tasks relating to different sectors, such as telling the story of a business, or writing a funding proposal to support a film festival, you will build your creative and collaborative skills and learn how to articulate them in ways that will be attractive to employers. 

Professional Experience with Creative Writing 
This module offers you the chance to contribute to the world outside Keele either through completing a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of projects for different clients), or working as a team to deliver a successful literary festival or event. You will be trained to showcase your creative and collaborative skills and abilities effectively before applying for an opportunity advertised through the module (or you can source your own, subject to it meeting the module’s requirements).  

Compulsory modules

Writingscapes
This module enables you to specialise in various forms of place-writing. It introduces you to some spatial theories, including sensoryscapes, geopoetics, and psychogeography, offering you different approaches you might adopt in your writing. You are  supported to reflect on the relations between theory and practice, and  read published examples of creative texts (poetry, prose, creative nonfiction) by English-language and bi-/multi-lingual writers from the UK and elsewhere, to help you develop your writing and situate it within broader literary landscapes. 

Life Writing
‘Autobiography’: that’s writing about the self, right? Wrong! That’s Rule One. You look at canonical texts by saints and sinners, scientists and sages. You study key theories. Then you look for other voice. You construct a counter canon and interpret it. This is about your creative practice as well as your academic development, though. What grain of sand will be your pearl? Workshops provide support, but this is your journey through the self to the world. Remember Rule One.  

Optional modules

Creative Writing Portfolio
This module gives you the opportunity to plan and develop an extended creative writing project, such as a collection of poems or short stories, or a longer piece of fiction. In Semester 1, you will read and discuss contemporary writing and experiment with examples of your own in a workshop, so you can settle on a project. In semester 2, you will work closely with a supervisor to produce a portfolio of creative writing. You might consider using any acquired understanding of digital/alternative platforms for the presentation of your Portfolio as an alternative to traditional text-based work. 

Extended Screenwriting Project
This final-year project is the culmination of your critical and practical work on screenwriting, building on modules undertaken in years one and two. With the consultation of tutors, you will identify and devise your own screenplay idea (for a feature film, TV show ‘pilot’, short film or adaptation), producing a professional-standard treatment to showcase your skills. The module will therefore provide a significant platform and output for anyone hoping to move into careers within the creative film and TV industries.

Other-than-human worlds: nature writing, environmental writing 
This module supports you to hone your place-writing to focus on non- or other-than-human worlds. You’ll study a wide variety of nature and environmental texts by global majority writers, working-class writers, disabled writers, queer writers, and others. You’ll analyse various uses of form, reflecting on the possibilities and limitations of, for example, hybrid, multimodal, and critical-creative writing. The module thinks about interrelations between humans and the other-than-human, and the potentials for writing to effect social and environmental change. 

Working-class Fictions 
This module introduces you to the practices of working-class fiction, a genre grounded in matters of identity and social realism. You will explore literary traditions through a series of set texts (e.g. Angry Young Men of the 60s, Shuggie Bain), film adaptations, and protest songs to inspire your own practice. You will be alerted to debates and propaganda that continue to influence whilst exploring how to experiment with medium to best represent the class-subject past and present. 

Shakespeare on Film 
How have Shakespeare's works been adapted by the film industry, and why do screenwriters and directors make the creative decisions they make? In 'Shakespeare on Film' you will explore a range of Shakespeare plays adapted for film, and develop your understanding both of the original works and of the possibilities they offer for reinterpretation and adaptation. You can practise film adaptation yourself, as you explore possibilities for cutting and modernising Shakespeare’s text for the screen.

Creative Magazine Production 
You’ll plan and produce a group digital 'journal' or 'magazine' focused on culture. Each group will negotiate the types of articles to include, and the design and style of the publication in relation to their chosen market and target audience. Your finished work will be published online, capable to be presented in various digital formats. You’ll refine the creative and collaborative skills built up so far, including encounters at Y1 and Y2 with cultural/creative platforms; you’ll develop your awareness of audiences and markets; and you’ll have a product to showcase after graduation.

Thresholds: Young Adult Fiction 
Young Adult Fiction, occupying a borderline between children's and adult fiction, often focuses on moments of crisis, its characters caught between innocence and ruin, naivety and understanding, and sometimes literally between two worlds. What is it about young adulthood that invites these explorations of the threshold and the liminal? Can we read 'growing up', through these fictions, not as gradual development but as series of shocks? This module emphasises diversity and we will read fan-fiction, genre fiction, and ‘issue’ novels.

Media and Climate Change 
Are you passionate about telling new and more powerful stories about climate change, biodiversity loss and human-nature disconnection, the key environmental concerns of our time? This module develops your creative storytelling skills in the context of environmental communication. You will discover different approaches to environmental communication and learn how to devise effective stories responding to briefs set by external partners from the environmental sector. You will gain vital skills relevant to professional roles in a wide variety of communications, environment and sustainability related fields.

The American South: US Summer School (Level 6) 
Study Southern US culture on location! The American South is a distinctive but difficult to define geographical and cultural entity, and attitudes to the South range from celebration to derision. Studying with others from a range of disciplines, you will think through historical and current constructions of the US South through its history, literature, film, and wider culture. You spend four weeks at one of our partner universities taught by Keele staff, shaping your own research project with their support. 

Employing Creative Writing: Putting Your Subject into Practice 
Preparing for life after graduation, this module enables you to put your degree skills into practice and work with employer-clients on a series of real-life projects. Enhancing the creative and collaborative skills you developed on ‘Pathways with Creative Writing’, Employing Creative Writing trains you to work effectively with clients from a variety of settings, such as charities, publishers, museums, or even the construction sector, and gives you the opportunity to present your work to your chosen employer-client. 

Professional Experience with Creative Writing (Year 3) 
In your final year we offer you another opportunity to complete a work placement, a project for a client (or a series of clients), or work as part of a team to deliver a successful festival or event. Completed during the final stages of your degree, the module gives you cutting-edge experience of the sector you wish to enter following graduation as well as valuable employer contacts, thereby providing you with an effective career launchpad.