M.A.- Writing for Young People

Overview 

This Creative Writing course is for writers for children of all ages, from the picture-book age through to young adult (YA). Prose fiction is likely to be the main area studied, but you'll have the chance to look at writing in all forms, including poetry, picture book texts and narrative non-fiction for young people.

The course supports you to create a significant body of writing, with practical plans for its place in the real world of publishing. It is based on the principle that most writers learn and benefit from working closely with their fellow writers, in a disciplined, supportive setting, and with tutors who are practising and published writers in their field. Most of our students aim to complete a novel by the end of the MA.

The writing workshop is at the heart of the course. With tutors and your fellow writers in a workshop setting, you'll learn to see your work through objective eyes and to think clearly about the different strategies you might adopt. You'll learn from each other’s mistakes and successes, as well as your own. You'll be urged to try things out, take risks and experiment, and reflect on and discuss the writing process. The context modules help you to see your own writing in the wider context of published children’s writing. The course encourages you to read widely and analytically.

Course Structure 

Contact hours for the course are approximately six hours per week for full-time students, and three hours per week for part-time students during the first two trimesters. Additional, optional lunchtime lectures are offered approximately once a fortnight. All workshops and teaching sessions happen either on Wednesdays or Thursdays, depending on your assigned group. During the third trimester, you'll work one-on-one with your manuscript tutor and attend two summer conferences.

Throughout the course, you're expected to learn independently, and (in general terms) read approximately a book a week, and write approximately 1,000 – 2,000 words a week. Overall, you'll likely spend 40 hours a week on your studies as a full-time student, and 20 hours a week on your studies as a part-time student.

Trimester one
In the first trimester’s writing workshop, you’ll explore a variety of forms of writing to gain a sense of different age ranges and styles of writing and experiment with your own writing. We encourage all our students to experiment and take risks at this stage of the course.

The context module, Writing for Young People: Forms, Ages and Stages, is concerned with the writer’s relationship with the audience, and will help you understand some of the issues raised by writing for young people. You'll read one set text each week to discuss in class, reading "as a writer", looking closely at language and style, in addition to writing short pieces of your own creative work.

Trimester two
In the second trimester’s workshop, you'll be asked to choose your area of writing and use the workshop’s feedback and encouragement to explore it in more depth. You'll bring short excerpts from your work-in-progress for discussion and feedback in the group. You may continue to experiment with different ideas for other stories.

The second trimester’s Context Module looks at contemporary children’s publishing, and aims to give a realistic grasp of the choices open to new writers in the field. This is your chance to learn about how the publishing industry works, and to develop the professional skills you need as a working author. 

Trimester three
In Trimester three, you'll continue to write your work-in-progress, editing and re-drafting your work to help you develop a manuscript as near to publishable quality as possible.

You’ll be supported by tutorials with a manuscript supervisor. The manuscript may be a novel, a collection of stories, a collection of poems or picture book text. Most of our students choose to write a novel for young people.

Part-time students follow the same sequence of modules, but do so over two years.