Celebrating MA Creative Writing student success

Gutter No. 17

Two current students on the MA Creative Writing programme at Edinburgh Napier University are celebrating fresh success in 2018.

First-year part-timer Noëlle Harrison has a story in issue 17 of Gutter, one of Scotland's most acclaimed publishers of new writing. Vardo's Daughters is a chilling tale of treachery and lies set in the witch-fearing past of Norway. Gutter is now run by an independent cooperative after surviving a tumultuous 2017 in Scottish publishing.

Second-year part-timer Jenny Bloomfield is one of the creators contributing to WE SHALL FIGHT UNTIL WE WIN, a graphic novel marking a century since the first wave of women gained the right to vote in the UK.

The 64-page anthology by 404 Ink and BHP Comics is being created by celebrated writers and artists including Denise Mina, Hannah Berry, Durre Shahwar and Grace Wilson. A Kickstarter campaign seeking £8000 to help fund the project hit its target in just 15 days.

Exciting news & opportunities for MA Creative Writing @EdinburghNapier University

Now is the perfect time to apply for the MA Creative Writing programme at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. We've got lots of exciting opportunities and news to share, but - unusually - we also have a few places left for the September 2016 intake.

Most years we are already full by now but several prospective students with unconditional offers of a place on the course have had to defer starting until September 2017. That's a shame for them, but it has created openings for late applications to our acclaimed MA programme.

If you've considered applying but thought it was too late for this September, there is still time to take action. There are direct links to our online application form on the right hand side of this blog - one for full-time students, one for part-timers.

If you want to know more about our MA and the application process, read this blogpost. But enough of the sales pitch, what about our exciting news and opportunities?

Firstly, we're proud to announce the creative writing programmes at Edinburgh Napier in Scotland and Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, USA have signed an articulation agreement, enabling graduates of our MA to continue their studies on the Writing Popular Fiction MFA at Seton Hill.

What does that actually mean? Most students who graduate from the MA here at Edinburgh Napier have written the first 20,000 words of their Major Project, usually a novel. Going on to Seton Hill will give them continuing support and mentoring to finish that project.

Dr Nicole Peeler, director of the Seton Hill MFA

Seton Hill considers the MA as equivalent to a year spent on the MFA, meaning students articulating from Edinburgh Napier could complete the degree at Seton Hill in just over a year.

The MFA is a low residency programme [akin to distance learning], so students work from home most of the year and visit the Greensburg campus for week-long residencies.

And Seton Hill is offering a significant fee discount for the first few Edinburgh Napier MA Creative Writing graduates who articulate to the MFA.

Urban fantasy writer Nicole Peeler is director of the Writing Popular Fiction programme at Seton Hill, and is an enthusiastic supporter of the new agreement. [Click her name in this paragraph to read more about the MFA.]

More news: the Creative Writing MA programme team at Edinburgh Napier is expanding. We are in the final stages of recruiting a new part-time lecturer to help us grow and enhance the course.

Interviews are being held next month and - fingers crossed! - the new team member should be in place for the start of the 2016-17 academic year this September. Watch this space for more news...

One last piece of news: we are introducing a new learning journey for part-time students on our MA. When we discussed what we were doing with the current crop of part-timers, several of them admitted being jealous of the new structure their successors will enjoy!

Watch out for another blogpost later this week revealing the new-look part-time Creative Writing MA here at Edinburgh Napier. Frankly, we're not sure why we didn't think of it sooner... Onwards!

Updated: Admissions process for MA Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University

The original version of this post is the most popular page on our blog, but we figured it was time to update the information - here's the 2017 version...

Unique is a good way to describe the postgrad creative writing programme at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. For a start, we put genre fiction front and centre in our course. If you love writing and reading science fiction, fantasy, crime or horror, most MFAs and MAs don't want to know - but we embrace great genre writing.

Another unique focus at Edinburgh Napier is comics and graphic novels, which most other programmes ignore. In fact, we love this medium so much we devote an entire module about it, Writing Graphic Fiction. [Good news: no talent for drawing required!] We also specialise in creative non-fiction, applying the techniques for developing and writing a novel to a research-based narrative.

Edinburgh Napier's postgraduate creative writing MA does not offer a poetry option. I repeat, poetry is not a requirement. There are plenty of other great courses with brilliant poets on the faculty - if you want to study poetry, seek them out. We have had prize-winning poets as students on our programme, but we don't teach or critique poetry.

There are no peer review workshops in Creative Writing MA classes at Edinburgh Napier. I repeat, there are no peer review workshops. This boggles the mind of some people, as such workshops are the bedrock of creative writing pretty much everywhere else. But we don't have them in our classes. Not one!

Instead, we set weekly writing assignments and expect you to bring the results to class. You're encouraged to critically self-reflect on your work [with prompts from us], and to share that thinking. You get professional editorial feedback on your writing and your thinking, delivered masterclass-style in class. And you get six hours of one-to-one mentoring.

If that sounds enticing, here's how you apply for our course. Like so much of our programme, the admissions process we use to select students also seems to be unique...

First, you fill in and submit an application form [there are links to an online version top right of this page]. We welcome applicants who already have a degree - it doesn't have to be in English, English literature or some form of creative writing]. We also recognise prior learning and writing experience in people who don't have a degree yet.

The crucial section of your form is the personal statement. This is where you tell us about your aspirations as a writer, and why our programme can help. Here's a hint: don't just paste in your usual personal statement. We always look to see if applicants have done their research on the course and have enthusiasm for our specialisms.

Do your homework. Google us to read interviews we've given about our ethos, our approach to  creative writing. Read the other entries on this blog. If you want your application taken seriously, show us you've taken our course seriously. Plus: that statement is a first chance to showcase your ability to write. Blow our socks off!

All being well, we'll progress you to the next stage of our admissions process. We don't ask for a writing sample with your application. Instead - if we like your application form - we'll invite you to undertake a writing challenge. We ask you to write us an original short story of up to 1000 words, and you'll have two weeks to submit it.

To make this a challenge, we give you a choice of first sentences. You select one and use that as the opening for your story. We also let you decide when we send the brief, so you choose the two weeks that best suit you. We even include the criteria we'll be using to assess your submission, so the process is more transparent.

Once you've sent in your story, we read and assess it. Some applicants get turned away at this stage [we take roughly one out of every five people who apply]. If your story shows promise, we will invite you to a selection interview - face to face or via Skype if you live a long way from Edinburgh.

The interview is the last stage. It can last up to an hour. During that time we use one or two teaching and learning activities from our course to assess you as an applicants. This  gives you insight into our programme and how we teach it. Rest assured, your interview should be an enjoyable experience, and not an interrogation!

We let you know within a day if we're offering you a place - no waiting for months to find out [and no fee to apply to the course, either!]. We use a rolling admissions process: once we're full, we're full. Our course takes a maximum of 16 full-time students a year, and up to four part-timers who are with us for two years.

If you still have any questions, feel free to get in touch before you formally apply. Email lecturer David Bishop here: d.bishop@napier.ac.uk . The sooner you apply, the better your chances...

Robert Shearman: "Writing is a bit of a sod"

Robert Shearman wrote Doctor Who: Dalek, the Hugo Award-nominated TV episode that revived the malevolent metal monsters. His short story collections have won both a World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. He's also an award-winning dramatist for theatre and the writer of numerous radio plays. In this special guest-blog he talks about being Writer-in-Residence on the MA Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier:

"Writing is, it has to be said, a bit of a sod. There are mornings I wake up, and remember I’m a writer, and the cold chill of that is enough to make me pull the duvet back over my head. It’s the only job in which the better you get at it the worse you realise you are. I started out twenty years ago, all cocky and ambitious, and a little bit rubbish – and the greatness I expected was just above my head out of my grasp.

I’m in my forties now, and I can knock together words with a little more proficiency, and I can see more clearly just how little I’ve yet achieved and how far I still have to go. I fully expect that when I’m ninety-five my prose will be the best I will ever craft it, and my ideas will strike the right balance between wit and pith – and the self-knowledge it will take for me to have got there will reveal just how bloody awful a writer I really am. 

Some days writing seems like the second worst thing in the world. And the first thing, annoyingly, would be not being allowed to write at all. So I grit my teeth and get to it and moan about it under my breath – moan quietly, too, for fear that someone might hear me and take it all away. 

The problem is that writers feel like frauds. When I pick up a book, any book that’s not by me, and I see all those pages filled with words, all that prose neatly laid out and looking so confident, I can’t but help believe there must have been something mystical that made it happen. And every writer I know, deep down, suspects that there’s some magic formula that makes it easy for everyone else... except him. Look at all the photos on those dust jackets. Look at how those authors smile! They know something we don’t.

So you can understand that when I was offered the residency at Edinburgh Napier I felt a certain amount of guilt. How could I tell people how to be a writer when after all these years I was struggling to work that out myself? And if I could feel like a fraud writing in my bedroom, with no one but the cat to judge me, how much worse would it be around a couple of dozen students all keen and eager and wanting to change the world?

On the first day of term I went to the introductory talk given by Sam Kelly and David Bishop, and I tried to look confident and accomplished, and I nodded sagely at the things they said. Inside I felt queasy. Because Sam and David were talking about the high standards expected for the course, the way that the students wouldn’t be mollycoddled, how they would be pushed and be required to push themselves. They were all given the opportunity to leave, right there and then, with no shame. No one took it.

I would have. I really would. And that was my first understanding of how Edinburgh Napier worked. It requires a certain kind of courage. And the students I would be working alongside would be braver than me. Really, it’s hard enough some days just to write. But to write, and to be accountable for that, it’s another matter entirely. I’ve always been very suspicious of writing courses, because so often they seem to promise the earth – or, at the least, fame, glory, and publication. In essence, they offer their students that magic formula we all know doesn’t exist but suspect still somehow might.

Edinburgh Napier starts by asking you a question, and it’s an important one, and the one that artists don’t ask of themselves often enough. ‘So what?’ You’ve got a nice little idea for a story. Nice little plot, nice cute characters, nice turns of phrase. You’ve got a metaphor in mind for chapter three you’re itching to use, it’s so clever! So what? Because if you can’t answer that, there’s no point to it. Filling the shelves of a hundred thousand bookshops there are stories that have already been published – and if you can’t find some justification why your own deserves to be beside them, it won’t deserve to be.

If that sounds scary, it’s because it is. If it sounds harsh, it’s missing the point. The greatest gift you can lend a writer is the hope that what they’re working on might actually matter. What sets Napier apart is its emphasis upon the way that writers should assert themselves and find projects that define them: that’s the reason why we pull the duvets over our heads, it’s not the fear that the words are going to bite us, it’s the fear that all that effort has not a scrap of point.

Napier refuses to puts its students on to some easy conveyor belt to publication, smoothing out all the quirks and individuality. Napier doesn’t see that the purpose of story is some optional extra you graft on to course work once you’ve learned how to do good grammar and pretty structuring. I realised that what Sam and David had told me was perfectly true – that the selection process for the MA course was very rigorous, and that the students on it all had something so much more promising than a bland understanding of how language works. With these students, they might actually be offering something new.

And I would meet with them. I would see how they would wrestle with their ideas sometimes, trying to force them to be ever more ambitious, to get the most out of them they could. And I would go to my office, and I would try to exact the same standards on my work. I would sit down and start a new story, and find answers to that question: ‘so what?’

I decided that if they were going to work so hard then the least I could do was work hard too. I set myself a task. I would write a short story each week of my residency, and post it upon a blog for all the world to see, and the stories would directly bounce off conversations I’d had with students inside and outside the classroom, and they would be inspired by what inspired them.

As Writer in Residence the one thing I could do was write – and give them a demonstration that there was someone out there doing the same thing as they were. Prone to the same doubts and paranoias, and prone to the same bouts of laziness. To strip away the mystique. To show that what they’re doing is what all writers do, word after word, paragraph after paragraph, every single day.

Sam Kelly and David Bishop are an unlikely duo. Sam is small and excited and so burns with enthusiasm that in the classroom you can sometimes almost hear students’ minds pop with inspiration. Sam at first focuses upon the theory of writing, delighting in Derrida and psychogeography, and trains the student to see their work in a new context, as something which either embraces or challenges other disciplines. David is dry, thoughtful, and very funny – he approaches the business of writing with a fierce practicality that is the fruit of a career in television, books and comics.

It’s the way their two different styles work in synthesis that gives such flavour to the course. And right beside them, lurking in the Writers Room with its overflowing shelves of extraordinary literature, is Stuart Kelly – and Stuart has read just about everything in the world, has an opinion on it, and can tell anyone preparing their own novel what else to read for further insight and direction. I’ve been trying to catch Stuart out for nearly a year with obscure literature I think he might not have heard of; I can’t do it; I give in.

And I’ve seen how the students have grown in confidence. – No, let’s stop calling them students now, let’s say writers, because that’s what they are: they’re not working merely towards graduation, they’re working for something much bigger and bolder. Writing is essentially a solitary pursuit. No matter how much we plan, or discuss it, or offer support for others, the actual graft of it always is some single-handed combat with a blank screen and a bucketload of words. But it can never be truly solitary, because then we’d leave the reader behind; writing is a form of communication, after all, and if we get stuck just talking to ourselves why should anyone want to listen? That’s been my principle joy at Edinburgh Napier – watching how the writers interact, seeing how the enthusiasm for one person’s project can inspire someone else’s.

As it has mine. I came to Napier rather arrogantly worrying what I could give to the students. I never much thought about what I would take from them. What they’ve given me is a new fearlessness. A mind more open to new ideas and approaches. A greater sense of purpose. And a feeling that what we’re all doing in this job, silly as it may be, self-indulgent as it is, does truly matter. Yes, it’s still a sod. But I stare the sod into submission now with pride. And it’s with pride I’ll look back on my year at Edinburgh Napier. I can’t wait to see what the new friends I’ve been working with are going to write next, next week, and in the years to come. I’ll be there, writing alongside them."

Apply now for 2012 MA Creative Writing intake

It's only week 6 for our new cohort of MA Creative Writing students, and we're already getting applications for the September 2012 intake! It seems word about the new, innovative nature of our course is spreading. We've designed a new brochure to tell the world about what we're doing, as you can see from the images scattered through this blog posting.

Our course keeps a strict cap on numbers so we can maintain the highest standard of teaching and mentoring. Student experience is paramount for us. As proof of that, we turn away 3-5 applicants for every student we accept. So who makes it on the course? Talented, committed writers who are willing to make sacrifices to achieve their goasl.

The new class is only our third intake, but we've already attracted students from the United States, Australia, Malaysia, Italy, Finland and across the UK. The good news for full-time Scottish students is we're the only creative writing MA north of the border to offer any funded places [although those places are strictly limited].

Our course is unique in many ways. We don't believe in workshops or peer review as a teaching tool. Instead we offer professional editorial feedback, delivered in a masterclass style. This is supported with at least ten hours of one-to-one mentoring support, and voluminous written feedback is given on formally assessed student work.

Poetry is not an option on our course. Instead we focus on popular genres [crime, horror, science fiction, fantasy, creative non-fiction], commercial storytelling media [graphic novels, screenwriting] and experimental fiction. We train writers for a career, not how to fill in grant application forms.

Sound like we might be the course for you? Then click the full-time or part-time links at the top, right-hand side of this page. Join us!

[BarBelle picture © Steven Cook, used by kind permission]

Star Wars promo for MA course

This Star Wars style promo was created as a fun way of promoting the MA Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University. May the course be with you - always! [Apologies to anyone reading this on an iPad or iPhone, but we can't get this video to work on your devices - yet!]

Former MA students form Illicit Ink

Illicit Ink is another innovation that's grown out of the MA Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University. It runs themed prose reading nights at Cabaret Voltaire's Speakeasy venue on the Cowgate in central Edinburgh. The Illicit Ink team work with and support authors ahead of events, encouraging fun and risk-taking in both stories and performances. Bizarre experiements and collaborations are welcome.

Having sprung from the Edinburgh Napier MA, the team at Illicit Ink have a soft spot for supporting writing students from any programme. Recent events include horror-themed Monsters Ink in October, and a murder mystery evening  in July. Next up is Time Will Tell on Sunday December 4th. If you want to read with Illicit Ink, click here. Read more about Illicit Ink by clicking the blogroll link at right.

Graphic Scotland - championing innovative comics, grassroots writers and artists

Graphic Scotland is an exciting new venture being developed by a graduating student from Edinburgh Napier's Creative Writing MA [with plenty of help from others]. Ariadne Cass-Maran was inspired to set up Graphic Scotland after taking our course module on writing for graphic fiction. [This post-graduate module is believed to be unique to Edinburgh Napier's course, and is taught by ex-2000AD editor David Bishop.]

Graphic Scotland aims to promote the best of Scottish graphic fiction by showcasing grassroots writers and artists. Another of its core aims is broadening appreciation of this exciting narrative medium to a wider, more diverse audience. The days when comics only meant superheroes or The Beano are long gone! To help you keep an eye on Graphic Scotland, we've added it to our blogroll on the right.