Science fiction creative writing programs

See how other students and parents are navigating high school, college, and the college admissions process. Ask questions; get answers. How to Get a Perfect , by a Perfect Scorer. Score on SAT Math. Score on SAT Reading. Score on SAT Writing. What ACT target score should you be aiming for?

How to Get a Perfect 4. How to Write an Amazing College Essay. A Comprehensive Guide. Choose Your Test. In ranking the schools, I considered five major criteria: 1: MFA Ranking —If a school has a great graduate creative writing program, it means you'll be taught by those same professors and the excellent graduate students they attract.

Schools with strong MFA programs are also more likely to have solid alumni networks and internship opportunities. However, many schools with great undergrad programs do not offer MFAs, in which case I simply focused on the other four options.

Certainly it's less important than what kind of education you'll actually get, but having a brand-name degree so to speak can be helpful.

Louis Washington University has an excellent creative writing MFA program, lots of super specific class options, and a number of scholarships specifically earmarked for creative writing students. Bonus School: New York University I didn't include NYU in the main list because it doesn't have a dedicated creative writing major, but it's a great school for aspiring writers nonetheless, offering one of the most impressive creative writing faculties in the country and all the benefits of a Manhattan location.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when looking at creative writing programs to help you determine the best school for you: Does It Have Courses You're Interested In? Who Will Be Teaching You? What Are the Alumni Doing Now? What About the Rest of the School? What's Next? Alex Heimbach. About the Author. Search the Blog Search. Fantasy and science fiction are genres of setting, first and foremost, Fowler asserts. Karen Joy Fowler offered more advice for those of us who work in these genres.

Do not promote stereotypes and prejudice. And, possibly most importantly, Fowler urges us to be creative. The future of fantasy and science fiction needs more imagination and fewer world-weary immortals.

How are these very different effects and affects achieved? What are their benefits to the student author? What pitfalls, perceived or otherwise, attend the allure of each?

What is the relationship of humor to earnestness, and of seriousness to irony? Is the absence of irony really the same thing as earnestness? Does the absence of earnestness somehow necessitate irony? With an eye toward technique, we will attempt to answer these and further questions by time spent among the words of those who fall along, though often refuse to stay put on, the earnest-ironic continuum.

Students will be expected to write three stories or essays throughout the semester, exploring for themselves this treacherous but eminently skiable slope.

A critic blends the subjective and objective in complex ways. A critic must know the history of an artwork, its past, while placing it on the contemporary landscape and contemplating its future. A single essay will analyze, argue, describe, reflect, and interpret.

And, since examining a work of art also means examining oneself, the task includes a willingness to probe one's own assumptions. The best critics are engaged in a conversation -- a dialogue, a debate -- with changing standards of taste, with their audience, with their own convictions and emotions.

The best criticism is part of a larger cultural conversation. It spurs readers to ask questions rather than accept answers about art and society.

We will read essays that consider six art forms: literature; film; music classical, jazz and popular ; theatre and performance; visual art; and dance.

At the term's end, students will consider essays that examine cultural boundaries and divisions: the negotiations between popular and high art; the aesthetic of cruelty; the post-modern blurring of and between artist, critic and fan. Nonfiction Seminar: The Lyric Essay WRIT W 3 pts While nonfiction is perhaps known for its allegiance to facts and logic in the stalwart essay form, the genre conducts its own experiments, often grouped under the term "lyric essays.

Lyric essayists blend a passion for the actual with innovative forms, listening deeply to the demands of each new subject. In this course, students will map the terrain of the lyric essay, work in which writers revise nonfiction traditions such as: coherent narrative or rhetorical arcs; an identifiable, transparent, or stable narrator; and the familiar categories of memoir, personal essay, travel writing, and argument.

The course will be conducted seminar style, with close reading, lecture, and classroom discussion. They will also complete writing exercises and their own lyric essay s , one of which we will discuss as a class. Their final project will be a collection of their creative work accompanied by an essay discussing their choices. Department approval NOT needed. Nonfiction Seminar: Literature Without Writing WRIT W 3 pts The investigative dialogue is among the oldest forms of literature, and it remains one of the most egalitarian and relevant to life.

It's simple - comment and response, question and answer - and can be produced by artists, scientists, lunatics, athletes, criminals, and any other human being, from Plato to Oprah Winfrey. The interview is a kind of performative literature, documenting a time, place, mood, and an extemporaneous exchange.

Transcription transforms the off-the-cuff spoken word into permanent, written text, from ear to page, an art form of capturing rather than imagining. Conversational language is also essential to the art of fiction, showing through telling, or explaining instead of organizing our life into this-then-that narratives. Modernism was the age of the interior monologue but the internal debate might be a form more reflective of the 21st century mind.

This course will include readings of psychoanalytic sessions, legal court transcripts, celebrity chats, Zen koan talks, philosophical dialogues, podcasts, television talk shows, and fictional interviews.

Students will conduct real interviews and write fictional ones. They will transcribe, listen, and hear literature in the artless, everyday discussion. Prerequisite No prerequisites required. When she's conducting immersion journalism, she lives with her sources, tries to blend with them. Long-form narrative reporting requires her to ask difficult questions, born from exhaustive research and critical observation.

The memoirist reports from the prism of her own experience, casting herself as a character, making meaning of interviews through the fault lines of memory. The biographer is a ventriloquist, often embodying the purpose or quest of another person, and pulling voices and stories from hints and scraps. In this seminar, students will explore the various kinds of literary reporting inherent to various nonfiction literary forms, unearthing the strategies writers can use to elicit powerful interviews, background stories and ultimately, what it means to author another person's "truth," and discuss the delicate terrains of race, gender and political misunderstanding, interrogating our own preconceptions.

Students will have the opportunity to do some reporting on their own, and will write two short papers. Nonfiction Seminar: Science And Sensibility WRIT W 3 pts Writing about the natural world is one of the world's oldest literary traditions and the site of some of today's most daring literary experiments.

Known loosely as "science writing" this tradition can be traced through texts in myriad and overlapping genres, including poetry, explorer's notebooks, essays, memoirs, art books, and science journalism. Taken together, these divers texts reveal a rich literary tradition in which the writer's sensibility and worldview are paramount to an investigation of the known and unknown.

In this course, we will consider a wide range of texts in order to map this tradition. We will question what it means to use science as metaphor, explore how to write about science with rigor and commitment to scientific truth, and interrogate the fiction of objectivity. They may never write a second, but in order to be called novelists there always has to be a first.

As a result the first novel is a very special animal. Every kind of writer must attempt one and despite vast differences in genre or style there are often many similarities between them.

In fact, one of the surest similarities are the flaws in each book. Before each writer becomes an expert at his or her method, his or her style, there is room for experimentation and unsuccessful attempts. These "failures" are often much more illuminating for students than the successes of later books.

First novels contain the energy of youth, but often lack the precision that comes with maturity. By examining a series of first novels students will learn to identify common craft elements of first novels and how to employ them to great effect in their own writing. Must a story or a novel have one? When is a plot a plot and not just a series of random events, connected by too much willfulness on the part of the author?

How much should coincidence come to bear when designing a plot? Should an overreliance on plot deem a work to be classified as "genre writing" rather than a work of literature?

And how, within this context, does one understand F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous claim that "character is plot, plot is character"?

This class will attempt to answer these questions by examining the mechanics of plot, and how a machine can become an art form. The syllabus will include a variety of fictional works ranging from the murder mystery to the so-called plotless novel. In-class discussions and writing assignments will focus on the strategies these different novels and stories deploy as a way to understand structure, sustain dramatic irony, and make use of dramatic tension.

Readings may also include essays on plot by writers such as E. Fiction Seminar: The Craft Of Writing Dialogue WRIT W 3 pts Whether texting, chatting, conversing, speechifying, recounting, confiding, gossiping, tweeting, praying, interviewing, exhorting, pitching, scheming, lecturing, nagging or begging, humans love to talk, and readers love narratives that contain dialogue. Good dialogue makes characters and scenes feel real and alive. Great dialogue reveals characters' fears, desires and quirks, forwards the narrative's plot and dramatic tension, and often contains subtext.

In this course, we'll read different kinds of novels and stories -- from noir to horror to sci-fi to realistice drama to comic romp -- that implement various types of dialogue effectively, and we'll study how to do it.

We'll read essays by masters that explain techniques for writing great dialogue, and we'll practice writing different styles of dialogue ourselves. Coursework will consist of reading, in-class exercises, and two short creative assignments.

Departmental approval NOT required. But what is a character, and what constitutes a supposedly good or believable one? Should characters be like people we know, and if so, how exactly do we create written versions of people? This class will examine characters in all sorts of writing, historical and contemporary, with an eye toward understanding just how characters are created in fiction, and how they come to seem real to us. We'll read stories and novels; we may also look at essays and biographical writing to analyze where the traces of personhood reside.

We'll also explore the way in which these same techniques of writing allow us to personify entities that lack traditional personhood, such as animals, computers, and other nonhuman characters. Does personhood precede narrative, or is it something we bestow on others by allowing them to tell their story or by telling a story of our own creation on their behalf? Weekly critical and creative exercises will intersect with and expand on the readings and discussions.

Does it simply mean that white folks or men or heterosexuals or Americans don't listen to you very much? This is a reductive way of thinking that limits both minorities and majorities.

In this seminar we'll read work that challenges our received notions about "the edge" and who's in it. We'll read with an eye toward issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality but we'll also think about marginalization in terms of genre, geography, and even personal politics. Our goal won't be to categorize and quantify hardships, but to appreciate some great--though overlooked--writing. And, finally, to try and understand how these talented artists wrote well.

During the semester students will write short fiction inspired by the work they read and the craft issues discussed in class. We will excavate our abandoned work-- subjecting it to maneuvers ranging from the light in touch to the radical; visiting techniques appropriate for the isolation chamber, as well as the collaborative.

And we will examine how poets throughout the ages have approached revision -- including Lowell's changing of words into their opposites; Auden's revisions of his published work from the standpoint of maturity; Plath's 'next poem as revision' technique.

The idea of the class borrows from the world's current trash predicament: how to cut our waste; re-use creatively what we have already produced; make something new and useful of our junk. In this seminar, we will look seriously at the object, and think through the forms, processes, and lives of artists as models and inspiration for our own nonfiction pieces.

The writers we will be reading play with genre, style, form, and voice in innovative ways, like the art and artists they are writing to, occasionally using images in their texts or turning their own books and essays into art objects and playful experiments. An indefinite list of these writers: W. The class aims to stimulate and inspire your own practice through reading and seeing, critically and ecstatically.

You will write midterm and final critical responses, as well as submit creative texts every week that respond to the reading, culminating in a final literary work that will be an extension of one of your shorter imitative pieces.

But how do those pesky facts figure in? Additional specialties include literature for children and adolescents, and cross-genre blends like romantic suspense or young adult mysteries. Students attend two week-long, on-campus residencies each year to master the core elements of fiction writing and effective marketing and to gain inspiration from faculty mentors and special guests, all published authors in genre fiction. Established authors mentor students one-on-one as they work toward completing a market-ready manuscript from home.