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Creative Writing
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Course

Course

At Creative Writing, you will be come a creative, enquiring writer who works across disciplines and media. On this writing course, you will find ambitious and talented creators who are able to create a classic text, but you will also develop new forms that do not yet exist or link in with the latest developments.

What will you learn on the Creative Writing course?

You will learn to write better, and much more than that. You will discover the ways in which you can write and how you can express yourself in text. You will be taught about the different media that exist and how you can use them to your advantage. There will be a lot of room to experiment and to create. During the course, you will revise texts you created previously with the help of new skills, or recast them in a new form.

You will be taught subjects from the following learning pathways:

  • Transmedia storytelling
  • Poetry & performance
  • Prose (fiction/non-fiction/script/editing)
  • Curatorship
  • Theory

Course structure

  • In the first year, you will discover how to write prose, poetry and non-fiction. You will learn how to think and talk about writing, how to edit, how to recite and what media are available to apply your text or idea to. In addition, you will be taught theoretical and philosophical subjects, you will do a lot of reading, discuss texts, learn to give each other feedback and above all create a lot yourself.

    You will start the first year with approximately thirty other students, but the group will regularly be split up to make it easier to give each other feedback and attention.

  • In the second year, the subjects you familiarised yourself with in the previous year are explored in more depth. You will also make an initial choice between different subjects. You will choose at least one of the five majors:

    • Prose: autobiographical fiction
    • Prose: non-autobiographical fiction
    • Poetry
    • Transmedia
    • Stage

    There are also subsidiary subjects and electives which you choose in the second year.

  • In the second half of the course, you will choose your own direction. You will initiate your own projects (for example, a manifesto, research, a podcast, a series of poems) and look for an internship that matches your interests and ambitions. These projects and internships will be related to the profession you want to pursue after graduation and the place you aspire to in the literary world.

    Third year

    The Creative Writing Lab is an important part of the third year. Together with your fellow students, you will choose a theme and shape the content of the block yourself with guest lecturers and literature that you read together. In addition, you will also do an individual project within the joint lab. During this year, you will go into more depth and choose your own direction. You will identify the position you want to achieve within the literary profession.

    In the third year, you will do an internship with a company that matches the profile of the course – for example, a publisher, a literary festival, television or radio, a maker, a podcast, a magazine, a newspaper or a literature prize. Your internship may be editorial or related to promotion or production. In this way, you can put your literary knowledge and skills to use in a professional practice. You will develop content for that organisation and also devise new forms of information transfer.

    Fourth year

    After conducting research and writing a dissertation and a graduation thesis, you will graduate in the fourth year. Not only will you then be a graduate writer, you will also have the skills of an editor who can assess and improve other people's texts. You will have had your first experience of teaching. You will also be able to use literary resources in different ways.

    The graduation project in the fourth year is the work with which you will present yourself to the outside world and the professional field. It will comprise short stories, small collections, poetry or other work that brings out your own voice and shows what you are capable of.

    Your final work will be presented at the ArtEZ finals. Take a look at the site and visit the presentations if you are considering taking this course. Through the narratives, you will see what has captured our students' imaginations and get an impression of their work as they reach graduation.

    There are Creative Writing alumni working as independent writers, teaching, working within the cultural sector, as programmers for theatres, festivals and events, or combining multiple roles within their professional practice.  As a graduate, you may use the title Bachelor of Arts.

Projects

During the project weeks, you can work continuously on a project with fellow students or across disciplines. In addition, there are travel weeks during which you will travel with fellow students from your year, make new work during the trip and come into contact with writing courses or literary organisations in Europe with which Creative Writing has contacts.

  • Creative Writing plays an important role during the Nieuwe Types literature festival in Arnhem. Alongside the presentation of students' graduation work, you and your fellow students will provide programme elements and workshops.

  • The Creative Writing course works closely with De Nieuwe Oost production house. For example, students organise evenings in Theater aan de Rijn and are involved in programme elements of the Wintertuin Festival in Nijmegen.

  • Part of the course is learning to make programmes. You will already practise this during the course by developing and organising programme elements for various festivals in the Netherlands (including non-literary festivals) and for example the ArtEZ finals.

Masterclasses

The lecturers at Creative Writing are themselves active in the literary world. They regularly invite guest lecturers such as prose writers, poets and journalists to be part of their classes in order to reveal more about specific aspects of life as professionals in literature.

Course supervision

An important part of the course is that you learn to reflect on yourself and that you learn how to give feedback on others and help each other in your process. In the subject Process & Research, you will get help on how to do this. You will also learn how to set up a suitable working environment for yourself so that during your course, you undergo a process that will make you a better writer and maker. You can always talk to a lecturer about any questions and issues related to this process and research.

Facilities

The Creative Writing course has its own space for students working on their research lab, enabling them to continue working on their projects without interruption.

Studying in Arnhem

You can find more information about studying in Arnhem here.