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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
    • Audio
    • 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

     

    In your fourth year, you graduate with the following components: an artistic research project, a final work, and a start-up. By that time, you are not only a graduate writer but have also gained experience in skills relevant to other professional practices in the literary field, such as editing, teaching, and programme making.
    Your graduation work in the fourth year is the work with which you present yourself to the outside world and the professional field. These are often short stories, poetry collections, performances, documentaries, or other works that express your own voice and demonstrate what you are capable of.

    The final works can be found at ArtEZ finals. Take a look at the website and visit the presentations if you are considering this programme. Through these stories, you’ll discover what our students are working on and what their final works look like.

Project weeks

During the project weeks, you can work continuously on a project. In addition to regular project weeks, there are exchanges that focus on (interdisciplinary) collaboration — for example, ArtEZ-wide projects and exchanges with Comic Design and Illustration Design. There are also travel weeks, usually to Berlin and Madrid, during which you create new work and connect with writing programmes or literary organisations elsewhere in Europe.

  • 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.