Creative Writing (BFA)

Affiliation: School of Arts & Letters

Creative Writing majors gain a strong understanding of how writers read and practice their craft. Students cultivate their abilities to serve as fully-engaged first readers of each other’s work, supporting, interrogating, and celebrating individual efforts. They produce original creative work across genres (fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, drama, screen writing), exploring a wide range of approaches, challenging habits of both content and form. They practice a wide range of revision strategies across multiple drafts of creative work, to make their work the best it can be, and to cultivate understanding of revision as a crucial part of the writing process. Students learn how to engage with the greater writing world through submitting their work to literary journals and contests, and gain understanding of digital literary citizenship, including how to access and participate in the literary/writing world online. Through attendance at our readings and senior seminar presentations, students cultivate an awareness about how writers present their work, and how they can present themselves to wider audiences outside Truman.

Students may not earn both a BFA Creative Writing and a BA English degree.

CREATIVE WRITING COMMUNICATION

All BFA majors in Creative Writing will develop their skills as speakers and writers. Our Writing Enhanced courses require students to generate original creative work across numerous literary genres, progressing through successive stages of drafting and revising their work by receiving and responding to formative feedback from both faculty and peers. Our workshop classes challenge students to not only hone their critical faculties, but also develop their abilities to effectively and persuasively articulate their feedback, tailoring their responses to each writer in the room across a wide range of development levels, aesthetic projects, authorial agendas, and target audiences. This commitment to effective speaking and writing culminates in our Capstone course, where students give a public reading of their creative work at the English Senior Seminar Conference, framing their efforts for a wider audience, and thoughtfully fielding questions about their choices as developing readers, writers, and speakers.

DEGREE REQUIREMENTS: