Creative Writing

The Creative Writing Department at SPCPA provides a rigorous, well rounded writing education that balances imagination and artistic voice with dedicated study of craft. Students work with teaching artists and writers from varied professional and creative backgrounds, gaining exposure to different genres, perspectives, processes, and pathways within the literary arts.

Students learn that writing is both creative expression and disciplined practice.Through close reading, writing, workshop, critique, revision, and collaboration, they develop the technical skills necessary to communicate with clarity, originality, and purpose while discovering their own voices as writers.

Fiction
Students explore the craft of storytelling through character, dialogue, point of view, setting, conflict, structure, pacing, imagery, and theme. Through exercises, short form work, and longer projects, students move from generating ideas to developing, workshopping, revising, and completing original fiction.

Non-Fiction
Students explore the art of telling true stories through personal essays, memoir, profiles, literary journalism, and other forms of creative nonfiction. Emphasis is placed on observation, research, narrative structure, voice, imagery, point of view, and thoughtful revision.

Poetry
Students investigate poetry as both an expressive art form and a highly intentional use of language. Through the study of form, imagery, sound, rhythm, figurative language, structure, and voice, students experiment with a range of poetic approaches while developing and revising an original body of work.

The Working Artist
Students explore what it means to build a life and career around writing. The course introduces publishing, literary journals, submissions, freelance opportunities, professional communication, portfolio development, and other pathways available to working writers. Students learn how to prepare and present their work while beginning to see themselves as emerging professionals within the literary arts.

Screenwriting

Students explore the craft of writing for the screen through character, dialogue, conflict, visual storytelling, structure, pacing, and screenplay format. Students learn to think like both writers and filmmakers, developing stories that communicate through action, image, sound, and dialogue. Through writing exercises, script analysis, workshop, and revision, students develop original screenplays while learning the technical conventions of the form. Collaborative opportunities with filmmaking students allow writers to experience how a script evolves from the page to production and to see how creative choices in performance, directing, and filmmaking shape the final story.

Creative Writing Faculty