Practice in the original composition of poetry supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Criticism by practicing writers and talented peers encourages the student’s growth as both creator and reader of literature.
Creative Writing Courses
Creative Writing
The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers a perspective on the place of literature among the liberal arts. Criticism by practicing writers and talented peers encourages the student's growth as both creator and reader of literature.
Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format.
This fiction workshop will look at the ways writers learn from and pay tribute to one another - sometimes intentionally and explicitly, other times tacitly, perhaps even unconsciously.
This is a multi-genre writing class that explores daily creative practice. This semester, you'll be challenged to push your creative limits and to take risks in your work.
The Writers' Room will replicate the fast-paced environment of a Hollywood writers room. Students will be assigned to a writing team and will pen two complete scripts with their fellow writers.
Poets should come to this class ready to move, yell, play, and discover. Writing and performing our way towards a deeper understanding of ourselves as spoken word poets, we will collaboratively work our way towards a final public performance and, hopefully, the tools to better move the crowds we face, which are the tools to change the world one poem at a time.
Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the places of literature among the liberal arts.
Advanced practice in the original composition of fiction for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the place of literature among the liberal arts.
Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format.
The focus of this course will be on Italian women writers from the early 20th century to the present day. We will work with a mix of voices from the established canon, such as Grazia Deledda and Natalia Ginzburg, and those emerging in more recent years and who write from a culturally and linguistically hybrid perspective, such as Igiaba Scego and Ornella Vorpsi.
In Vital Signs we will explore narratives of the body, beginning by reading material illustrative of a wide-range of expression and experience while working toward finding language for our individual physical and emotional experience.
A reading-intensive advanced fiction workshop dedicated to a close reading of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, an indefinable masterpiece of Italian literature which combines autobiographical and fictional elements, calling into question the equivocal relationship between truth and invention.
Every life delivers a story (or three) worth telling well. This workshop rehearses the writing and performance skills necessary to remake the raw material drawn from lived experience into compelling autobiographical storytelling. As we engage the thematic focus of "Princeton, History and Me," we will explore autobiographical storytelling as both a practice and a process as we also evince (and confront) the personal, moral, ethical and artistic dimensions of the stories we choose to tell about ourselves, about Princeton, and the stories that remain to be told about both.
This course will introduce students to the foundational principles and techniques of screenwriting, taking into account the practical considerations of film production. Questions of thematic cohesiveness, plot construction, logical cause and effect, character behavior, dialogue, genre consistency and pace will be explored as students gain confidence in the form by completing a number of short screenplays.
This class will use fairytales, films, games and new media to illustrate universal script principles while creating a rich interdisciplinary lens to explore the innovative intersection of narrative screenwriting, science and technology.
In this course, which is both a creative writing course and a literature course, students will study canonical French-language essays and newer forms of essayistic production (the essay film, photo essay, blog, and podcast) and will use these texts as models for their own writing.
This workshop class will introduce students to the fundamental elements of developing and writing a TV series in the current "golden age of television." Students will watch television pilots, read pilot episodes and engage in in-depth discussions about story, series engine, season arcs, character, structure, tone and dialogue, which will be applied to their work.
Taught by Bridget Kearney (Lake Street Dive) and Paul Muldoon (Rogue Oliphant) with class visits from guest singer/songwriters and music critics, this course is an introduction to the art of writing words for music, an art at the core of our literary tradition from the Beowulf poet through Lord Byron and Bessie Smith to Bob Dylan and the Notorious B.I.G. Composers, writers and performers will have the opportunity to work in small songwriting teams to respond to such emotionally charged themes as Gratitude, Loss, Protest, Desire, Joyousness, Remorse, and Defiance.