Creatively is Field Studio’s core foundation course for academics in the humanities and social sciences who are new to creative writing and would like to learn how to more effectively and vividly express themselves through pedagogy and mentorship. If you’d like to clearly make and refine your arguments and enact worldbuilding in books, articles and essays, and receive personal, tailored feedback from experienced faculty, this course is for you.
Class Purpose
In Creatively you will learn––and practice––the foundational tools of creative writing as we study and discuss as a group the work of a wide range of academic writers. You will study the building blocks of writing craft, learning how to hold attention and animate ideas so that they stick with the reader and matter over time while writing rigorous, scholarly enquiries.
What you will learn
This course provides you with
- The ability to render scenes with vivid details, manoeuvring the reader through time and space while maintaining their attention
- Understanding how to both use exposition with effective precision, and recognise when it is holding the writing back
- The techniques needed to pace the writing in order to build narrative momentum and sustain it throughout a chapter and book
- The tools to help you deploy arguments and engage theory.
How it will be taught
This six-week course meets four times, for three hours each session, and is a combination of live pedagogy and writing mentorship. The editorial feedback and meetings with a faculty member will take place over the two non-teaching weeks.
We will study excerpts from books that are at the core of Field Studio’s teaching, work by authors such as Michael Taussig, Valeria Luiselli, João Biehl, and others, learning from them the breadth of what’s possible vibrant and theoretically-robust academic writing.
The class combines three modes of learning each week:
- Craft lessons – close study of the language, voice, and craft tools, assessing their possibilities for narrative and the choices behind them
- Writing exercises – hands-on practice applying craft techniques to your own material
- Feedback – structured and in-depth response (written or oral) to your writing from the instructor
What you will get
At the end of the six weeks, you will have a clear understanding of how to use the tools in the creative writing toolkit to articulate your research clearly, and with voice. You will have learned how to incorporate details and description to communicate lucid and robust ideas, use exposition in spare yet effective ways, and have had extensive time with your instructor to understand how your writing might move to finished drafts.