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Creative Writing Programme: Postgraduate Handbook, 2011-12
Introduction to the MA & PHD Programmes
Welcome to the Lancaster University postgraduate Creative Writing Programme - one of the longest established and most prestigious writing programmes in the UK.
The Creative Writing Programme forms an integral part of the larger Department of English & Creative Writing and is located in County College for most teaching and administrative purposes.
The MA by research takes three forms, all of which share common academic and creative objectives and lead to identical assessment portfolios: the campus MA, full-time; the campus MA, part-time; the distance learning MA (DLMA), part-time. Places are available on each model every year.
The ethos of these courses is as follows: only students who have strong portfolio ideas to develop will be recruited; the course is student-centred and has no formal curriculum, though tutors will tackle formal issues arising from student submissions; students are expected to undertake research training provided online; students will be expected to exhibit a high degree of autonomy; each student will maintain an online Writing Journal, recording their progress on the course; each student will have a termly personal tutorial which will be recorded in the Writing Journal.
The Department also offers a taught MA in Literary Studies. This programme provides modules in poetry and fiction writing that can be taken in conjunction with contemporary literary studies modules in English
The PhD in creative writing can be undertaken either as a campus-based student or as a distance learning student; in either case, you can study full or part time. All models of doctoral study involve close supervision by one or more expert supervisors.
The Creative Writing courses have strong international links and are connected to a number of research projects in the UK and overseas. Our student community at both MA and PhD level is international and markedly diverse. Transcultural interactions have therefore become a feature of Creative Writing study for some students at Lancaster. Details of these links and projects can be found on our website and that of the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research.
This handbook contains all the procedural and academic information about each form of delivery and you should read it carefully before embarking on your programme of study. Key terms have been written in bold type for your convenience. Students already enrolled on the MA should use this handbook for reference throughout their course. Other information can be obtained from your tutors or the Course Officer, Lyn Kellett, Department of English and Creative Writing, County College, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YD.
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Academic and Administrative Staff
Teaching Staff
Diran Adebayo (Tutor, DLMA)
Jenn Ashworth (Lecturer)
Sarah Corbett (Tutor, DLMA)
Jane Draycott (Tutor, DLMA)
Paul Farley (Campus MA Convenor)
Kate Horsley (Teaching Fellow)
Lee Horsley (co-Covenor DLMA)
George Green (Director PhD programme, co-Convenor DLMA, Term 1)
Sara Maitland (Tutor, DLMA)
Brian McCabe (Tutor, DLMA)
Cath Nichols (Part-time Tutor)
Connor O’Callaghan (Tutor, DLMA)
Graham Mort (co-Convenor DLMA, Terms 2 and 3)
Saleel Nurbhai (Part-time Tutor)
Tom Pow (Tutor, DLMA)
Jayne Steel (Lecturer)
Michelene Wandor (Tutor, DLMA)
Visiting Lecturers
Emeritus Professor David Craig
External Examiner
Professor Jean Sprackland
Course Officer for Creative Writing
Lyn Kellett (l.kellett@lancaster.ac.uk) Ext. 94169
County B114
For all preliminary and administrative enquiries about the MA or PhD, contact Lyn Kellett: Telephone: 01524 594169 Email: l.kellett@lancaster.ac.uk
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Directors and Course Convenors
Paul Farley is convenor of the campus MA in Creative Writing and has direct responsibility for the course.
Lee Horsley, George Green and Graham Mort co-convene the distance learning MA in Creative Writing and have joint responsibility for this area of study.
George Green is director the PhD programme in Creative Writing both on campus and by distance learning.
The Postgraduate Secretary has special responsibility for graduate students and can help with general queries on all matters relating to postgraduate study; she should be the first port of call for all postgraduate enquiries from enrolled students.
Facilities
Research students who are employed as Teaching Fellows or Teaching Assistants will also have access to designated office space. Lancaster provides over 1000 student-accessible computers, software for student ’s own laptops, and off-campus access through the VPN. For further information see: http://www.postgraduate.lancs.ac.uk/Studying/Pages/Facilities.aspx
The Library
You must register with the library before you can use its facilities. This should be done at the same time as you officially register with the University during Intro Week. Distance Learning MA students may, if they wish, apply for Library cards (contact l.kellett@lancaster.ac.uk), but there are also extensive electronic resources available online - databases, e-Journals and e-Books. As a Lancaster student, you are able to access these electronic resources from anywhere in the world via MetaLib. For a full online summary of Lancaster's substantial online Library resources, go to http://lib-metalib.lancs.ac.uk/
If you would like to make any recommendations for the library holdings, contact Brian Baker (the Department’s library representative) who will make the order for you. Interlending and Document Supply (IDS) helps Lancaster University readers access information resources not available in our library. Postgraduates have a limit of 10 orders per academic year; additional requests may be permitted (please contact your Subject Librarian, Louise Tripp).
Postgraduate Activities & Social events
It is our hope that students on our on-campus MA and PhD Creative Writing programmes will get to know one another and socialise informally. A range of formal research presentations and research training events take place in the Department, primarily designed for English postgraduates, but also of interest to Creative Writing students. There are also a number of literary and social events, including Literature Live performances (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/events/lit_live.htm) and readings by visiting speakers. Creative Writing students give readings each term in ‘the Salon’ (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/events/salon.html).
Creative Writing postgraduates should be aware of the extensive seminar/visiting speaker programmes and conferences provided by the Faculty Research Institutes. See in particular the listings under The Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/centres/gws/people.htm), The Literacy Research Centre (http://www.literacy.lancs.ac.uk/) and the Centre for Trancultural Writing and Research (http://www.transculturalwriting.com/). These Centres regularly invite speakers of national and international renown to come to Lancaster and anyone with an interest in gender, literature, language and contemporary culture will be well served. Please contact them if you wish to be put on their mailing lists.
Students are also urged to support the Lancaster Literature Festival in Weeks 1-2 of the Michaelmas Term (15th-21st October).
Creative Writing Lectures
A series of lectures is offered each year on the undergraduate Creative Writing Programme. Many of these lectures will be of interest to postgraduates since they touch upon the fundamentals of creative process. A full list of these lectures can be found in the Undergraduate Handbook (see links on our webpage: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/undergrad/index.php)
Research Training
Online Research methods
A system of online research methodology training is available to students on the Department website. All new MA and PhD students are expected to undertake these modules under the guidance of their tutors and supervisors. Research training is a requirement of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and associated funding bodies. The six basic modules are all contained in the Postgraduate Portal: see the above menu (the modules are linked from: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/pg_portal/rtm_index.html).
Online Work-in-Progress
For Creative Writing PhD students, their most regular discussions with other creative writers will occur in our online Work-in-Progress sessions: these virtual workshops are scheduled each term, with students reading and responding to one another’s work in forum groups of 3 to 5 students.
Departmental Seminar Series
This seminar series consists of invited speakers who are usually addressing a similar topic. In 2010/11, we have many interesting speakers lined up both from within the Department and from elsewhere. Seminars will normally be held weekly on Wednesday afternoons at 5.00 pm and postgraduate students are strongly recommended to attend.
Visiting Agents/Publishers
Each year, agents and publishers visit both the campus MA and the Distance Learning MA Summer School to give presentations on the publishing industry and to answer questions about how writers, agents and publishers interact.
The Creative Writing Campus MA: Full and Part-Time
Full-time campus MA students follow an academic programme spanning three 10-week terms from October to July. You can expect to be a member of a group of 10-14 students. Two three-hour long seminars are held for on average six weeks each term. At the last week of each term personal tutorials replace seminars. A record of these tutorials is maintained in your Writing Journal and reviewed by a tutor to monitor progress. All academic staff are involved in teaching on the MA, providing expertise in a wide-range of literary genres. However, research leave granted to staff members means that you may not be taught by all tutors in any one year of study.
Part-time campus MA students follow exactly the same programme, but meet only once per week as part of a mixed seminar group. Seminars take place over a period of two years, spanning six academic terms.
The programme at Lancaster is entirely student-centred and seminars involve the close critiquing of student work. No formal programme of teaching to specific objectives is initiated; instead we aim to respond to individual needs and the needs of each workshop group as they emerge.
The course is designed to develop the individual writer’s creative potential within a rigorous critical framework and with reference to the publishing industry. Peer support is a vital aspect of the course and our requirement is that all work submitted to a seminar is read closely and responded to by all participants. This preparation usually takes one-and-a-half to two hours per seminar.
From time to time, tutors may run specialized workshops in response to the ideas developing within a seminar group. Writers, Literary agents and publishers are invited to the course to discuss professional aspects of writing and publishing.
Students attending either form of campus MA may attend creative writing undergraduate lectures. A programme of these can be obtained from the course officer, Lyn Kellett.
In the Michaelmas term a short residential course (Monday to Saturday) is offered to all campus MA students. In 2011 the campus residential will be held at Ty Newyyd from Monday 14th November to Saturday 19TH November 2011. The course will provide time to write and relax as well as writing workshops and readings by you and your tutors. Your MA fee includes the cost of the course and all food and accommodation. The fee we charge represents a much reduced percentage of the commercial cost of such a course. We do, however, ask you to make your own transport arrangements to and from the centre. A letter will be sent out at the start of the Michaelmas term with a more detailed schedule and special dietary information will be requested from you.
The Writing Journal
The LUVLE site provides you with an electronic Writing Journal, in which we ask you to record your progress on the course. The entries should be as follows:
Michaelmas Term
Project Outline
Brief Reports on Research Training Modules 1-5
Progress Report
Tutor’s Response
Lent Term
Progress Report
Tutor’s Response
Summer Term
Progress report
Portfolio Proposal
Tutor’s response
It’s important to use clear headings for those entries: Project Outline, Research Training 1: Postgraduate E-learning, Research Training 2: Understanding the Research context etc.
At the end of each term a tutor will read and comment on your progress report. At the end of the summer term a tutor will address and respond to your assessment portfolio proposal. You should not expect tutors to have read all your work during the course.
Interviews can be requested at other times, but please bear in mind that tutors on the campus MA are extremely busy and that exceptional circumstances need to prevail in such cases.
Framework of Study and Submission of Work to Campus MA Workshops
Study at MA level by research requires a high degree of autonomy from students. The programme of workshops led by tutors provides a framework for development, but in many ways you will be in charge of your own learning. You will also be a member of a group or community of writers, which functions as a form of mutual support. Direct contact with members of staff forms only part of the developmental process; contact with your fellow writers is of equal importance, both face-to-face and through the LUVLE network.
Each student on the campus MA will meet with a tutor each term for a personal tutorial and this will be recorded in the online Writing Journal. More information relating to termly tutorials will appear in the online facility.
Tutors may occasionally offer stimulus workshops and some workshops will be directed by visiting writers, but the majority of the campus MA sessions will involve the presentation and critiquing of students’ writing. Workshops are held on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the Michaelmas, Lent and Summer Terms. Seminars on Tuesdays will begin at 10.00am and end at 1.00pm. Seminars on Thursdays will begin at 10.00am and end at 1.00pm.
Your tutor will guide the sessions, but you should have read your fellow students’ work carefully and be prepared to participate in the workshops, offering thoughtful criticism in a supportive way. Criticism in this context involves celebration of good writing as well as identification of writing that seems to fall short of its author’s ambition for it. Your final MA portfolio will include a piece of self-critical reflective writing (self-critique) that may make reference to the work of fellow students as well as your own writing and other literary or theoretical work. Your Writing Journal will be a source of key points for this piece of self-critical writing.
Campus MA tutorial groups normally have around 12 students. This has implications for the number of students submitting work each week and for the amount of work that should be submitted. A workshop is not intended to serve an editorial function and not every word you have written needs to pass through it. A workshop is a creative forum in which ideas about writing can be tested and extended in relation to actual texts. So be prepared to experiment, sharing in this process and extrapolating from it.
It’s always difficult to quantify creative work, so the following guidelines for workshop submissions are approximate:
• All work should be 1.5 or double-spaced and word-processed in 12-point type on one side of A4 paper.
• Poets should submit up to three individual poems or equivalent long poem.
• Short fiction writers should submit one story, maximum 2,500 words. Novelists and scriptwriters should submit chapters or extracts of no more then 2,500 words.
• It’s good practice to include a cover sheet (one side of A4) with notes that outlines any particular issues or problem areas that you would like to hear discussed.
• It’s worth bearing in mind that the quality of analysis and discussion is related to the quality - rather than the sheer quantity - of work submitted!
Submitting & Re-Producing Work. In any seminar a workshop group can only critique the work of approximately half its members.
Full-time students should aim to submit work once each week for either seminar, and part-time students once every two weeks. For the Tuesday workshops your work should have been submitted by the previous Wednesday by 12.00am and for the Thursday workshop by the previous Friday by 12.00am. Work is posted directly onto the LUVLE website for you to download and read for your next workshop. Training on the use of the LUVLE site will be given on our IT induction day, which is on Tuesday, 5th October, at 12.00 in the Library, Training Suite 2, C.Floor.
Special arrangements will apply during the first week of the autumn term. Work should be submitted in hard copy or by email to Lyn Kellett, the Course Officer: l.kellett@lancaster.ac.uk
Study/Research Weeks
The campus MA at Lancaster is one undertaken by writing practice and research – bearing in mind that Creative Writing also defines the concept of research ‘as practice’. This means that your writing itself is seen as a forward-searching investigative medium, but that we recognise that writers might also engage in more formal aspects of research such as travel or the exploration of library archives. Accordingly, 3 weeks per annum (including the residential course) are set aside in which there are no tutorials and during which you will be able to pursue such uninterrupted activity either on or away from the campus.
LUVLE
Lancaster University’s Virtual Learning Environment or LUVLE will form an important part of your experience at Lancaster; you will be registered on the site and will take part in an induction session during the first week of term. The site will be a means of storing student and staff profiles, communicating via the café and announcement boards, sharing current reading, posting important articles or documents relating to the course and participating in termly online writing conferences. See the first of our Research Training Modules for an introduction to using LUVLE (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/pg_portal/rtm_e-learning.htm).
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Campus MA Online Conferences
Self-directed online conferences will take place each term after the writing/research weeks and are an opportunity to gain a response to new work your research may have generated. You will be a member of a small group of students and will be asked to post up a new piece of writing and respond to the work of your peers in a written critique. For more detailed Guidelines, see below.
The Campus MA Schedule 2011-12
Campus MA Programme Michaelmas Term
MA Tuesday group will meet from 10.00am – 1.00pm in Meeting Room 1, B.Floor, County College, beginning 11th October 2011.
MA Thursday group meet from 10.00am – 1.00pm, in Meeting Room 1, B.Floor, County College, beginning 13th October 2011.
Part One Lectures are held on Thursday 1.00-2.00 in Bowland Main Lecture Theatre and
Friday, 1-2 in Bowland Main Lecture Theatre (Michaelmas and Lent Terms)
Campus MA Programme Lent Term
Tuesday groups will meet from 10.00am – 1.00pm, Meeting Room 1, County College
Thursday group (Group B) will meet from 10.00am – 1.00pm in Meeting Room 1, County College
Group
B: George Green
Campus MA Programme Summer Term
Tuesday group will meet from 10.00am – 1.00pm (Group A) Meeting Room 1, County College
Thursday groups (Group B) will meet from 10.00am – 1.00pm Meeting Room 1, County College
First week of term is week beginning 23rd April 2012.
Group
B: Jenn Ashworth
The Distance Learning MA
The distance learning MA is mediated almost entirely by online tutorials and online conferences. These take place on a designated LUVLE site to which you will be given access: the site is available without any special software and can be accessed online from anywhere in the world as soon as you have been given an ISS login and password (this can be arranged as soon as you have registered for the course). The LUVLE site also provides a cybercafé where students can meet and communicate informally, a facility for announcements, student and staff profiles, research training modules, a book review facility and useful exemplar material from previous MA graduates.
The course is a part-time one, spanning six academic terms over two years. You can expect to be a member of a group of 18-20 students studying from anywhere in the world.
The programme at Lancaster is entirely student-centred and online tutorials involve the close critiquing of student work. No formal programme of teaching to specific objectives is initiated; instead we aim to respond to individual needs through the allocation of a personal tutor who will be an expert in your chosen genre. The online conferences allow another level of responsiveness in the context of a small group.
The course begins with a preliminary tutorial in which students introduce themselves and their work to their tutor. There is a conference each term for six terms in order to stimulate creative work and critiques. In each term students submit work for two tutorials that take place before and after the online conferences each term. An individual course outline is negotiated at the beginning of the course, which becomes the frame of reference for the student’s work and progress. Each creative assignment is accompanied by an assignment commentary, which discusses the genesis of the creative work and any special difficulties or issues you have encountered.
Students receive detailed written critiques from their tutor engaging both with the assignment commentary and the creative work itself. The student’s self-critical writing in the final MA portfolio may be largely drawn from these reflective exchanges.
After the end of the Summer Term of
the 1st year of the course, a five-day Summer School is held on campus, consisting
of workshops, readings and visits by agents, publishers and writers. Personal
tutorials are also held to review progress and this is an opportunity to meet
with fellow students in a convivial way. The date of the summer school will be
Sunday 29th July to Saturday 4th August, 2012.
Framework of Study and Submission of Work to Distance Learning MA Tutorials
Study at MA level requires a high degree of autonomy from students. The programme of distance learning tutorials provides a framework for development, but in many ways you will be in charge of your own learning. You will also be a member of a group or community of writers that functions as a form of mutual support. Contact with members of staff forms only part of the developmental process - contact with your fellow writers can also be of great importance. This is facilitated through the Summer School as well as through online conferences and informal contact.
You will have access to your tutor through two substantial online tutorials per term: these take place in the ‘student submissions’ section of the site and are visible only to the individual student / tutor. Tutors will offer a carefully structured critique of your work, which pays close attention to the text as well as raising more general issues about writing and the creative process. It is important that contact is restricted to term times and that each submission is carefully assembled for your tutor’s comments. In the very first term of the course we also provide a preliminary tutorial, which will get the process of exchange underway.
Writing Journals / Learning Logs
The LUVLE site provides you with space for electronic Writing Journals and Learning Logs. In 2011-12, we will be in the process of making some changes to our virtual learning environments, so the requirements for each cohort (2010-12 and 2011-13) will be slightly different: there will be separate introductions to our eLearning facilities in our online Research Training Modules, and students should also consult their own VLEs for detailed instructions on their electronic submissions. Our electronic journals and logs serve a variety of purposes: they allow you to keep your own virtual record of your reflective process and to make entries that you share with your tutor (including project outlines, brief reports on Research Training Modules, responses to tutorials and progress reports). For both cohorts of students, the progress report submitted in the Summer Term of Year 1 will form the basis of a personal interview with your tutor at the DLMA Summer School.
Research Training Modules
All MA students are required to undertake research training as part of their degree programme. Our research training methodology (RTM) modules are mounted at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/pg_portal/rtm_index.html. The modules cover ‘Postgraduate eLearning & Web Facilities’, ‘Understanding the Research Context’, ‘Library & Archival Research’, ‘Scholarly and Professional Presentation’, ‘Research & Reflective Practice’ and are designed to equip you to function effectively as a student and – for some students – to prepare you for PhD study. They are a mandatory element in our courses for any students seeking Arts & Humanities Funding Council (AHRC) support.
You should work through each module
independently, keeping your own electronic record of your progress (see your
VLE for more detailed instructions). Your tutor will check this record and
discuss your progress through the modules. They should be completed by the end
of your first year of part-time study and will remain as a resource that you
can access when needed.
Preliminary Tutorial
You should already have mounted a brief profile and photograph on the LUVLE site, but for this tutorial you should submit a more detailed personal profile with information about your writing experience, publications, and any relevant qualifications. You should also attach a course proposal - an outline of what you hope to achieve on the course in terms of your creative writing - and a short sample of work. Your tutor will reply with their own personal profile, comments on your course proposal and any suggestions they have concerning your first assignment. Your tutor will not comment exhaustively on your creative work at this stage.
Subsequent Tutorials
Distance learning tuition is a personal service to the student and is necessarily very demanding for tutors. Tutors and students are never further than a few keystrokes apart and it’s tempting to try to remain in contact with your tutor or turn to them for help whenever things get difficult. In order to get the most out of your relationship with your tutor clear guidelines are necessary and a structured process is desirable. A tutorial is not intended to serve an editorial function and not every word you have written needs to be read by your tutor. The online conferences provide a creative forum in which ideas about writing can be tested and extended in relation to actual texts. So be prepared to experiment, sharing in this process and extrapolating from it in order to solve problems and develop new work.
As well as creative work, each tutorial submission should include a short reflective piece – the assignment commentary. This is a discussion of your experience of writing the assignment, pointing your tutor towards any special problems or achievements, providing contextual information, raising technical or structural issues and helping to focus the tutor’s response. The reflective commentary may also involve discussion of your reading of other texts whilst engaged with the course. Just as your creative work should be a selection, your commentary should also be selective and not ventilate all your concerns in one go!
It’s always difficult to quantify creative work, so the following submission guidelines are approximate:
• All assignments should be uploaded in your submission folder as Word files. You will be given instructions on LUVLE about accessing a personal submission folder, which will eventually contain all of your work and all of your tutor's responses over the two years of the degree programme.
• All work should be 1.5 or double-spaced and submitted in 12-point type.
• If you are an AppleMac user, you will be able to submit work using ‘Word for Mac’ (.doc or .docx), Plain Text (.txt) or Rich Text Format (.rtf); if you use ‘iWork’, you can export your document to a Microsoft Office format (e.g., Office 2007). If you have up-to-date Mac software and Office for Mac this should be unproblematic.
• All students should submit a commentary of up to 1,000 words alongside their creative work.
• Poets should submit up to 6 individual poems or equivalent long poem. Short story writers should submit complete stories, up to a maximum 5,000 words.
• Novelists and scriptwriters should submit chapters or extracts of no more then 5,000 words.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the quality of analysis and discussion is related to the quality - rather than the sheer quantity - of work submitted! In fact, in the context of distance learning, restricting the amount of work submitted is essential in order to elicit a focused response. (If you multiply the number of tutorials by the quantity of work and add the work submitted to conferences, then the course represents a very substantial portfolio of writing with accompanying critiques and commentaries).
Your tutor’s reports will be part of the strategic development and revision of your work, but don’t expect them to look at revisions of your pieces as a matter of course. That is time consuming and becomes a process of editing rather than stimulation, dependency rather than partnership. Tutorials are designed to allow you to absorb and develop techniques that can be used to revise existing work and to shape new work from the outset. A good place to test a revised piece is the online conference rather than sending it back to your tutor. If it seems imperative to submit revised work, then discuss with your tutor beforehand - but it should replace rather than augment a tutorial.
Tutors will comment on problems of presentation, grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling and other ‘technical’ aspects of your writing, but not exhaustively. Once such a problem has been flagged up by your tutor, it will be your responsibility to deal with it. It is a pre-requisite of any MA portfolio that it has been properly formatted and that it is free from mistakes and oversights (our online research training modules (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/pg_portal/rtm_index.html) offer help with many aspects of presentation and scholarly conventions).
Your relationship with your tutor is about forward momentum: creating new work that is shaped by a developing tutorial process. Each new submission to your tutor will show how you have assimilated their tuition into your writing technique. As we have indicated in the submission guidelines, sending large quantities of revised work to your tutor can slow down the tutorial process and we have given specific guidance on this. However, the conference is a good place to post revised work, because you have reflected closely on the piece and can then assimilate and evaluate the comments of your fellow students.
These guidelines represent a
framework only. Your relationship with your tutor is a personal one and will
develop over the course of the two years in which you work with them. You will
have an individual style of writing and your tutor will have an individual
style of response. As well as writing tutorial reports they will be able to
respond briefly to questions, which arise after a tutorial exchange. If you are
experiencing serious problems, then of course, you should contact your tutor
for advice. We would be grateful, though, if you could remain sensitive to the
pressures on staff time and exercise consideration in such matters.
Online MA Conference Guidelines
These guidelines cover both campus and distance learning online conferences. Please note that conditions may vary in each case.
Several conference sites currently operate, allowing groups of students to participate in parallel conferences. Your MA café will be open as a meeting place for all students, so some issues can be taken from a conference and ventilated in this more public space. You will be assigned to a group with an alphabetical designation at the beginning of the course. We will try to arrange membership of each conference group according to genre. Conferences take the form of online discussion dedicated to work in progress. These guidelines are based on the experience of tutors and students over the past few years and we hope that they’ll help you to get the most out of the conferences that you’ll take part in.
Details of how to log on to the
conference site will be sent to you just before or early in the Michaelmas
term; we will arrange a preliminary conference (DLMA) or induction (campus MA)
to ensure that all students are comfortable with the system.
Quantity
It’s important to observe guidelines on the amount of work submitted - bearing in mind that creative work is always difficult to quantify. The quality of comments is often enhanced by a tight focus; huge submissions may be tempting, but they are invariably counter-productive. Poets may submit a maximum of 3-4 poems, (depending on length) or equivalent long poem. Prose writers may submit one piece, typically a story or a chapter, maximum length 2,500-3,000 words. Occasional exceptions to these guidelines are permissible where the form of the work absolutely requires a longer submission, but we would ask you not to exceed them except in those circumstances.
The Role of the Tutor
The role of the tutor is to monitor the conference site, getting in early to make brief comments that can open up a piece for the rest of the group. They won’t respond exhaustively to each piece, but they will generally try to promote a lively debate, acting as devil’s advocate where necessary!
Responses to Responses
Even in a small group you will receive plenty of comment in relation to your work. Sometimes the advice given will be contradictory. It’s important not to treat the group as some kind of tribunal that you must satisfy. As the course proceeds, you will become adept at sifting through comments, identifying what rings true for you. Sometimes these might be sympathetic remarks and sometimes ones that feel initially unsettling but that turn out to be mobilising or thought-provoking.
You should not to rush into responses and immediate evaluations of critiques. Some writers do like to respond to everyone’s suggestions within the time-span of the same conference but it is not a requirement. In fact, we urge considered reflection upon critiques. Make sure that you feel certain about suggestions or developments you intend to pursue. Ideas for changing your work will only work effectively if they proceed from your own conviction.
Managing the Space
It is best to use the café space for brief social comments, thanks to people for their responses etc. The conference easily becomes unwieldy, taking a long time to navigate, unless we try to keep it quite streamlined. Please do not post your thanks for each comment received!
Managing Novels
Novelists, in particular, can feel concerned if their readers receive the novel in an incomplete or disjointed way. Students last year made an arrangement whereby they can post up coherent sections of novels between conferences marked ‘For Reference Only’. The etiquette is that no one is obliged to read and comment but people with available time may do so. There is a potential here for reciprocal arrangements that could be mutually beneficial. Of course, those kinds of literary partnerships or ‘buddying’ can also be carried out by email.
Etiquette & Number of
Responses
We ask students to respond to all pieces posted in each conference group, so this is a reciprocal process. Computer conferencing is an exciting medium where people often find themselves developing and surprising themselves in ways that can be hampered in face-to-face situations. Swiftly escalating arguments are a notorious feature of virtual communication: the phenomenon is known as ‘flaming’. Normally, our verbal pronouncements are modified by body language or tone of voice. But ironical nuances can be easily missed in cyberspace. If you do find yourself feeling nettled by a comment, try not to react peremptorily. Checking out privately what the person intended can often completely defuse the situation. If you do decide to write a robust reply, it will be better for having been carefully thought through first!
Students (and sometimes tutors) can have a fear of making and displaying errors. Please view the site as a space for ongoing thinking rather than definitive or rigid thinking. Discussions can be informal, fluid and exploratory as well as being academically and creatively rigorous.
The Practicalities
• Creative work should be posted as Microsoft Word files, accompanied by a short introduction. The introduction is an opportunity to focus attention on specific aspects of the work you have posted.
• Critiques (responses) should be written, checked and saved as Word documents then posted directly into the conference space. Opening attachments takes away the immediacy of response and introduces an unnecessary layer into the process.
• A critique should be between a minimum of 400 words and a maximum of 600 words. Anything much shorter looks cursory and anything much longer seems verbose. This is an approximate guide.
• A critique should be a freestanding piece of writing. It should, generally speaking, be structured into three main parts: introductory remarks (readability rating), detailed observations about the text (troubleshooting), and closing remarks (overview), which may recommend other reading, refer to other texts, raise more general questions etc.
• In the case of poetry, the poems need to be critiqued one by one rather than through an overview which can easily lose focus. Introductory and summative remarks are still very useful here.
• Don’t add to the files unnecessarily. Don’t acknowledge receipt of a critique just to be friendly and only respond to a critique if the ensuing discussion is leading us somewhere new or significant.
• Don’t defend yourself against critiques unless they seem to miss important points and these points themselves raise important questions. Once a discussion does begin to digress from the work in hand it should be taken to the café.
• Sometimes it’s good to deliberately title a response or a piece of information so that it has a specific rather than a generic title.
• Guidelines are just that - they’re sensible parameters not a straitjacket, so please feel free to respond with idiosyncratic enthusiasm too!
Distance Learning MA Schedule 2011-12
Preliminary Tutorial Oct 10th
1st Tutorial Oct 24th
1st Conference Nov 7th- Nov 18th
2nd Tutorial Dec 5th
3rd Tutorial Jan 30th
2nd Conference Feb 13th- Feb 24th
4th Tutorial March 12th
5thTutorial May 7th
3rd Conference May 21st - June 1st
6th Tutorial June 18th
Summer School July 29th – August 4th
Creative Writing MA: Some Recommended Reading
Poetry
The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber
Poetics, Aristotle, Penguin Classics
Poetry in the Making, Ted Hughes, Faber & Faber
An Introduction to English Poetry, James Fenton, Viking
The Deregulated Muse, Sean O’Brien, Bloodaxe Books
Writing Poems, Peter Sansom, Bloodaxe Books
Rhyme’s Reason, John Hollander, Yale
Interviews with Poets, ed. Philip Hoy et al, Between the Lines
How Poets Work, ed Tony Curtis, Seren Books
The Firebox, ed. Sean O’Brien, Picador
New British Poetry, ed. Paterson & Simic, Graywolf
The New Penguin Book of English Verse, ed. Keegan, Penguin
Emergency Kit, ed. Shapcott & Sweeney, Faber & Faber
Making for Planet Alice, ed. Maura Dooley, Bloodaxe Books
Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures series, Bloodaxe Books
Prose Writing
Consciousness & the Novel, David Lodge, Penguin
Story, Robert McKee, Methuen
How to Write a Damn Good Novel, James Frey, St Martins Press
The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron, Pan
On Writing, Stephen King, NEL
The Writer's Workbook, Ed Newman et al, Arnold
How Novelists Work, ed. Maura Dooley, Seren Books
Story Structure, Robert McKee, Methuen
Writing Short Stories, A Routledge Writer's Guide, Ailsa Cox
Short Circuit, writers on short fiction, Salt Publishing
Script and Screenwriting
The Art and Science of Screenwriting, Phillip Parker (Intellect)
Alternative Scriptwriting, Dancyger and Rush (Focal Press)
Screenwriting Tricks of the Trade, William Froug (Silman James)
Radioactivity, Seren Books Writing for Radio, Vincent McInerney, Manchester University Press
Writing for Television & Radio, Robert Hilliard, Wadsworth
Writing Scripts for Television, Radio & Film, Thomas Learning
Story: Substance, structure Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee, Methuen
General
How to Write Essays and Dissertations, Nigel Fabb and Alan Durant, Pearson Longman
Eats Shoots & Leaves (the zero tolerance approach to punctuation), Lyn Truss, Profile Books
The Writer’s Coursebook, Macmillan
The Coming of the Book, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, Verso
A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, Flamingo
The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, Penguin
The Human Brain, Susan Greenfield, Penguin
Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg, Shambhala
The Way to Write, John Fairfax & John Moat, Elm Tree Books
Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande, Macmillan
The Creative Writer's Craft, Bailey et al, NTC
The Writer’s Workbook, Newman, Cusick & Tourette, Arnold
Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, Chris Baldick, Oxford
The Elements of Style, Strunk and White, Longman
Times Guide to English Style and Usage, ed Jenkins, Times
Writers and Artists Yearbook, A & C Black
The Writers Handbook, Macmillan
Most of these texts can be found in
the University Library.
Assessment Criteria and Requirements for the MA Portfolio
In order to gain entry to the MA programme applicants have to demonstrate academic capability, creative ability, potential, intention and ambition.
MA Course Outcomes
Though this document often separates creative and self-critical process and outputs for the sake of clarity, we regard them as mutually constitutive. Writers must become readers of their own work, moving from subjectivity to objectivity, impulse to reflexivity. Nor are all critical or creative processes necessarily conscious ones. Successful creative work is enabled through a synthesis of impulsive and exploratory writing, formal and informal research, disclosure to peers, close revision, wide creative and critical reading, reader-awareness, intellectual curiosity and intense reflexivity. Good critical or self-reflective writing shares those same qualities: their differences are a matter of form, emphasis and degree.
By the end of the course you will have created and revised:
• 90% - a portfolio of original creative writing (poetry, short fiction, elements of flash fiction, longer fiction, creative non-fiction, etc.) shaped by tutorials, workshops, peer critiques and self-reflection in which you will participate both as a writer and critical respondent (max 30,000 words or equivalent).
• 10% - a self-reflective essay that introduces your portfolio and discusses its aims and achievements in relation to the process of the course and to wider creative, critical and theoretical discourse (max 3,000 words).
Course Expectations
In order to engage successfully with the learning process of the MA you will be expected to:
• Undergo induction into the objectives, technical processes, teaching and learning methodologies of the course.
• Create an outline of your creative project indicating its literary form or forms and its thematic content and technical/structural approach.
• Actively pursue this creative project and submit substantial parts of the developing creative work for peer criticism in seminars and online critical conferences.
• Engage with Research Training Modules and demonstrate your engagement with and understanding of each module, recording your progress electronically: Postgraduate E-learning, Understanding the Research Context, Library, Online and Archival Research, Scholarly Conventions, Creative and Professional Presentation, Research and Reflective Practice.
• Engage in critical reading and annotation of the work of your peers, participating in weekly seminars and/or termly online critical conferences.
• Engage with recommended texts relating to your creative project
• Engage in wider creative and critical readings, keeping an online record of this process.
• Take part in a Residential Writing Week or Summer School offering generative and critical workshops led by your tutors.
• Engage with visits made to the course or its residential study week by industry professionals – writers, editors and agents in particular.
MA Learning Outcomes
Evidenced through tutorials, online conferences, workshops and seminars and assessed at the end of the course as a contribution to their self-reflective essay, a successful student will have:
• Gained proficiency in the use of online learning environments and a range of research methods.
• Maintained a journal or learning log of the course.
• Developed critical and analytical skills in relation to their own work, the work of their peers and professionally published literature.
• Engaged in wide creative and critical reading, expanding their contextual understanding of new writing and achieving a broader frame of reference for critical reflection.
• Gained a greater understanding of the publishing industry, how it works, and the opportunities and strategies for publication of their work.
Evidenced through the seminar and tutorial process and assessed at the end of the course as their main output from the course, a successful student will have:
• Revised and developed their original project outline into a fully realised portfolio of poetry, fiction or scriptwriting.
• Significantly revised their portfolio of writing in the light of insights offered by the processes of the course (see above), especially the formative criticism offered by their peers and tutors on the course.
• Have written a self-reflective critical essay discussing their creative work in the light of their experience of the course and their engagement with wider creative, critical and theoretical discourse.
• Have ordered a selection of this creative work and presented it with the essay as a bound volume for assessment.
Assessment
The MA programme at Lancaster is based upon the writing and revision of an original portfolio of creative work plus a reflective essay. We do not offer interim marks for your work at any stage, because, by definition, that work will change. You should speak to your tutor at the Summer School (DLMA) or during a personal tutorial (campus MA) to gain a sense of your progress and the standard of your work, but do not press your tutor for an actual mark.
Two forms of assessment are used on the Lancaster Creative Writing MA:
Formative Assessment
This is the process whereby tutors interact with students throughout the course, guiding their progress through tutorials based upon their creative work and the shared entries and records in their online learning environment (e.g., tutorial reports, annotated workshop feedback, assignment commentaries, learning logs and / or journal entries). Formative assessment can be understood as a reflexive process where a student is able to focus the feedback they need, then develop and refine their portfolio as a response to that feedback – it is distinct from summative assessment where actual marks are awarded.
Summative Assessment
This is the final event of the course where a portfolio of creative work is submitted along with the reflective essay and both are marked against specific assessment criteria.
Safeguards and Quality Control
All portfolios are independently marked by two tutors and final marks awarded after a careful discussion of each element and criterion. Cross-marking takes place between the campus and distance learning MAs to ensure consistency. Portfolios are sampled by the external examiner to ensure accuracy. The range of marks is discussed with the external examiner at a final examination board. A summary of feedback is sent to every student along with his or her final mark. The external examiner submits an annual report on the examination process and an annual review is carried out upon this basis. External audits, such as PQR (Periodic Quality Review) add a further layer of security to the assessment process.
Summative Marking Categories
When Marking MA portfolios examiners make notes on each of the following broad areas of achievement.
Language: appropriate, original and inventive use of language
Subject Matter: deployment of themes; settings; variation in subject matter
Narration: narrative movement, momentum and control
Characterisation & Realisation: how effectively people, places and situations are brought to life
Technique: formal and free effects; use of dialogue; POV, narration and narrative voice.
Structural Effects: rhythm and progression; how well the whole is built and the parts achieved
Self-Critique: clarity; contextualisation; references to other literature; awareness of creative process
Summary: a final comment summarising the ambition, impact, originality, technique and content of the portfolio that has led to the final mark.
Summative Assessment Criteria
These criteria should guide your process through the MA and help you to understand the standards against which your portfolio will be marked
General Criteria and Grades
To receive the MA, each student will write, revise and present an original portfolio of literary work prefaced by a self-critique. We give 10% of your final mark for this critique and 90% for the creative portfolio, so the emphasis is on creativity supported by reflective process. Both elements are marked out of 100% and the marks aggregated. We expect a maximum of 30,000 words of creative work (depending on genre) and a maximum of 3,000 of self-critical reflection. Creative work in the portfolio will represent many drafts and revisions, so it is a distillation of the work produced on the course.
At MA level, the team of examiners looks for writing which displays considerable artistic merit and a high degree of professionalism. Professionally accomplished work will exhibit awareness of publishing and scholarly standards, including an understanding of the purpose of formal structures, layouts, presentation and writing techniques. This work may also be experimental and adventurous, taking risks to extend the reader’s awareness of such devices. We also look for reader-awareness: an underlying sense of readers' capacities for absorbing your written text and energising it as imaginative experience.
The award categories are Pass (50-64%), Merit (65%-69%) and Distinction (70% +), or Fail (49% and below). Given that the award of a higher degree implies a significant progression from the standard of a first degree, the Distinction is reserved for truly outstanding work, as determined by the team of examiners. The team includes the MA tutors and the external examiner.
Specific Criteria
These are the features we expect to find in your final portfolio, evidenced both through the expressive creative work and the reflective self-critical essay, since there is considerable overlap:
• Thematic sensibility: originality and innovation in the choice and exploration of overt and underlying themes.
• Artistic ambition: adventure in technique, the exploration and synthesis of language, form, subject matter and structure through a range of work.
• Formal skills and awareness: an understanding of the range of formal possibilities in poetry and fiction and a sustained engagement with their deployment.
• Intellectual ambition: work that is meaningful beyond its command of technique or form that seeks significance in relation to wider social, political or artistic contexts.
• Command of the medium: clarity and precision of language, vivid or striking imagery and original phrasing, avoidance of cliché, hackneyed phrases, and generalised abstraction.
• Imaginative realisation: the ability to create convincing characters, settings and situations, bringing them to life vividly for the reader.
• Reader awareness: understanding of the reader’s role in the realisation of a literary text explored through the forms of expressive writing and through critical reflection.
• Technical realisation: engagement with the production values and technical requirements of writing that explores form in innovative ways – concrete texts, meta-fictional productions, modular forms.
• Point of view: awareness and control of narrative voice and viewpoint, ability to sustain a consistent tone or range of tones, where appropriate.
• Momentum: introduction and control of narrative energy, the creation of forward movement linked to structural awareness.
• Discrimination: choice and deployment of subject matter; awareness of genres, avoidance of generic cliché, derivative forms following pre-set formulas.
• Scholarly presentation: clear and accurate presentation, including correct spelling, grammar and syntax. Marks may be deducted from portfolios that exhibit persistent errors.
• Creative presentation: control of formal layout, including demonstration of technical expertise in poetry and understanding of appropriate paragraphing in prose texts. This does not rule out innovative approaches that successfully explore the page as a visual/typographical space.
• Meta-structure: the optimal arrangement of the collection of work to enhance the whole.
• Focus: ability to synthesise a range of themes or to explore in-depth a narrower range.
• Research skills: evidence of creative research that makes the writing convincing within its social, historical, political, technological or other context; evidence of literary and critical reading that leads to the construction of convincing arguments underpinned by theoretical awareness.
• Critical skills: clarity of argument in self-critical writing; well-structured reflection; accurate textual referencing; a bibliography; observance of scholarly conventions of presentation and citation.
• Editorial skills: evidence of sound revision, proofreading and close editing.
Grade Descriptors
Distinction 80-100%
Rarely attained, this grade represents innovative and highly original writing with strong impact, achieved artistic and intellectual ambition and striking themes. The work will be of publishable quality across an entire portfolio such as would merit submission to mainstream literary magazines, journals and publishers. It will show professional levels of control and innovation in the exploration of formal structures, POV, language and ideas. Critical work will have sustained intellectual ambition, draw successfully upon Research Training and reflective journal or log entries, sustaining an original argument and showing an exceptional range of creative and critical reading that is seamlessly integrated and referenced in a scholarly way.
Distinction 70-79%
Exceptional writing across the entire portfolio that shows adventure and thematic innovation, with both artistic and intellectual ambition. This work will show the potential to reach publishable quality such as would merit submission to mainstream literary magazines, journals and publishers. It will show confidence in its exploration of formal structures, POV, language and ideas. Critical work will have intellectual breadth and a strong theoretical dimension, drawing strongly upon Research Training and the student’s own reflective journals or logs, maintaining an original argument and showing an exceptional range of reading that is well-integrated and properly referenced.
Merit 65-69%
Strongly realised writing that shows strong technical ability and an awareness of appropriate literary form across the main range of work. It will show artistic and intellectual engagement, convincing themes, and a high level of technical integration that, nevertheless, may not be entirely sustained. It will exhibit elements of impact and surprise through detailed evocations, deploy convincing POV, and show the development of ideas within its literary forms. Critical work will be strongly argued, make significant reference to Research Training, to the student’s own reflective journals or logs, and to wider theoretical, creative and critical reading. It will be properly referenced and deal thoroughly and systematically with the ideas it seeks to express.
Pass 60-64%
Work of literary worth that shows the growth of a convincing technique and an accurate and inventive use of language that will not be evenly sustained across the whole portfolio. Work in this category will show conviction and bring about elements of surprise, exhibiting an awareness of literary forms, POV and narrative technique, though it may demonstrate less thematic originality and intellectual ambition. Critical work will be expected to exhibit an awareness of the reflective and research elements of the source and to show evidence of a range of reading and acquaintance with theoretical perspectives, though this may be more limited or the elements may be less fully integrated than would be expected in a thesis that receives a Merit.
Pass 50-59%
Work at the top end of this category will show the potential for significant development that has not yet been realised in terms of conception and execution. It may suffer from unevenness, the use of clichéd language, POV, themes and forms, and may lack the convincing deployment of ideas alongside its strategies to entertain and invoke. Work at the bottom end of the scale will show a significant lack of technical control and ambition for the work, often exhibiting a pedestrian quality that lacks surprise or innovation. Proofreading errors and solecisms may be evident. The best critical work will display competence, but may lack engagement beyond the student’s own work, ignoring wider creative and critical reading; the least successful portfolios may show little engagement with personal praxis, research and reflective process, whilst containing flawed, inconsistent or poorly developed arguments lacking in ideas and example.
Fail 0-49%
Work in this category is unusual because of the standards placed upon students at the point of entry and because engagement with the processes of the course will necessarily focus on a high level of achievement. Creative and critical work falling into this category will not have engaged significantly with research, reflective or developmental aspects of the course and will remain significantly undeveloped or derelict in its creative expression and critical perspectives.
Submission
Submission date: the deadline for submission of your work is 1st September
You should supply three bound copies. After the examiners' meeting in late September or early October, you may have one copy back if you will collect it in person or give us return postage. We will keep a copy for our archive and the third copy goes to the library.
Portfolio Guidelines
The emphasis in your portfolio should be on quality rather than quantity. Remember that the presence of sub-standard poems, chapters or stories is likely to diminish your final achievement. Awareness of process and progress can be conveyed through your self-critique.
• Poetry portfolios should contain about 35 - 40 poems (depending on length), which have been selected from the work during the year. We recommend a maximum of 60 pages of poetry.
• A short fiction portfolio might contain 12 - 16 short stories, a portfolio of between 28,000 - 30,000 words.
• A mixed portfolio of short stories and poems might comprise 5 - 7 stories, 14,000 - 16,000 words and 20 poems, depending on length (maximum 30 pages of poetry).
• A novella of 28,000 - 30,000 words. This should include a synopsis not exceeding 350 words.
• Novelists’ sample chapters of between 28,000 - 30,000 words. The chapters should be strategically chosen and each one might include a short contextualising paragraph if it is felt to be helpful to the examiners. Novelists should also submit a synopsis for the entire novel, maximum 350 words.
• Scriptwriters should follow the guidelines for the novel, working within the total word-count of 28,000 - 30,000 words and including a synopsis of up to 350 words for each script.
• Other combinations of material are possible, but each genre included should be substantially represented. If you are in any doubt or if your portfolio seems to exceed these guidelines, then you should seek advice from your tutor or the director of postgraduate studies. We recognise that flexibility is an important aspect of portfolio building.
• Your portfolio need not contain everything you have written during the course: abandoned projects and obvious failures can be omitted!
Self Reflective Critical Writing (3,000 words)
Your self-critique acts as an introduction to your MA assessment portfolio and should be placed before the creative work. The main source of ideas and structure for this will be contained in the notes in your Writing Journal (campus MA) or in the exchanges contained in your Assignment Commentaries (distance learning MA). This piece of reflective writing should aim to:
• Introduce your portfolio and contextualise your choice of creative work
• Reflect upon your progress as a writer over the length of the course and to show your understanding of the creative process in relation to your own work
• Engage with the work of your fellow students, other creative writers, or the work of writers who have written about the creative process
• Discuss the development, drafting, selection and revision of your portfolio in the light of your experience
• Discuss technical and thematic issues in your work
• Reveal your own intentions as a writer and develop your own working practice through reflection upon it
• Show your understanding of the professional context for your work and its publishing potential, where appropriate
That is not a definitive checklist and you may find yourself selecting from it or adding to it in order to write your account. The self-reflective piece should be about 3,000 words and should be carefully structured with an introduction, main argument, and concluding remarks. That is not to say that you have to arrive at any resounding conclusion; above all we ask you to engage with and reflect upon creative process.
Nothing should prevent the work from being both personal in focus and scholarly in presentation. Remember that it is written for an external examiner who does not know you, your work or your peers. So references must be contextualised and footnoted (usually in the case of published work) if necessary. You may wish to quote from tutorial exchanges or conferences where a verbal or written remark prompted development or re-evaluation. You must supply a bibliography of any published texts used in the piece, which should appear at the end. Footnotes should give the title of the publication, author, date of publication and page reference. Guidelines about the presentation of such references can be found in our module on 'Scholarly Conventions' at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/pg_portal/rtm_scholarly_conventions.htm
Don’t allow your reflective account to fall into a kind of pseudo-academic pastiche. References to other writers and philosophers will not in themselves impress an examiner! Make sure that your references are purposeful. You are writing as a creative writing practitioner; as a writer with reflective capability, and we ask for clarity, lucidity and insight. You are also writing your account for other creative practitioners, writer to writer. How do your insights illuminate the process of imaginative writing from starting points to composition, drafting, revision, editing, publication and performance?
On the DLMA the final tutorial and conference may be set aside for issues relating to the critical/reflective essay. On the campus MA, discussion about the reflective essay will form a part of your individual tutorials and seminar discussions.
MA submissions are available for your reference electronically on our VLEs and from the Departmental Office.
Information for MPhil/PhD Students
MPhil in Creative Writing
The MPhil is a piece of independent research. Shorter than a PhD, it is expected to demonstrate a high degree of creative skill, competence in research, critical evaluation and independent thought, but does not require quite the same depth of originality as a PhD or its publishing potential.
MPhils are examined by substantial creative portfolio plus thesis of up to 12,000 words, two copies of which should be submitted soft-bound in the first instance. The work will be examined by two persons nominated by the Department, one internal and one external, but the student will not be expected to attend a viva voce examination unless the examiners especially require it.
PhD in Creative Writing
The PhD is a piece of independent creative writing and research. Like the MPhil, it is expected to demonstrate high levels of creativity plus scholarly competence and knowledge of the field, in addition to which it must display an original contribution to knowledge and the potential to be published.
PhDs are examined by creative portfolio plus reflective thesis, two copies of which should be submitted soft-bound in the first instance. The creative portfolio should constitute a book-length work of literature. The work will be examined by two persons nominated by the Department, one internal and one external, and the student will be expected to defend the thesis at a viva voce examination in due course (sometimes up to 3 months after submission of the thesis).
Students should be aware from the start that vivas in the Humanities are idiosyncratic events and each one needs to be individually prepared for with the help of the supervisor.
The Framework for PhD Supervision in Creative Writing: Information for students and supervisors
The PhD in Creative Writing
The PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster is enabled via face-to-face supervision and the Virtual Learning and Research facilities, allowing students to study from anywhere in the world and to modulate between different forms of support if necessary. Our constituency of students is therefore transcultural in identity and support ranges from face-to-face supervision on campus to distance learning through electronic means.
The Challenge of the Creative Writing PhD
A doctoral award is the highest award that the UK Higher Education system can confer. It is usually seen as a pre-requisite to an academic career and should be anticipated as an extremely challenging and demanding programme of study. Students accepted onto the programme need a strong creative and academic track record, usually including published work; supervisors will be widely published, experienced academics, and regarded as experts in their field.
The PhD in Creative Writing is still relatively new to the academy and brings with it special challenges since it privileges creative output over critical reflection, whilst combining the two. Research in creative writing is achieved through praxis as well as through more formal or traditional critical strategies. Critical reflection may also be approached through aspects of creative writing practice in the most adventurous doctoral theses.
Students should expect to have all their ideas and pre-conceptions challenged during doctoral study and to embark upon a relationship with their supervisor that is intensely demanding, both intellectually and emotionally. This is especially true of the Creative Writing PhD where there is an inevitably close emotional connection to the creative work being critiqued. It is important that a strong structure exists for such a relationship and that both supervisors and students have a clear understanding of what to expect from the process.
The Academic Structure of the Creative Writing PhD
The PhD in Creative Writing usually takes the form of a major creative project (‘a book length work’ of up to 80,000 words) in the student’s chosen literary form, plus a critical/reflective thesis of 20,000 words.
Creative Writing at Lancaster forms part of the Department of English & Creative Writing, and, increasingly, students are embarking on PhD’s that synthesise creative and critical elements. Variations on the basic 80/20 ratio can be negotiated, depending on available supervisors. The most obvious alternative is a 50/50 division, but it should be borne in mind that the creative component has to achieve a ‘fully-realised work of literature’, so it is difficult for novelists to embark on a split 50/50 portfolio, though this is possible for writers of short fiction, shorter scripts, poetry, and the novella.
The nature of the creative work will necessarily vary from case to case, but can be explored through any literary form after agreement has been reached with a specialist supervisor. The focus of the reflective thesis might range from an intensive focus on personal creative practice and process to reflection that makes reference to a much wider field of creative literature or critical/theoretical writing.
The essence of the PhD in Creative Writing is research through creative practice (see below) and this practice should be seen as the core of your ‘original contribution to knowledge’ as defined in the PhD regulations. The creative and critical elements of the PhD are not separately realised elements: ideally they form a dynamic process and should represent a dialectic that shapes the final submission to the examiners.
How Supervisors are Appointed
Each application for doctoral study is read by the postgraduate director for Creative Writing, then fielded to two members of staff identified as potential supervisors because they are experts in the student’s chosen genre or field of research. If successful, each student is assigned a primary supervisor and a secondary one who can take over in case of illness or sabbatical leave.
Alternatively, the supervision may be jointly shared between two supervisors. Typically, this might involve close supervision of the creative work by a specialist Creative Writing tutor, plus some input on the reflective thesis from a colleague in English. The system is flexible and intended to fit the needs of each student as closely as possible.
Research Elements of the PhD
The Creative Writing PhD consists primarily of generative writing process – the production of new stories, poems, novels and scripts. This can be described as ‘research through practice’. Such practice might also involve formal aspects of research that draw upon cognate areas of academic study. In addition, the reflective thesis may draw upon critical and theoretical reading in a heterogeneous way – not just literary theory, but writing on a whole range of subject matter that might have been explored in the creative body of the PhD submission.
Research Questions
All PhD’s are underpinned by an explicit set of research questions, usually summarised in the PhD ‘abstract’. All writers have tacit questions at some level in their minds when they approach new work. For the PhD, those questions must be made manifest at an early stage. They form part of your application statement. They are often modified in the light of your findings as a researcher. So they are reference points, rather than fixed points. It’s a good idea to keep these to around five questions, rather than allowing a list to proliferate into baroque detail. Such questions are also essential in making applications for AHRC funding, so that funding bodies can understand the entry point and proposed trajectory of your enquiry.
The research questions can focus on the creative enterprise itself - what kinds of human experience it seeks to investigate and how. Typically questions will relate to intersections of theme, characters, cultural content and form. Those, in turn, will lead to questions about practice. In simple terms, we might think of research questions relating to the creative work as being quite open or speculative in nature, whilst the questions relating to the reflective thesis might be more evaluative, designed to measure intention against achievement.
Research as Practice
"These black sounds are the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know of, and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art. Black sounds: so said the celebrated Spaniard, thereby concurring with Goethe, who, in effect, defined the duende when he said, speaking of Paganini: 'A mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain.'" - The Duende: Theory and Divertissement, Federico Garcia Lorca
Recognition for the Creative Writing PhD has essentially been a recognition that creative writing itself can form ‘an original contribution to knowledge’ – that through its imaginative strategies, fabulations, interpretations and inventions it can create new insights and understanding. Such insights might be retrospective (the historical novel) or contemporary (a new book of poems) or anticipatory (futuristic fiction). Or they might fuse all three temporal perspectives in the same work.
What is clearly recognised is that an original contribution to knowledge in the field of creative writing is unlikely to be a reflection upon a previously extant work or works. Unlike more theoretical writing, it will draw upon the writer’s personal resources of memory, emotion and passion, seeking to explore and trust subconscious urges, to draw energy from the aquifers of the self. Such raw energy will be given form and shaped into a more carefully sculpted textual artifact whilst retaining a sense of original voice and momentum. Spontaneous, exploratory writing is not the opposite of writing as research, but a stage within it.
Writers exploring their thematic material are often drawn into formal kinds of research that underpin acts of invention. In order to situate an invented narrative with fictional characters in a specific culture, place and time, then they may need to find out about their locus. This could involves field visits, exploration of historical archives, interviews with experts, readings of related fictional accounts, literature surveys, the study of maps, work practices, belief systems and cultural practice. The writing itself synthesises these elements, creating credible fictional worlds from actual components.
Writers also have the liberty to invent realities in order to create imaginative conviction on the part of their readers. It has often been said that artistic truth – the creation of original insights - depends upon the deployment of artistic lies.
The area of research most closely related to the Creative Writing PhD is ‘action-research’, described thus:
The practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behavior. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation. (Schön, The Reflective Practitioner, 1983: 68)
Although usually applied to educational or sociological research, the relationship between practice and reflection and the subsequent modification of practice obviously equates to the writerly process of: spontaneous drafting - considered revision - re-drafting. So we can think of ‘writing as research’ as a form of exploratory, site-specific or situated research, emanating from and referring to the writing process.
Formal research
In order to carry out formal aspects of research, it’s useful to be able access the appropriate techniques and resources. This almost certainly will involve use of a library and its reference system in order to find out what has been written before that might overlap with the proposed creative project and which theoretical or philosophical perspectives might be useful in deepening understanding of its significance.
Writers often engage in interdisciplinary aspects of research and the University is rich in lectures and resources in a wide range of subject areas from medical science to physics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, music or engineering.
Ethnographic techniques also form part of some creative projects – the carrying out of interviews and the interpretation of the results being the most common. For a creative writer, the environment of the University with its diverse resources can form an exciting environment to draw upon.
Critical Reflection
At least 20% of the PhD will be formed from critical reflection. This is almost always focused – in some way - upon trying to create an understanding of the creative process as you experienced it. This is facilitated by reflexive strategies – the Learning Log on the LUVLE site, the maintenance of a Writing Journal, notebooks, and a record of source materials. In order to carry out this work successfully you are essentially devising, analysing and rationalising your own system of ‘poetics’.
The focus of the critical/reflective thesis will vary, depending on your interests. It may focus on your work in relation to other work in the same genre and so draw upon creative works that allow you to draw comparisons with thematic treatment and technique. You may also wish to draw upon the work of creative writers who have written about writing from a practitioner’s point of view: Aristotle, Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, David Lodge, Stephen King, et al. Their work affords the special insights of writers who have themselves forged creative strategies as practitioners working in a particular genre.
Some students have used creative strategies as part of their critical reflection upon creative practice – such as reflecting through the voice of a character in a novel, creating fictional interviews with themselves, or deploying a range of rhetorical devices usually found in creative work. This may be regarded as a high-risk or ‘cutting-edge’ strategy, depending on your point of view, but such ‘writerly’ or integrated approaches can be hugely stimulating and precipitate important realisations about the interrogative nature of creative work.
The final source of perspective on your creative work will be critical theory: how theorists who have discussed text and its mediations might have influenced your reading, practice and reflection. This might encompass linguistics, socio-linguistics, formalism, structuralism, post structuralism, Marxism, reader-reception theory, feminist theory, queer theory, post-modernism and beyond.
Research Training & Personal Development Plan
Core research training modules are provided online for all PhD students via the LUVLE site and you will work through these with the help and guidance of your tutor.
Further research training is provided by the Faculty programme and we encourage our students to take part in the sessions – though not all of them may be of obvious appeal to creative writers. It’s important that students attend sessions that have a generic appeal such as thesis writing, using the library, and research methods. We are now becoming involved with the provision of such training in order to broaden its appeal and to focus it on research as creative practice.
Students are provided with information on personal development planning (PDP) via and supervisors should encourage students to register on it in order to plan their future as academics and researchers. The PDP site can easily be accessed from the PhD LUVLE site for Creative Writing.
Some funding for research is available for each postgraduate student. This may be used in a number of ways including research trips, conferences, and training courses where appropriate. In the first instance, applications for support should be discussed between supervisors and students and then taken to the Director of Postgraduate studies for Creative Writing.
PhD students often elect to teach Creative Writing to undergraduates on our Part I scheme as a way of developing their experience and supplementing their income. Students wishing to enquire about such teaching should approach the Part I convenor.
Face-to-face Supervision
Full-time students are expected to meet with their supervisors once every two weeks in term time for a one-hour supervisory session. This will usually involve the discussion of research strategy, the close reading of new sections of creative text, the review of revised sections of text and discussion of any associated reading recommended by the tutor. It is the student’s job to take notes during these sessions and to maintain records of the supervisory process via their LUVLE
Learning Logs
Any supervisions that are missed should be carefully logged with reasons. Part-time students are expected to attend for the equivalent of half a full-time student. It’s a good policy to provide a reflective cover sheet with every submission of work since this then accumulates as the ‘spine’ of the reflective thesis. All supervisory submissions and written responses should be exchanged via the LUVLE PhD submission zone.
Distance Learning
Supervision can be mediated by distance (virtual) learning for those students who are resident elsewhere or who may be disabled or otherwise unable to come regularly to the University campus. This is a specialism of our provision at Lancaster, linking writers together across the English-speaking world. As a distance learning student you will be a member of a diverse research community linked to a range of personal and institutional projects and collaborations.
For full-time students, two major tutorials are held each term and the supervisor supplies a detailed report on each piece of work. The quantity of work submitted will depend on the stage you are at with your studies, but it can comprise 5-8,000 words of narrative prose or 5-8 poems as a general guide. Exchange can be facilitated via the LUVLE site and a complete record of the exchanges should be maintained there. Again, we recommend the use of reflexive cover sheets to accompany creative work. Each supervision should be recorded as a Learning Log entry.
An online work-in-progress session will take place at some point during each academic term. Campus-based and distance learning students will be linked together in small genre-based groups, and you will work with this group of students and a supervisor to exchange new writing and perspectives, to discuss ideas, techniques and approaches, to share reading and to consider key aspects of the research process.
The annual review panel for each student (years 1 & 2) normally requires attendance at the University, but, in exceptional circumstances, may also be carried out via a telephone conference or a live video link. We expect that distance learning students will be involved in one such session each year – this may be incorporated into the Annual Review panel and their panel for Confirmation of PhD Status in the first 2 years. In the final year it should take the form of preparation for submission and examination by viva voce.
Lancaster University Virtual Learning Environment (LUVLE)
Whether staff are supporting a student by distance learning, face-to-face or hybrid methods, the Creative Writing LUVLE site is the primary means by which they will exchange work. The site also facilitates the easy contact of students by tutors and features profiles of staff and students so that our international constituency of doctoral students can be made visible. It features a tutorial submission zone for each student where students can leave work and responses can be left by the supervisor. This means that the entire history of a doctoral student’s progress can be recorded and that work is securely stored in a central location. It also facilitates joint supervision because each tutor has equal access to the student’s work and supervisory history.
A Learning Log is also provided and this should be maintained after every supervision without exception. It’s vital that a full record of supervision exists. The log can be a very important means of recording key achievements or recording differences of opinion that you wish to make a matter of record. It is a fundamental right of the student to have such a record, but we would urge its creative and not merely bureaucratic use. In the event of a supervisory relationship going wrong in any way, then you can expect the Learning Log to be reviewed as a record of the supervisory process. Used to its full advantage, the Learning Log can extend supervisory practice and create an invaluable dialogue in relation to the supervisory programme.
The Chat Room on the site will be used primarily by students for informal contact. The Resources section contains helpful documents relating to your studies, including an archive of past submissions. The Work in Progress conference space facilitates discussion of work in progress and works through a system of peer mentoring that has proven to be very successful in enabling writers to help one another.
Only designated supervisors and students can access the work in each submission zone, but the Postgraduate Director can access all areas of the site as the site administrator. This means that they can offer support and advice to new tutors by visiting the relevant section of the site. In the near future we hope to extend the site facilities so that the records of every student are stored there for easy access – though that access will be restricted to key personnel.
Online induction will be given in the use of the LUVLE environment, including familiarity with the structure of the PhD scheme, the use of reflexive writing, dialogue with a tutor, submission zones, online fora and learning logs.
Other useful facilities include an announcement facility, staff and student profiles, a book review feature, a cybercafé, and key exemplar material drawn from successful PhD portfolios.
PhD Work-in-Progress Sessions
Both full- and part-time students are required to take part in Work-in-Progress (WIP) sessions each term, except in the final year of their studies. WIP groups are located on the LUVLE site.
The WIP sites are based on the design of MA conference sites, so if you have taken an MA with us, this will be a familiar space. The essential difference is that you will be working in a much smaller group – usually four/five research students - that will be self-regulating. The aim of the sessions is to share creative or reflective writing and to explore the nature of research in relation to the Creative Writing PhD. A WIP session will normally last for 12 days at the mid-point of the term.
Several WIP sites currently operate, allowing groups of students to participate in parallel conferences. Your PhD café will be open as a meeting place for all students, so some issues can be taken from a WIP session and ventilated in this more public space. You will be assigned to a group with an alphabetical designation and we will try to arrange membership of each conference group according to genre.
Conferences take the form of online discussion dedicated to work in progress. These guidelines are based on the experience of tutors and students over the past few years and we hope that they’ll help you to get the most out of the WIP sessions that you’ll take part in.
It’s important to observe guidelines on the amount of work submitted - bearing in mind that creative work is always difficult to quantify. The quality of comments is often enhanced by a tight focus; huge submissions may be tempting, but they are invariably counter-productive.
Poets may submit a maximum of 3-4 poems (depending on length) or equivalent long poem. Prose writers may submit one piece, typically a story or a chapter, maximum length 2,500-3,000 words.
Occasional exceptions to these guidelines are permissible where the form of the work absolutely requires a longer submission, but we would ask you not to exceed them except in those circumstances – and to check with your supervisor first.
The Role of the Supervisor
The role of the tutor is to monitor the conference site, occasionally commenting on the work or on the discussion that ensues. You may not even be aware of their presence, but we will look in on each session!
Responses to Responses
Even in a small group you will receive plenty of comment in relation to your work. Sometimes the advice given will be contradictory. It’s important not to treat the group as some kind of tribunal that you must satisfy. As the course proceeds, you will become adept at sifting through comments, identifying what rings true for you. Sometimes these might be sympathetic remarks and sometimes ones that feel initially unsettling but that turn out to be mobilising or thought provoking.
You should not to rush into responses and immediate evaluations of critiques. Some writers do like to respond to everyone’s suggestions within the time-span of the same conference but it is not a requirement. In fact, we urge considered reflection upon critiques. Make sure that you feel certain about suggestions or developments you intend to pursue. Ideas for changing your work will only work effectively if they proceed from your own conviction.
Managing the Space
It is best to use the café space for brief social comments, thanks to people for their responses, etc. The WIP conference easily becomes unwieldy, taking a long time to navigate, unless we try to keep it quite streamlined. Please do not post your thanks for each comment received!
We ask students to respond to all pieces posted in each WIP conference group, so this is a reciprocal process. Computer conferencing is an exciting medium where people often find themselves developing and surprising themselves in ways that can be hampered in face-to -face situations.
Swiftly escalating arguments are a notorious feature of virtual communication: the phenomenon is known as ‘flaming’. Normally, our verbal pronouncements are modified by body language or tone of voice. But ironical nuances can be easily missed in cyberspace. If you do find yourself feeling nettled by a comment, try not to react peremptorily. Checking out privately what the person intended can often completely defuse the situation. If you do decide to write a robust reply, it will be better for having been carefully thought through first!
Students (and sometimes tutors) can have a fear of making and displaying errors. Please view the site as a space for ongoing thinking rather than definitive or rigid thinking. Discussions can be informal, fluid and exploratory as well as being academically and creatively rigorous.
The Practicalities
• Creative work should be accompanied by a short introduction, which is an opportunity to focus attention on specific aspects of the work you have posted. Work should be posted as Microsoft Word files; if you are an AppleMac user, you will be able to submit work using ‘Word for Mac’ (.doc), Plain Text (.txt) or Rich Text Format (.rtf); if you use ‘iWork’, you can export your document to a Microsoft Office format (e.g., Office 2007). If you have up-to-date Mac software and Office for Mac this should be unproblematic.
• Critiques (responses) should be written, checked and saved as Word documents then posted (copied and pasted) directly into the conference space. Opening attachments takes away the immediacy of response and introduces an unnecessary layer into the process.
• A critique should be between a minimum of 400 words and a maximum of 600 words. Anything much shorter looks cursory and anything much longer seems verbose. This is an approximate guide.
• A critique should be a freestanding piece of writing. It should, generally speaking, be structured into three main parts: introductory remarks (readability rating), detailed observations about the text (troubleshooting), and closing remarks (overview), which may recommend other reading, refer to other texts, raise more general questions, etc.
• In the case of poetry, the poems need to be critiqued one by one rather than through an overview which can easily lose focus. Introductory and summative remarks are still very useful here.
• Don’t add to the files unnecessarily. Don’t acknowledge receipt of a critique just to be friendly and only respond to a critique if the ensuing discussion is leading us somewhere new or significant.
• Don’t defend yourself against critiques unless they seem to miss important points and these points themselves raise important questions. Once a discussion does begin to digress from the work in hand it should be taken to the café.
• Sometimes it’s good to deliberately title a response or a piece of information so that it has a specific rather than a generic title.
• Guidelines are just that - they’re sensible parameters not a straitjacket, so please feel free to respond with idiosyncratic enthusiasm too!
We hope that the WIP sessions will also result in increased posting in the ‘What I’m Reading’ section of the site, since this is a developing, student generated source of invaluable reference material.
Examination by Viva Voce
At the end of your doctoral studies students will submit their thesis to a panel of examiners, including external and internal examiner. The panel will be independently chaired and your supervisor can be present at your request. You will be questioned closely about your thesis and you will be expected to ‘defend’ its contents by offering verbal arguments in support of it. The viva is a necessarily rigorous process and even successful candidates are requested to carry out some small revisions to their thesis. Major revisions may be requested, in which case the award may be withheld until the examiners have approved all changes. See below for further details.
The Structure of the PhD Programme
Full-time PhD, Year 1
Student is logged onto the LUVLE site. The PhD proposal is reviewed. Termly work plans should be presented. Research training and PDP are undertaken. Student maintains a Writing Journal to log creative/reflective process. Field research begins, if any. Programme of reading begins. Creative project begins, accompanied by reflexive cover sheets. By the end of year 1 the student should have:
• Produced a substantial portfolio of creative work – at least a third of the entire project
• Maintained a Learning Log in electronic form
• Compiled a bibliography
The annual review usually takes place between your supervisor (s) and one other academic (usually your secondary supervisor). For the annual review the student is asked to submit:
• A PhD abstract – a half-page summary of the creative and reflective projects summarising key research questions and approach
• A revised PhD proposal taking account of new developments
• A sample of creative work up to 15,000 words (prose) or equivalent (up to15 poems)
• Sample pages from their Learning Log
• A detailed progress report
• A bibliography
Full-time PhD, Year 2
Student continues with main body of creative project. Writing Journal is maintained. Bibliography is developed. Reflective thesis is planned. The confirmation panel takes place at between 18 and 24 months. It will be independently chaired and will have two external members as well as your supervisor. For this the student will submit to the panel:
• Revised PhD abstract - a one-page summary of your research, its methods and its 'original contribution to knowledge'
• Revised PhD proposal, including revised research questions
• A sample of creative work up to 30,000 words (prose) or equivalent (up to 30 poems)
• A chapter plan of the reflective thesis
• Sample pages from the Learning Log
• A bibliography
• A progress report on the research process
This body of work will be reviewed by a panel consisting of your supervisor and one or two independent readers from the Department or cognate departments. If the Department is required to report on you to the AHRC, or a similar funding body, this review will be an essential component of the report. The committee, again in consultation with your supervisor, will also consider if the work submitted provides grounds for recommending the confirmation of your registration as PhD.
The submission for the review and confirmation panels should be discussed in detail with your supervisor. These panels normally take place before or shortly after the end of the summer term in any academic year, depending on the date of your registration. Supervisors are responsible for convening panels for their students and arranging their membership and chairpersons. Students are responsible for consulting their supervisor, making sure their work is in order and sending it electronically to all panel members no less than 10 days before the date of the panel meeting.
If the panel decides that it cannot recommend such a confirmation, students are free at any subsequent date during their registration to make a further submission. But students should be aware that the University normally insists on a further minimum period of study (usually one year, full-time) after a confirmation of status is agreed before a thesis can be submitted. It is therefore sensible to attend to the business of submitting work to a confirmation panel as soon as possible.
Please note that this Department believes strongly that students should not expect to be confirmed as a PhD automatically and may, for many reasons, have a project more suited to an MPhil. Acceptance onto a PhD programme does not, in any way, guarantee that the student will be awarded the qualification at the end of his or her registration period. Students must be aware that, in the UK, the PhD is the highest academic qualification available and that very rigorous standards of scholarship continue to apply.
Full-time PhD, Year 3
The creative project is completely drafted and undergoes revision. The critical/reflective thesis is completely drafted and undergoes revision. A review panel is held to look at a selection of the work. Both elements are combined into a completed PhD thesis. The completed thesis is proofread Internal and external examiners are identified and approached. The thesis is bound and submitted in triplicate along with an electronic back up. A date for the viva is set. The student is prepared for their viva. Viva takes place.
Part-time PhD
The part-time PhD usually takes place over 4 to 6 years (maximum time 72 months; minimum time usually 48 months, but with special permission this can be shortened to 42 months). A review is still held each year with submission of all the mandatory academic elements but approximately half of the work-in-progress stipulated for full-time students. Upgrade will normally take place at the end of the 4th year, with a full range of reflective and creative work being evidenced.
Assessment & Examination
Both the MPhil and the PhD in creative writing consist of a substantial portfolio of creative work plus a reflective/critical thesis. The word-counts given below are general guidelines and will be of little use for those students working in the field of poetry. Your supervisor will advise you about the contents of your submission, which in the case of the PhD is a book-length work of creative writing plus a thesis of up to 20,000 words.
The Viva
Once the completed thesis has been submitted, the external and internal examiners will be asked to read it within approximately three months. An oral examination will then be scheduled at which the student will be expected to defend their thesis. All students should be offered a mock viva before the actual examination.
The responsibility for organising a mock viva lies with the student's primary supervisor. They should also initiate arrangements for the viva proper with assistance from the postgraduate secretary. The internal examiner is responsible for liaising with the external examiner (once appointed) in preparation for the viva. The director of the PhD programme in Creative Writing can advise on the choice of a chairperson and internal and external examiners. The Director of postgraduate studies for English & Creative Writing can offer procedural advice, if necessary. In no circumstances is the candidate to approach a prospective examiner directly.
If the student has held a lectureship at Lancaster University then two externals should be appointed for the examination. If the supervisor does not believe the thesis is ready for submission but the student wishes to submit anyway, then the supervisor’s views will be submitted in writing before the examination to the Director of Postgraduate Studies and the Dean of Graduate Studies.
Vivas vary enormously depending on the combination of examiners and students. In general they last at least one and a half hours, though some may last a lot longer than that. It is always advisable for students to reread their work a couple of times before their viva and to be prepared to discuss its strengths and weaknesses. The questions range from the very general, looking at the remit and focus of the project, to the methodological and theoretical approaches employed, to the very detailed (‘what did you mean when you wrote ...?’). As it is impossible to predict the form of individual vivas, it is best to have a mock viva but not have too fixed an idea of what the actual viva will be like. Talking to previous students about their experience may be useful if they are still around, but your own viva may follow a different pattern.
Following the viva, examiners are asked to make one of the following recommendations:
The degree of PhD should be awarded:
a. Forthwith
b. Subject to corrections being made (see (i) below)
c. Subject to amendments being made (see (ii) below)
and if b or c are required, the external may be willing to agree that these should be verified by the internal examiner only.
The degree of PhD should NOT be awarded:
a. Permission should be given for the thesis to be revised and resubmitted within 12 months for the degree of PhD (see (iii) below)
b. The degree of MPhil be awarded
c. 12 months for the degree of MPhil (see (iii) below)
Notes
(i) The term ‘corrections’ refers to typographical errors, occasional stylistic or grammatical flaws, corrections to references, etc. Corrections should be made within 3 months from the notification of the result of the decision.
(ii) The term ‘amendments’ refers to stated minor deficiencies, requiring some textual revisions. Amendments should be made within 6 months from the notification of the result of the decision.
(iii) If resubmission is recommended please enclose your report, on a separate sheet, advice about modifications to the thesis which will be sent to the student within one month of the viva voce examination.
Further Information:
The University Postgraduate Handbook and Regulations, University registry
Further Reading:
How to Examine a Thesis, Lynne Pearce, Open University Press 2005
The Doctoral Examination Process, Penny Tinkler & Carolyn Jackson, Open University Press, 2004
How to Survive Your Viva, Rowena Murray, Open University Press, 2003
Code of Practice
This is a sample of the document that we expect all research students (not taught) to read and sign during their fist week in the Department. It includes vital information on our supervision, monitoring and upgrading procedures which all new students should familiarise themselves with.
Supervision
What you can expect of us:
If you are a campus-based student, your supervisor should be seeing you on average once a fortnight (full-time students), or once a month (part-time students), in order to discuss your progress, work out goals, and discuss the written work which you should start producing as soon as possible (the regularity of these meetings is not, however, set in stone, and it is normal for supervisions to be held more frequently at the beginning and end of a PhD, and rather less frequently during the middle-phase).
You can expect written work to be read and commented on by your supervisor within two weeks; you cannot expect that a supervisor will always have time to read work given in just before supervision.
Distance learning students can expect two substantial tutorials per term. You can submit up to 5-8,000 words of narrative prose to your tutor or 5-8 poems and they will respond with a detailed written report. All exchange is via the LUVLE site. You should expect a response from your tutor within two weeks. Your tutor may also wish to see you face-to-face, or to speak to you via phone or video link, at least once each year.
It is possible that during your time at Lancaster the supervisor originally assigned to you will be away on sabbatical leave. In this case, we will do our best to provide a suitable alternative supervisor, although in many cases the supervision is continued at a distance. All new students will, however, be allocated a supervisor on site even if their prospective main supervisor is away.
Your supervisor should advise you if, in her/his opinion, you are falling behind with your work, or seem unlikely to reach the required standard. Likewise, she/he should tell you when she/he thinks you are ready to submit.
Your supervisor should also be consulted if you decide to change your registration e.g. from full-time to part-time.
What we expect of you:
That you attend regular supervision, and produce written work as soon as possible. That, in conjunction with your supervisor, you work to produce a realistic plan for your thesis, and that you attempt to complete within the time-span.
Monitoring
What you can expect of us:
The University now requires us to monitor postgraduate students’ progress very thoroughly, and you will be asked to complete a mid-session report during the Lent term, and a departmental and a University progress report form during the summer term. It is very important that you undertake this task and that you are honest as it will enable the Postgraduate Director and Dean of Graduate Studies to trouble-shoot any problems around supervision etc. It is also now normal practice for your supervisor to organise an annual review panel at some point each year, but usually in the Summer term. Like the upgrade panel, this will give you an opportunity to discuss the progress and direction of your work with a member of staff other than your supervisor: a practice very useful for all concerned.
What we expect of you:
That you complete and sign the forms and return them to the Postgraduate Secretary by the date given.
Deadlines and Confirmation
What you can expect of us:
Work submitted for confirmation of the PhD will be read by your supervisor and another member of staff normally through the face-to-face meeting or panel, which is now seen as a useful preparation for the viva voce examination at the end of your studies. This is new standard practice for all academic departments/institutions at the University. The confirmation decision is then made known to the departmental Research and Postgraduate Committee, and formally ratified by the University’s Dean of Graduate Studies.
What we expect of you:
That you produce the required work by the required deadlines.
Confirmation of PhD Status
At Lancaster, all research students are registered for a PhD but this will only be confirmed if their project shows sufficient breadth, depth and originality to be suitable for a PhD. Otherwise an MPhil may be recommended. On this point, we would like to emphasise that an MPhil is a substantial and important research qualification in its own right, and that students should not regard it as a failed PhD. Some topics are better suited to this qualification.
Confirmation normally takes place between 12–18 months into the research for full-time students and between 24–36 months for part-time students. (For AHRC-funded students, it must be no later than 18 months.)
For full-time students, maximum time allowed for the completion of the degree is 48 months; minimum time usually 36 months, but with special permission this can be shortened to 30 months; for part-time students, maximum time is 72 months; minimum time usually 48 months, but with special permission this can be shortened to 42 months; for MPhil students, maximum time is 36 months; minimum time usually 24 months (or 60 months maximum and 36 months minimum if you are part time).
Submission & Binding of Theses
Candidates are required to submit two soft-bound copies of their PhD thesis to the Postgraduate Studies Office (A24, University House), who will arrange for the theses to be sent to the examiners. After the viva, once the thesis has been examined and all corrections have been completed, it is a University regulation that students must arrange for two hard-bound copies of their thesis to be submitted to the University. We therefore suggest you leave a cheque (made payable to Brady Bookbinders Ltd.) to cover the cost of hard-binding with the Postgraduate Secretary when you submit your corrected copies to the Department. The Postgraduate Secretary will then arrange for the hard-binding of both copies of your thesis. Please note that candidates will not be awarded their degree until proof of hard-binding has been received at the Postgraduate Studies Office.
The Postgraduate Secretary has information about the current regulations for format, submission and binding of theses. Information can also be obtained from the Postgraduate Studies Office (A24, University House).
The Student’s Responsibilities
• As a research student you have a number of responsibilities, which include:
• Arranging and maintaining contact with your supervisor(s).
• Consulting your pigeonhole, email, and notice-boards regularly.
• Alerting your supervisor(s) to any difficulties. In exceptional circumstances you may prefer to discuss the matter with the Director of Postgraduate Studies.
• Maintaining progress as laid down in the programme of work Agreeing with your supervisor(s) on when to submit the thesis bearing in mind the regulations governing minimum/maximum periods of study.
• Reporting any formal complaints to your supervisor(s), the Director of Postgraduate Studies or the Head of Department, who will take action.
Supplementary Information
Financial Information
Up-to-date information on postgraduate fees is available on the Student Registry site at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/sbs/registry/postgrads/fees.htm. Please note that fees for PhD by distance learning are, at present, identical to those for campus-based learning; the University category of 'studying away' does not apply to virtual learning programmes, which are weighted the same as their part-time or full-time campus based equivalents.
Self-funding students are expected to pay their fees on Registration Day, but can arrange to pay online in termly tranches, by going to:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/finance/onlinepayments/.
Financial Support
DLMA Overseas Scholarships
Two Overseas Scholarships worth £8,000 over the two years. They are attached specifically to the DLMA and awarded annually on merit. Details can be obtained from the Creative Writing Course Officer, Lyn Kellett.
Other Funding Opportunities
Only limited funding is available at either MA or PhD level. Information on studentships/scholarships and bursaries can be found on the Departmental website’s funding page, at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/postgrad/english/fees.htm
The Department may be able to help with conference expenses, if you are giving a paper. Forms to apply for expenses can be obtained from the Postgraduate Secretary. We will not usually be able to cover the entire amount. Decisions on expenses will be made in the summer, at the end of the financial year. The Faculty is hoping to institute a fund for this purpose.
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International Students
The Overseas Student Advisor in Student Services co-ordinates a special introductory programme for international students in addition to the general programme designed to assist all students in getting to know the University. The programme includes meetings with an advisor, talks on all matters of particular concern, a civic reception and excursions to local places of interest. Further visits take place throughout the year. News of these and of social events, some involving local organisations, are given in a newsletter sent regularly to all international students and a display of material of interest is also available.
There are weekly social meetings for the partners of overseas students so that they have a chance to get to know each other, and English Language classes are provided, free of charge, for those partners who wish to acquire some knowledge of English while in Lancaster.
English Language Teaching
Whilst all students entering the University are required to have a good standard of English, the University recognises that students entering a new academic environment may need extra support. The Student Learning Development Centre runs a free Academic Support Programme, primarily for students registered in any academic department of the University whose first language is not English. This course can offer special group tutorials for individual departments; weekly classes, for students from mixed disciplines; individual tutorials for any student who need extra support, particularly with written communication.
The general mixed discipline classes focus on: language awareness; listening to lectures; reading academic assignments; writing academic assignments; seminar preparation and social English.
The 1:1 tutorial service is available for anyone needing more individual help, especially in writing. After reading your assignment, written feedback will be given and then there is a chance to discuss any other points you wish. In the light of the comments, the assignment can then be re-written, if desired.
The Centre also offers pre-sessional courses in Study Skills each summer for which fees are charged, some of these courses being run in conjunction with University departments. The courses are designed to prepare students prior to studying on their degree programme.
Counseling & Support Services
The Counseling Service offers a confidential and professional service to all members of the University. A number of our students have had occasion to use the Counseling Service, which they have found to be very helpful and worthwhile.
The Counseling Service is open five days a week throughout the year. One of the eight (part-time) counselors can usually offer an appointment within a few days and this can be made by visiting the office, which is on B floor in Furness College, or by phoning ext. 92690. An answer-phone is in operation when the office is closed. If you have mobility difficulties, staff will arrange an accessible meeting place.
The Counseling Service hopes to provide a welcoming and friendly environment where people can feel comfortable and, most crucially secure in the knowledge that whatever is said will be safeguarded by their strict standards of confidentiality.
Student Representation
Postgraduate Student Representatives will be appointed at the beginning of each new academic year (1 MA Rep. and 1 Research Rep.). Details of names and how to contact them will be displayed in the Department. Postgraduate Representatives will be entitled to attend, propose agenda items and vote in departmental meetings as well as the Postgraduate and Research Committee meetings, which deal specifically with postgraduate matters. The Postgraduate and Research Committee meets once a term, whilst departmental meetings are called at the discretion of the Head of Department. The Representatives will be kept informed of the times and agendas of meetings. If more than one student volunteers for the post, we will hold an election.
Postgraduate Resources & Events
Reading Groups
Student Magazines
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