Cirrus@Austlit

Outcomes: Students are able to shape personal imaginings into writing which interest a wider readership; understand that all creative writing requires a persuasive use of craft which may involve several stages of revision; deploy literary strategies—relating to characterisation, imagery, setting, atmosphere, storyline and plot, thematic resonance—which are common to the chosen form of writing; and prepare a manuscript which meets the common requirements for presentation of a literary manuscript.

Content: This unit enables students to write in what seem to be contrasting genres—autobiographical fiction (including journal and memoir) or speculative fiction (including science fiction, fantasy, magical realism). The unit explores the necessary inventiveness of writing about the self and the way in which speculative fiction is necessarily anchored in the observations and experience of the writer.

Writing about the self may seem like a simple process of disclosure, yet it raises fascinating problems for the writer, including ownership of stories, the ethics of disclosure, the status of objective truth, and the writer's willingness and capacity to represent what we may think of as unembellished truth. Similarly, writing about strangeness (through science fiction, fantasy or magical realism) may seem like a simple process of free invention, but it involves problems of verisimilitude, scientific plausibility and the writer's ability to suspend the reader's disbelief. When we write about ourselves we make a version of the self in language, and when we write of other worlds or other possibilities we make a new world in language.

The unit is divided into two streams—autobiographical fiction and speculative fiction. Students concentrate on one stream only and consider the key forms, conventions, and techniques of writing in the selected genre.