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2025 Spring

CREATIVE WRITING - COM351 Spring 2025


Course
Anthony Marais
For information about registration please contact our admissions.

The aim of COM 351 is to improve your creative writing and critical thinking skills, enable you to generate writing in the future, and to impart the methodology necessary for a career as a creative writer. To accomplish this, students will receive training in practical and theoretical aspects of creative writing through lectures, critical readings and exercises, focusing on narrative fiction in four types: essays, screenplays, novels and short stories.

Here is the course outline:

1. Introduction

Feb 5

Syllabus Review, Teaching Creative Writing, Art vs. Science, Rules of Writing

2. Aphorisms

Feb 12

Art & Creativity, The Aesthetics Schematic, Aphorisms vs. Truisms, Narrative Structure (1)

3. Crafting Conversation

Feb 19

Word Choice, The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Artistic Ethos, Narrative Structure (2)

4. Memes and Archetypes

Feb 26

Pet Rocks, Memes and Archetypes

5. Public Reading

Mar 5

The Charles Bukowski Archetype

6. Aristotle’s Poetics (part one)

Mar 12

Concepts of Tragedy: Hamartia, Anagnorisis, Peripeteia, Catharsis

7. Aristotle’s Poetics (part two)

Mar 19

Components of Tragedy, Elements of Plot, Qualities of Character

8. Character Development (part one)

Apr 2

Psychology and Art, The Alchemical Process, Character Arcs, Empathy

9. Character Development (part two)

Apr 9

The life and death of Antal Szerb

10. Plot Structure

Apr 16

Screenplay analysis: “Psycho” by Joseph Stefano (based on the novel by Robert Bloch)

11. Sex and Violence

Apr 23

The invisible Art: novels vs. film, Modernism, Beauty vs. Novelty, Catharsis

12. Reviewing and Editing (part one)

Apr 30

Dalton Trumbo and the Importance of Words

13. Reviewing and Editing (part two)

May 7

Poetry in Cinema: The Films of Albert Lewin

14. Public Reading (part two)

May 14

Public reading of original work

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