Creative Writing

Creative Writing Courses

The Writing Program at NYU Shanghai also offers a range of creative writing courses designed to support the creative ambitions of our uniquely diverse student body.

In a lively, multicultural setting, these courses foster essential skills in self-expression, persuasion, and analysis, and guide students in their growth as language artists. With a focus on reading, writing, and discussing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in both traditional and emerging digital forms, these courses are built on the idea that sustained practice in these areas strengthens skills valuable across careers—from business and marketing to journalism, game development, interactive media, and even the sciences.

Students interested in further hands-on experience can help edit creative writing’s annual print journal, The Poplar Review, or participate in events with visiting writers and translators in our Literary Reading Series.

Additionally, many of our courses can count toward elective credits for Humanities or Interactive Media Arts majors, offering students a chance to enrich their major studies through creative writing.

Creative Writing Minor 

Requirements 

For students who would like to immerse themselves in creative writing more deeply, NYU Shanghai also offers the Creative Writing Minor for a total of 16 credits:

  • Introduction to Creative Writing (4 credits)
  • 8 credits of intermediate level Creative Writing courses 
  • 4 credits of an additional Creative Writing course (of any level) or a closely related elective (usually in literature, theater, or film).

You can also take creative writing courses at a number of NYU’s global academic centers. Those looking for an intensive summer course have opportunities to enroll in three engaging summer programs: Writers in Paris, Writers in Florence, and Writers in New York.

Course List

Introduction to Creative Writing

CRWR-SHU 159 | 4 credits | Tue/Thu 1:45-03:00pm

This workshop course offers a broad introduction to the art of capturing the world around you in your own original fiction and poetry. Through close readings of classic and contemporary examples, intensive in-class workshops, and vigorous revision, students will learn to make their stories and poems live on the page through attention to plot, character, dialogue, language, heartbreaking images and the mystery of the perfect line break.

Pre-requisites: None Equivalency: This course counts for CRWRI-UA 815 Creative Writing: Introduction to Fiction and Poetry Introduction to Creative Writing is a requirement for all intermediate/advanced workshop classes. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course.

 
Introduction to Creative Writing: Literary Translation

CRWR-SHU 245 | 4 credits

In this new version of our introductory course, students will focus on writing their own stories, poems, and dramatic dialogues, as in any Intro to Creative Writing course. However, instead of working with a more conventional creative writing textbook, students will study craft through the lens of literary translation, getting “inside” exemplary works of literature by producing their own translations among and between Chinese, English and other languages. Translation will serve as a prompt for student’s own works, providing models and patterns for close study that students can then experiment with, take inspiration from, and adapt (or depart from) in creating their own work. This class recognizes and celebrates the global nature of reading and writing literature in the 21st century, and encourages students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds to draw on their native tongues, traditions, and techniques in creating compelling work in English — but not just in English (or in one variety of English).
 
This course fulfills the Introduction to Creative Writing requirement for Creative Writing minors or a Humanities Survey requirement, with approval.

 

 

Speculative Fictions

CRWR-SHU 200A | 4 credits

Science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, alternative histories—all fall under the heading of speculative fiction. In this class, students will study and practice worldbuilding, combining imaginative writing with research to create compelling, believable worlds, characters and stories—whether they are situated on other planets, in other dimensions, in magical realms, in super-high-tech futures, or wherever else the imagination can take us.

This course satisfies IMA Seminar and Creative Writing Minor. It is cross-listed with INTM-SHU 295. This course counts for an elective in Creative Writing, IMA and the Humanities major. 

 

Intermediate Poetry Workshop

CRWR-SHU 221 | 4 credts | Wed 4:15-6:45 pm

In this intermediate creative writing workshop, students will explore the possibilities of poetry by writing and sharing their own work while also engaging with exemplary works by great poets from a range of traditions, background and times, with a practical emphasis on contemporary poetry and its many vibrant modes and methods. At times, students will experiment with age-old forms such as the sonnet, haiku and sestina; at other times students will pursue the possibilities of contemporary performance poetry and spoken word, Modernist collage and pastiche, postmodern hybrid poetries, and emergent digital poetics. The goal for each student will be to create a body of work that draws on knowledge of traditional forms while also speaking directly to the unique circumstances of our times -- and each individual poet's experience.

Prerequisites: Students must have either 1) completed an Introduction to Creative Writing Course (CRWR-SHU 159 or CRWR-SHU 161) or 2) be of junior or senior standing.

Fulfillment: This course will fulfill one of the two the Intermediate Workshop components for the creative writing minor. Humanities other Advanced course.

Intermediate Creative Nonfiction: Forms of the Personal Narrative

CRWR-SHU 209 | 4 credits 

In this intermediate creative writing workshop, students will write with the “I.” They will explore narrative possibilities across genres and modes, working at times from direct observation: observation of the self, of the world, and of the shifting relationships between and among all of us and it in its and our countless points and moments. At times, students will draw upon memory, at other times they will pay close attention to that which presents itself to us (as we present ourselves) “in the moment,” and at yet others upon research and reading. Throughout, students will experiment using techniques associated with fiction and poetry to push the “personal essay” in the direction of inspired creative nonfiction, memoir, autofiction, lyric and experimental poetry, and cross- genre hybrids. Along the way, they will develop a richer and more nuanced critical vocabulary to help us talk and think about what they are reading and writing.

This course counts for an elective in Creative Writing, IMA and the Humanities major.   

 

Writers on Writing

CRWR-SHU 260 | 4 credits | Tue 3:15-5:45 pm

The premise of this course is that gifted writers highly conscious of their craft teach us more pointedly about creative writing when, juxtaposed to the creative work of each, we hear, see and experience what each identifies as fundamental to his or her writing practice — whether technique, discipline, recurrent battle, avenue of inspiration, self-imposed rule or other. This course looks to such writers as guides from whom we may learn by studying the steps they have taken over time to develop and hone their craft. The course typically (but not always) pairs, each week, one or two pieces of an author’s creative work with another that reflects critically on some aspects of their writing practice, and on the craft of writing. In essence, this is a hybrid course that blends study of creative work with that of writers' critical self-reflection. Students also pursue their own creative writing projects, reflecting critically on their own process along the way. The course readings draw from multiple cultures, literary traditions, and genres including the short story, flash fiction, the novella, the essay, memoir, diary, children’s literature and poetry.

Prerequisite: Writing as Inquiry WRIT-SHU 101/102 OR CRWR-SHU 159 Introduction to Creative Writing OR CRWR-SHU 161 Introduction to Creative Writing: Literary Translation Focus

Fulfillment: This course counts as one of the three intermediate/advanced creative writing workshops required for completion of the Creative Writing Minor.