Creative Writing 12

Unit 1: The Creative Writer's Craft

The course's craft identity: thinking creatively and reflectively about ideas, manipulating language on purpose for effect, reaching for figurative as well as literal language, and building the working habits — drafting routines, notebooks, sustained practice — that separate a serious writer from someone who occasionally writes.

• Thinking Like a Creative Writer, Not Just a Reader

• Bending Language for a Reason

• Reaching for Metaphor, Not Just the Literal Word

• Building the Habits of a Working Writer

Unit 2: Genres & Forms of Creative Writing

The course's areas of focus — fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, memoir, graphic and visual texts — and how choosing a form and transforming raw material into an original piece is itself a creative act.

• Choosing the Right Form for the Job

• How Images Carry Story

• Turning Raw Material Into a Finished Piece

Unit 3: Style, Voice & Literary Devices

The writer's stylistic controls: the levers of style, developing a recognizable voice (point of view and persona, and the separate skill of tonal control through humour, irony, satire, and wit), deploying literary devices on purpose, and evaluating how those devices shape meaning in both model texts and your own drafts.

• Style as a Set of Deliberate Choices

• Building a Consistent Narrative Stance
• Controlling Tone Through Humour, Irony, Satire, and Wit

• Deploying Craft Techniques on Purpose
• Judging Whether a Device Is Earning Its Place

Unit 4: Writing Process & Portfolio

The productive strand: reflecting honestly on your own process, moving a piece through drafting and revision, polishing usage and conventions with enough control to make deliberate departures, assembling a portfolio that shows growth, creating for real audiences, and refining a piece for maximum clarity and impact.

• Reflecting on How You Write

• Moving a Piece from Draft to Finished

• Usage: Catching the Errors That Undercut a Piece
• Conventions: Punctuation, Capitalization, and Canadian Spelling

• Showing Growth Across a Body of Work

• Writing for a Real Reader, Not Just an Assignment

• The Last Pass: Cutting What Doesn't Earn Its Place

Unit 5: Reading, Responding & Sharing

The receptive and sharing strand: reading model works closely for craft, distinguishing literal from inferential meaning, understanding First Peoples narrative structures and protocols of ownership, evaluating the reliability of sources, choosing how to perform or share a piece aloud, and citing sources honestly.

• How First Peoples Stories Are Built

• Whose Story Is It to Tell

• Strategies for Reading Closely

• Reading for Subtext

• Performing and Presenting Your Writing

• Story as a Way of Carrying Perspective

• How Place Shapes a Story

• Is This Source Worth Building On

• Picking the Right Format to Share Your Work

• Giving Credit Where a Piece Draws on Someone Else's Work