Creative writing is any form of writing that deviates from traditional professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, and is characterized by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes, as well as various poetic and poetical traditions. Because of the ambiguity of the concept, writing such as feature articles, which belong under journalism, might be deemed creative writing, despite the fact that the content of features is explicitly focused on story and character development.

This category includes both fictional and non-fictional works, such as novels, biographies, short tales, and poems. In the classroom, creative writing is usually divided into fiction and poetry classes, with an emphasis on writing in an original style rather than replicating pre-existing genres like crime or horror. Screenwriting and playwriting are two types of screenwriting that are generally taught separately, yet both fall within the creative writing umbrella.

Mit Opencourseware Creative Writing

mit science fiction writing

Prerequisites

None

Description

This class will focus on the craft of writing genre science fiction. We will examine what makes speculative fiction different and how to construct stories and longer works that fit the requirements of the genre. We will read stories from early to contemporary science fiction in many subgenres to explore the flexibility and mutability of the field, as well as analyze how various great authors have handled central issues in the genre.

While this class will focus on “hard” science fiction, other forms of speculative fiction, including fantasy, will be supported if there is interest. Further, while the readings are primarily short stories, we will address long fiction in discussion. Students are encouraged to write at whatever length and in whatever subgenre of speculative fiction interests them most.

Schedule and Readings

During the first seven weeks of the class, we will discuss techniques directly related to the assigned stories. All stories are to be read by the Tuesday of that week. Exercises during the week will focus on the particular element of style that we have discussed.

The second seven weeks of the class will be devoted to workshops of original student stories. Using the vocabulary of technique, every student will participate in workshops leading to polished, finished fiction.

For a detailed look at the schedule and readings, see the Calendar and Readings sections.

Genre

Our reading will be science fiction short stories. While you are encouraged to write longer fiction or fantasy if that is your preference, I have chosen to use short fiction so that we can cover a larger range of the styles and subgenres in the field. Please do not feel constrained by the readings. You are entirely welcome to work on long fiction / fantasy and I will discuss this in class.

mit creative writing faculty

Our faculty is made up of some of the world’s best known media and writing scholars, teachers, and practitioners. From literature, civic media, digital media, design, and data visualization, to television, games, science fiction, and international pop culture, they are winners of Pulitzer Prizes, National Science Foundation CAREER Awards, and Peabody Awards, and recipients of countless grants and fellowships.

They are also some of the most accessible faculty members anywhere. If you would like to speak or meet with them, we encourage you to contact them.

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	Vivek Bald Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Contact vbald@mit.edu	Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His films include “Taxi-vala/Auto-biography,” (1994) which explored the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and “Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music” (2003) a hybrid music documentary/social documentary about South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. Bald is currently working on a transmedia project aimed at recovering the histories of peddlers and steamship workers from British colonial India who came to the United States under the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws and settled within U.S. communities of color in the early 20th century. The project consists of the Bengali Harlem book as well as a documentary film, “In Search of Bengali Harlem,” (currently in production), and a digital oral history website in development at bengaliharlem.com.
	Marcia Bartusiak Professor of the Practice Emeritus bar2siak@mit.edu	Combining her training as a journalist with a graduate degree in physics, Marcia Bartusiak has been covering the fields of astronomy and physics for four decades and has published in a variety of publications, including Science, Smithsonian, Discover, National Geographic, Astronomy. and Natural History. Her latest books are Dispatches from Planet 3, a collection of cosmological essays, Black Hole: How An Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved and The Day We Found the Universe, about the birth of modern cosmology in the 1920s, which was reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a small wonder” and received the History of Science Society’s 2010 Davis Prize for best history of science book for the public. Bartusiak has also written Thursday’s Universe, a guide to the frontiers of astrophysics; Through a Universe Darkly, a history of astronomers’ quest to discover the universe’s composition; and Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony, a chronicle of the international attempt to detect cosmic gravity waves (which was updated and republished in the summer of 2017). Each was named a notable book by the New York Times. Another of her books, Archives of the Universe, a history of the major discoveries in astronomy told through 100 of the original scientific publications, is used in introductory astronomy courses across the nation. In 2006 Bartusiak received the prestigious Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics for her significant contributions to the cultural, artistic, and humanistic dimension of physics and in 2008 was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for “exceptionally clear communication of the rich history, the intricate nature, and the modern practice of astronomy to the public at large.”
	Ian Condry Professor condry@mit.edu	Ian Condry s a cultural anthropologist of Japan and professor at MIT since 2002. He is the author of two books, Hip-Hop Japan and The Soul of Anime, both of which explore globalization from below. The books are available for free, thanks to Creative Commons and Duke University Press: mit.academia.edu/IanCondry. In the fall of 2019, he launched the MIT Spatial Sound Lab, a community production studio for immersive, multiperspective, sonic experimentation. Among the goals is to provide a space for using sound to disrupt hierarchies, reduce inequalities, and cross borders. He is co-organizer of Dissolve Music, a sound conference and music festival, in 2018 and 2020 (mitdissolve.com). Since 2018, he is the radio DJ for Near and Far, a Japanese hip-hop show, on WMBR 88.1FM Cambridge, and online at wmbr.org, weekly Tuesdays 7-8pm. Archive at mixcloud.com/iancondry. Since 2006, he has organized the MIT / Harvard Cool Japan research project, which explores the critical potential of popular culture. He is currently working on a book about musicians on the margins in Tokyo, Boston, and Berlin.
	Junot Díaz Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing junot@mit.edu	Junot Díaz’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut book, Drown, was met with unprecedented acclaim; it became a national bestseller, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award, and has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was published in 2007 and won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. In 2012, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “Genius Grant”, $500,000 over five years, no strings attached. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Díaz is a professor of writing at MIT.
	Paloma Duong Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Latin American Studies pduong@mit.edu	Paloma Duong is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies. At the intersection of cultural studies, media theory, and critical theory, Paloma researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She works with social texts and emergent media cultures that speak to the exercise of cultural agencies and the formation of political subjectivity. She is currently writing Portable Postsocialisms: Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History, a book-length study of Cuba’s changing mediascape and an inquiry on the postsocialist condition and its contexts. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Art Margins, and Cuban Counterpoints: Public Scholarship about a Changing Cuba.
	Fox Harrell Professor of Digital Media and AI fox.harrell@mit.edu	D. Fox Harrell is Professor of Digital Media & AI in both the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. His research focuses on the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He founded and directs the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) to develop new forms of computational narrative, gaming, social media, and related digital media based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. He is the author of the book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (MIT Press, 2013). In 2010, the National Science Foundation recognized Harrell with an NSF CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” In 2014-2015, he was awarded a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University and was recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication.
	Heather Hendershot Professor Director of CMS Graduate Studies hshot@mit.edu	Heather Hendershot studies conservative media and political movements, film and television genres, and American film history. She has held fellowships at Vassar College, New York University, and Princeton University, and she has also been a Guggenheim fellow. Hendershot is particularly interested in the complicated relationship between “extremist” and “mainstream” conservatism and in how that relationship is negotiated by conservative media. Her courses emphasize the interplay between industrial, economic, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen (big or little). Students are encouraged to consider the ways that TV and film writers, directors, and producers have attempted creativity and innovation while working within an industry that demands novelty but also often fears new approaches to character and narrative. Hendershot is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation (2004) and the author of Saturday Morning Censors (1998), Shaking the World for Jesus (2004), and What’s Fair on the Air? (2011). For five years she was the editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. During the 2014–2015 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University where she wrote Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line (2016). She has recently held fellowships at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and at the Stanford Humanities Center. Her book on network television of the Chicago 1968 Democratic National Convention is forthcoming form University of Chicago Press.
	Eric Klopfer Head of CMS/W Professor and Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade klopfer@mit.edu	Eric Klopfer is Professor and Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. He is also a co-faculty director for MIT’s J-WEL World Education Lab. His work uses a Design Based Research methodology to span the educational technology ecosystem, from design and development of new technologies to professional development and implementation. Much of Klopfer’s research has focused on computer games and simulations for building understanding of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Much of his research centers on the affordances of new technologies including AR, VR and mobile, and how those can be applied today. He is the co-author of the books Adventures in Modeling, The More We Know, and Resonant Games, as well as author of Augmented Learning. His lab has produced software (from casual mobile games to the MMO The Radix Endeavor) and platforms (including StarLogo Nova and Taleblazer) used by millions of people, as well as online courses that have reached hundreds of thousands. Klopfer is also the co-founder and past President of the non-profit Learning Games Network.
	Helen Elaine Lee Professor helee@mit.edu	Helen Elaine Lee is a graduate of Harvard College (1981) and Harvard Law School (1985). She is a novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, The Serpent’s Gift, was published by Atheneum and her second novel, Water Marked, was published by Scribner. Her short story “Blood Knot” appeared in the spring 2017 issue of Ploughshares and the story “Lesser Crimes” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of Callaloo. Helen was on the board of PEN New England for 10 years, and she served on its Freedom to Write Committee and volunteered with its Prison Creative Writing Program, which she helped to start. She has written about the experience of teaching creative writing in prison in a New York Times Book Review essay, “Visible Men”. Her stories about prisoners have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Hanging Loose, Best African American Fiction 2009 (Bantam Books), and Solstice Literary Magazine. Her novel Pomegranate, which will be published by Simon Schuster’s Atria Books, in the fall of 2021, is about a recovering addict who is getting out of prison and, inspired partly by the love of a woman on the inside, strives to stay clean, get her kids back, and choose life. Helen is Director of MIT’s Program in Women’s & Gender Studies.
	Thomas Levenson Professor of Science Writing levenson@mit.edu	Professor Thomas Levenson is the winner of Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, Peabody Award (shared), New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse award. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Discover, and The Sciences. He is winner of the 2005 National Academies Communications Award for Origins.
	Alan Lightman Professor of the Practice of the Humanities lightman@mit.edu	Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. He was educated at Princeton University and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. Before coming to MIT, he was on the faculty of Harvard University. At MIT, Lightman was the first person to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities at MIT, and was John Burchard Professor of Humanities before becoming Professor of the Practice of the Humanities to allow more time for his writing. Lightman is the author of five novels, two collections of essays, a book-length narrative poem, and several books on science. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, Nautilus, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. His novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. His novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in fiction. His most recent books are Screening Room, A Memoir of the South (2015), named one of the best books of 2015 by the Washington Post, The Accidental Universe (2016), named by Brainpickings as one of the best books of 2016, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (2018), an extended essay on the intersection of science and spirituality and the basis for an essay on the PBS Newshour, and In Praise of Wasting Time (2018), which investigates the creativity born from allowing our minds to freely roam. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has won numerous other awards and is the recipient of five honorary degrees. Lightman is also the founding director of the Harpswell Foundation, which works to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.
	Kenneth Manning Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and History of Science manning@mit.edu	Kenneth Manning received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University (History of Science; 1970, 1971, and 1974). He joined the MIT faculty in 1974. His first major work was a study of nineteenth-century mathematics. This was followed by Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just (1983), which won the Pfizer Award and the Lucy Hampton Bostick Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is currently studying the role of blacks in American medicine, and has authored a number of scholarly articles on blacks in science and medicine.
	Seth Mnookin Professor of Science Writing Director of Graduate Studies for Science Writing Director, MIT Communications Forum smnookin@mit.edu	Seth Mnookin is a longtime journalist and science writer and was a 2019-2020 Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the National Association of Science Writers “Science in Society” Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2020, the Polish translation of The Panic Virus won Jagiellonian University’s “Smart Book of the Year” Editors Award. He is also the author of the 2006 New York Times bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, which chronicles the challenges and triumphs of the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox. His first book, 2004′s Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Seth’s 2014 New Yorker piece on rare genetic diseases won the American Medical Writers Association prize for best story of the year and was included in the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including STAT, New York, Wired, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Spin, Slate, and Salon.com. A former music columnist for The New York Observer, he began his journalism career as a rock critic for the now-defunct webzine Addicted to Noise. He graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a degree in History and Science, and was a 2004 Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

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