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Narrative and dialogue - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

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Narrative and dialogue

Paul, our webmaster, is off at Focus on Imaging so we can’t touch the main OCA website. Having announced the Creative Writing Degree at the end of last week, it wasn’t long before someone noticed that we need a third level one course in Creative Writing to complete the degree programme. This course, to be called Narrative and Dialogue will open to enrolment in the early summer. The course details are in the Creative Writing BA(Hons) handbook, which together with the Textiles handbook, is now available to download from last week’s post, but the outline is repeated below:
Narrative and Dialogue (40 Credits)
This course is designed for students interested in any form of creative writing that may involve both theoretical and practical understanding of plot, structure, dialogue, and character development. It will focus on script writing but will also explore those elements of narrative and dialogue that are relevant to the novel and the short story.
Indicative module content

  • Planning: research; proposal, outlines and scene breakdowns (treatments)
  • Plotting and Structure: Back-story, beginnings, ‘set-ups’, middles, progressive developments, and ends. Main plots and subplots and their uses.
  • Character: protagonists and antagonists; character development, and the importance of plot obstacles in the creation of character and the exploration of themes and ideas.
  • Dialogue: text and sub-text, naturalistic and stylised speech.
  • Formatting, drafting and editing.
  • Genre: techniques appropriate to specific genres, i.e. stage, screen, radio.

Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the module, you will be able to:
1. Understand the elementary structures and techniques of narrative
2. Develop the primary skills of narrative – story, character and dialogue – by
analysis and practice.
3. Demonstrate an understanding of the differing demands of differing specific
media for script (stage, screen, radio).
4. Develop critical judgment of their own work in response to constructive feedback


Posted by author: Alison Churchill

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