Undergraduate Creative Writing

In addition to reading carefully the specific details concerning portfolio submissions for individual courses, you should keep in mind the following general advice:

Try to demonstrate as wide a range of your writing abilities as possible. 

• For instance, in fiction a range of narrative possibilities (even if they are fragments) will demonstrate your abilities (a good descriptive scene, a good action scene, a good scene that employs dialogue) better than one or two “complete” short stories that might fail. 
• With poetry, instead of submitting a portfolio of 20 rhymed-stanza “hurtin’” poems about a love relationship you had that turned sour, include poems on other subjects and in other formats. Variety in the form and content of your submission alerts the instructor to the breadth and depth of your engagement with writing to date.

Your acceptance into the class (or not) is not necessarily an absolute judgment of your writing ability at this point. 

• We receive many more portfolios than there are places in Creative Writing classes, and if you do not get into one class, you may get into another in another year, or you may gain admission to a class in another genre. 
• If you are not accepted, please don’t be discouraged. Just keep writing (sign up for a Continuing Education Creative Writing class, if you can) and try again.

The questions asked on portfolio submission forms regarding your background (previous writing courses taken, which recent literary titles you have read, etc.) have no right or wrong answers. 

• They are intended to give the instructor a sense of what level of previous writing or reading experience the members of the class possess. This is useful information for the instructor in fine-tuning their course curriculum.