Advanced Topics

This page branches out from the Core Creative Writing curriculum into five specialization tracks. These are electives, not a checklist: pick the one or two tracks that match what you actually want to write, rather than working through all of them.

Fiction: The Novel and Genre Craft

Deepens novel-length narrative craft, with a focus on genre fiction, diagnostic revision, and sentence-level style.

Genre Fiction Craft: Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture (BYU, 2025 edition) - a free, university-level lecture series on plotting, worldbuilding, and character for speculative fiction, widely regarded as one of the best entry points into genre craft at depth.

Novel Structure & Diagnostic Revision: Story Grid (Shawn Coyne) - a free framework (podcast, blog, and diagnostic method) built by a veteran editor for figuring out why a full manuscript isn't working and how to fix it at the structural level.

Mythic Structure & Genre Convention: The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 25th Anniversary Edition (Christopher Vogler) - the standard text on archetypal plot structure, useful for understanding (and deliberately subverting) genre conventions.

Advanced Prose Style & Voice: Several Short Sentences About Writing (Verlyn Klinkenborg) - a sentence-level meditation on rhythm and clarity, pitched well above introductory style guides.

Poetry: Advanced Form and Experimentation

Covers advanced formal craft, the history of poetic forms across cultures, and critical immersion in modern and experimental poetics.

Poetic Forms and Traditions: The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (Mark Strand & Eavan Boland) - a chapter-by-chapter survey of major forms (sonnet, sestina, ghazal, and more) with exemplary poems for each.

Modern & Experimental Poetics: Modern Poetry (Yale Open Courses, Langdon Hammer) - a free, full Yale lecture course on Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and the major shifts of 20th-century poetics; read alongside your own writing practice rather than as a substitute for it.

Advanced Poetic Voice & Process: The Triggering Town (Richard Hugo) - a classic, opinionated set of lectures and essays on where poems come from and how to trust your own material once you're past the basics.

Screenwriting & Dramatic Writing

Builds on core screenwriting fundamentals with advanced structure, series writing, and adaptation across media.

Screenplay Structure & Narrative Theory: Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (Robert McKee) - the field's most rigorous treatment of dramatic structure and the relationship between character and plot.

Screenplay Structure & Narrative Theory: Save the Cat! (Blake Snyder) - a complement to McKee rather than a substitute: a practical, industry-standard beat-sheet approach used widely for outlining and pitching feature scripts.

Television Series Writing: Writing the TV Drama Series, 4th Edition (Pamela Douglas) - a step-by-step guide to the specific demands of series structure, writers' rooms, and pitching a show, distinct from feature screenwriting.

Adapting Existing Work Across Media: Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature (John Desmond & Peter Hawkes) - covers the analytical and practical choices involved in adapting novels, stories, and plays for the screen.

Literary Nonfiction & Narrative Journalism

Covers long-form true-story craft, the personal essay at an advanced level, and the ethical questions specific to writing nonfiction as literature.

Long-Form Narrative Nonfiction Craft: Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University - advice from working narrative journalists (Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Malcolm Gladwell, and dozens more) on structuring and selling true stories.

Long-Form Narrative Nonfiction Craft: Nieman Storyboard - a free, ongoing companion to the book above: line-by-line annotations and "why's this so good?" breakdowns of standout narrative nonfiction.

Advanced Personal Essay & Memoir: The Situation and the Story (Vivian Gornick) - a close study of how personal narrative constructs a persona and a "truth-speaker," drawn from a century of memoir and essay.

Ethics, Truth, and Fact in Nonfiction: The Lifespan of a Fact (John D'Agata & Jim Fingal) - a real dispute between an essayist and his fact-checker, staged as a book, that makes the tension between narrative license and factual accuracy concrete rather than abstract.

Literary Translation

Covers the craft and theory of carrying literary work across languages, for multilingual writers who want to translate as well as write.

Theory and Practice of Literary Translation: The Craft of Translation (ed. John Biguenet & Rainer Schulte) - essays by working literary translators on the specific problems of moving a text between languages.

Translating Poetry: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (Eliot Weinberger) - a short, close study of nineteen different translations of a single classical Chinese poem, making the stakes of every translation choice visible.

Translating Prose: Voice and Fidelity: This Little Art (Kate Briggs) - a book-length essay on the experience of translating prose, grounded in the author's own work translating Roland Barthes.