Whether you are studying creative or professional writing, the library has books, journals and databases to suit your needs.
Welcome to our guide about Creative and Professional Writing resources. As the Learning and Research Librarian for Humanities and Languages, I am here to support you in your learning and assignments.
Michelle Crowther, Learning & Research Librarian for Humanities and Languagues
You can find books about creative writing on the third floor at classmark 808 both on the open and moving shelves.
E-books are very handy as you can read them off-campus. We have several titles which you can find them via the library’s catalogue and search tool Library Search e.g. Researching creative writing by Jen Webb and Creative writing: a workbook with readings by Linda Anderson.
Stephen King (2012) said: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” The library has a good selection of fiction, both adult and children’s, to help you in your studies. The children’s fiction is located on the 2nd Floor of Augustine House. It includes picture fiction, junior fiction and senior fiction. Digitized copies of older literary works are available via Historical Texts.
The library also has access to contemporary fiction ebooks and audiobooks via the Overdrive platform. You can download the Libby app to borrow books from this collection.
Project Gutenberg – Freely available ebooks. Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, M.E. Braddon, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Cholmondeley, Lewis Caroll, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Wood and many more.
You can keep up to date with the publishing industry by reading some of the following publications:
Or you may like to read some examples of creative writing in magazines such as Interzone or Black Static. You can find these in the Silent Zone on the second floor near the lifts.
Online journals about the theory and practice of creative writing are also available and include: Contemporary Literature, Editor and Publisher, Hollywood Scriptwriter, Journal of Poetry Therapy, Life Writing, Literary Imagination, and New Writing: International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing.
To find out more about journals published for creative writers, you can use an app such as Browzine. Not only does it store all your favourite journals, it enables you to easily find and read the most recent issue from your mobile device (and store them in a bibliographic management tool such as Zotero or Mendeley).
Open access journals are often scholarly, but the difference is, they believe in making their research accessible to anyone with an internet connection. This means that you don’t have to have a subscription to read the articles they publish. An example of a peer-reviewed open access journal is Writing in Practice: The Journal of Creative Writing Research – produced by the National Association of Writers in Education.
Sometimes you may want to look for journal articles on a specific topic, such as life writing or fantasy fiction. You don’t have to browse for articles using Browzine, but can use a search engine such as Library Search or Google Scholar. Both are good, but they have different functions and it is good to be aware of that. Google Scholar searches scholarly material, but you may not be able to access all of the material whereas Library Search is linked to the CCCU journal subscriptions. Run a quick search in LibrarySearch to find full-text journal articles to read online using key words or phrases connected with your research topic e.g. “horror” or “writing non-fiction”. You can read the Library Search quick guide for more information.
JSTOR is also a popular journal database which provides access to past issues of journals.
If you need a journal article that the university doesn’t subscribe to, try document delivery. It's a great service for that end-of-year assignment.
Kanopy is a video-streaming service which includes a number of documentaries such as Mary Shelley and the Birth of Science Fiction and Science Fiction: Jules Verne to Ray Bradbury and Beyond. Plus, we have access to Box of Broadcasts (BoB) which archives British TV and radio broadcasts. Here you can find the BBC4 series Tomorrow’s Worlds: the Unearthly History of Science Fiction. You can search for a topic and find BBC, Channel 4 and Sky documentaries. Another great feature is that you can take clips of programmes and put them in your presentations or analyse the transcripts. Visit the Learning on Screen How to Videos or look at the CCCU Box of Broadcasts guide.
The library has some printed ‘shooting scripts’ which you can find with the books at class mark 791.437 on the third floor of Augustine House. For online material, the following web sites are recommended:
BBC Writers Room – script library and writing opportunities.
Daily Scripts – a collection of movie scripts and screenplays to serve as a resource for writers and actors.
Drama Online – digital library of play texts, filmed live performances, audio plays.
Script Slug – Download movie, tv, and web series scripts in PDF format or follow them on Twitter to find out what’s new @ScriptSlug.
Simply Scripts – A database of hundreds of downloadable scripts, movie scripts, screenplays, and transcripts of current and classic movies.
You can access corpora of scripts for TV, movies and American soap operas. These are useful for cross-searching several programmes simultaneously.
For industry news the Script Lab is quite good.
The following databases are available via the Find Databases A to Z link on Library Search. Don’t forget to log in to Library Search using your computing account to gain full access:
National Association of Writers in Education – organisation supporting the development of creative writing of all genres and in all educational and community settings throughout the UK.
Poetry Society – The Poetry Society was founded in 1909 to promote “a more general recognition and appreciation of poetry”.
Society of Authors – union for more than 10,000 writers, illustrators and literary translators, at all stages of their careers.
Writers Guild of Great Britain – includes advice and industry guidelines for writers.