ENGL M138.2 | Prof. Daniel Scott Snelson
http://dss-edit.com | dsnelson @ humnet
Tuesdays | Kaplan 211 | 12:00 – 2:50pm
Office Hours held in Kaplan 203
Book here: danny snelson .youcanbook.me
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This creative writing course explores new genres of writing on the internet. We follow emerging trends in digital poetics to develop new ways of creating works that are equally likely to appear on Instagram, through digital video games, in a chat story, generated with LLMs, or even printed on demand in paper format. Studying digital platforms and formats alongside contemporary art and letters, we’ll reimagine experimental writing practices through today’s emerging genres. How might social media platforms facilitate serial narratives? What do games demand of poetry? To what literary purposes might we direct webcomics, memes, or Twitch streams? Using a collective workshop format, we’ll engage in a series of writing experiments that attempt to find some of our own poetic responses to today’s technological environment. No previous training in creative writing or new media is required.
Where necessary, games will need to be purchased on Steam or via the platform of your choice. The course will require one purchase of a Print on Demand edition of your own work. Every effort will be made to make course content freely available.
All other texts, games, magazines, platforms, recordings, and videos will be freely available online.
As a general outline for the course, take note that these are broad strokes subject to change. This seminar is fully interactive, growing and responding to its users. Each week will build on previous weeks, class conversations, and the directions that our study happens to follow. The content of the syllabus will be updated regularly as a result, though the requirements will remain fixed. The syllabus will only be completed after we finish the course, and all research (including your own) has been collected
We only have a handful of chances to meet over the quarter: during which we’ll often work collaboratively to produce meaningful engagement with each other’s work and develop new experiments as a group. Absences will cut into your participation percentage. If you must miss a class, it is your responsibility to make arrangements with me both before and after the absence. This does not necessarily mean the absence will be excused — after one free unexcused absence, each following will drop your grade by half a letter.
This seminar will develop critical and creative tactics for writing on the internet. Through a series of experiments and collective productions, a substantial body of digital literary work will be generated, discussed, and workshopped. By working in—and on—the internet, this course aims to provide new insight into everyday digital life, with a particular emphasis on gender, race, class, and ability. Technical and poetic proficiency will work hand-in-hand to develop new perspectives on creative potential inherent to today’s digital (and post-digital) gaming platforms.
Throughout this course, our central meeting place will be Discord. To the uninitiated, it’s a chat server that we’ll be using as our Course Management System. All news and information about the course will be conducted over Discord. An invitation and signup to the dedicated (private) server will occur on our first meeting. This is a platform for informal conversation, weekly experiments, and advance preparation for seminar meetings and course development. Responsive posts are required.
This creative writing seminar will double as an online “surf club” that gathers, generates, and comments on writing for the internet. We will post creative works before each session and to gather inspiration from the internet. All work posted must be psuedonymous, operating under an invented avatar. This is simultaneously a creative decision and a means of guarding your privacy to enable experimentation across the internet. We’ll discuss this aspect of the course over the first week, and further revision to the process of posting and sharing may respond to course use patterns as they develop.
We will be *playing* in a variety of modes—part of the course will be to learn how to work in these platforms. How does one have meaningful conversation in VR? What does a collaboration in Online Town look like? What collective games might emerge via Etherpad? Throughout, we’ll interrogate form and function of our technology alongside the comics we discuss each week.
As such, the course will require access to a computer (more than a phone or tablet, preferably with a mouse) and adequate internet access in order to fully participate in the range of activities we will explore. If you have any questions or concerns about your setup, please feel free to write or meet with me at any time.
This course aims to facilitate access to research and exploration across a variety of platforms. Please don’t hesitate to draw attention to any point of access that might be improved: from the volume of the conversation, the size of text, the digital access to the texts, and so forth. All possible accommodations will be made. Additionally, or for more information, you may contact the CAE at (310) 825-1501, or access the CAE website at www.cae.ucla.edu.
| Course Actions | Due Date | % of Grade |
|---|---|---|
|
Seminar Attendance & Participation. (See descriptions above.) This is a collaboration-based course. We only get to meet on a handful of occasions this quarter—your input before, after, and during each session is paramount to the course’s function & collective success. |
Ongoing |
20% |
|
Experiment Posts. This course will require regular posts using a pseudonym. Your timely engagement with the weekly experiment will enable the ongoing workshop conversation of the course. Please note that these are *experiments* in the fullest sense—you are expected to play, fail, discover, and surprise yourself. Grades will be non-qualitative given timely assignment fulfillment. |
Ongoing, due Sunday evenings |
20% |
|
Discord Server Interactions. Playful, constructive, collaborative, civil, expanding, informal conversation should characterize the “seminar room” that is Discord. This includes: gathering & sharing resources; responding to peers’ works & sharing your own creative process; idle chatter; fresh finds; etc. Before each session, you should at minimum share:
|
Ongoing, due before class meetings |
20% |
|
Pecha Kucha. Final project rapid-fire presentations. |
6.3.25 |
10% |
|
Final Project. Open format, open platform, full creative license. Develop an experiment we haven’t had a chance to explore or develop a previous experiment into a full-fledged work. Must synthesize and respond to course materials & conversations. Collaboration, invention, exploration all encouraged. Group finals are entirely encouraged. We will develop the scale & scope of final projects in conversation. |
6.17.25 |
30% |
Experiment
Input
Study
Week 1 — 4.1 — Collective Development
Write:
Bio + CYO Experiment. For this first experiment, explore the three lists in the “Input” section and select any writing experiment/metagame that appeals to you. Then! Adapt it to a web platform of your choice. Take any experiment &make it speak to a platform of your choosing. When you’ve finished, write a bio for the psuedonymous author of your experiment so that we might get to know each other (&our avatars!) a bit better.
Bernadette Mayer, Writing Experiments (1970s)
Charles Bernstein, Writing Experiments (2006)
McKenzie Wark, Writing Metagames (2013)
The Syllabus.
Collective Selections.
Playing in Discord.
Inventing the Seminar.
Week 2 — 4.8 — This
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Week 3 — 4.15 — This
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Week 4 — 4.22 — This
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Week 5 — 4.29 — This
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Week 6 — 5.6 — This
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Week 7 — 5.13 — This
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Week 8 — 5.20 — This
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Week 9 — 5.27 — This
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Week 10 — 6.3 — Pecha Kucha Presentations
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