Serious Play provides students with a distinctive approach to prose fiction that privileges form and style for their own sake ahead of subject matter, narrative and voice. It proposes a series of playful constraints and provocations as the starting point for literary creation, drawing on key concepts in the scholarly study of the ludic mode. Students will undertake structured writing tasks in response to formal restrictions and games of chance to open up a space dedicated to innocent risk and joyful experiment, as a strategy to liberate their writing practice from the burdens of thematic significance, personal authenticity, or literary convention.