Serious Play provides students on the Creative Writing Pathway with a distinctive approach to prose fiction which privileges form and style for their own sake ahead of subject 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 responding to formal restrictions including: conventional narrative structure; games of chance and accident; pastiche and retellings; and verbal chaos, automatic writing and wordplay. The module opens a space dedicated to innocent risk and joyful experiment, free from the responsibility many writers quite properly feel for meaning and significance, for authentic expression of personal identity, or serious engagement with complex political and social issues.