Description
Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings provides a complete creative writing course: from ways to jump-start your writing and inspire your creativity, right through to presenting your work to agents and publishers.
It covers the genres of fiction, poetry and life writing (including autobiography, biography and travel writing), combining discussions of technique with readings and exercises to guide you step by step towards becoming more adept at creative writing.
The second edition has been updated and in large part newly written, with readings by a diverse group of contemporary authors displaying a variety of styles and approaches. Each chapter also features an array of inspiring writing exercises, enabling you to experiment with different methods and discover your strengths. Above all, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings will help you to develop your abilities while nurturing your individual voice as a writer.
Table of Contents
Contributors
Introduction
Part 1: The creative process
1: Stimulating creativity and imagination
2: Writing what you know
3: Writing what you come to know
Part 2: Writing fiction
4: Character
5: Setting
6: Point of view
7: Showing and telling
8: Structure and time
9: The story and your readers
10: Editing fiction
Part 3: Writing poetry
11: Introduction to poetry
12: Voice and language
13: Poetic structure
14: Rhyme and metre
15: Revising poetry
Part 4: Life writing
16: Starting out
17: Finding a form
18: Using memory
19: Versions of a life
20: Life characters
Part 5: Going public
21: Going public
22: Presenting your work
READINGS
Part 1: The creative process
1.1 from ‘Fires’
1.2 from ‘A Real-life Education’
2.1 ‘Death of a Naturalist’
2.2 from ‘Netherley’
2.3 from ‘Tomorrow is Too Far’
2.4 ‘Memory: The True Key to Real Imagining’
3.1‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’
3.2 from Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out
Part 2: Writing fiction
4.1 from ‘A Sheltered Woman’
5.1 from ‘The Edge of the Shoal’
6.1 ‘First Journeyman’
6.2 ‘Becky Finch’
6.3 ‘Love Silk Food’
7.1 ‘Going the Last Inch: Some Thoughts on Showing and Telling’
7.2 ‘The Dream’
7.3 ‘Moonlight’
7.4 from ‘Freddy Barrandov Checks … in?’
7.5 from ‘Byron Francis’
7.6 ‘I Could See the Smallest Things’
7.7 ‘Tomorrow is Too Far’
8.1 from The Art of Writing Fiction
8.2 ‘Pigeons at Daybreak’
9.1 ‘Bodies’
9.2 ‘Tattoo’
10.1 ‘Through a Tangle of Branches: Reworking the Poem’
10.2 from ‘Putting Coyolxauhqui Together: A Creative Process’
10.3 from ‘Redrafting and Editing’
10.4 from Steering the Craft
Part 4: Life writing
16.1 from Long Time No See
16.2 from ‘Little Boxes’
17.1 from The Haunting of Alma Fielding
17.2 ‘Red Riviera’
17. 3 ‘Well done, No. 3777!’
18.1 from Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir
18.2 from Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging
18.3 from Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging
19.1 from The Diary of a Young Girl
19.2 ‘Darkness and Light’
19.3 from Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
19.4 from ‘Time Travel on the St. Lawrence River’
20.1 from Bad Blood
20.2 from Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star
20.3 from Foreigners: Three English Lives
Part 5: Going public
21.1 from Tips From a Publisher
21.2 ‘Considering Self-Publishing: A Guide’
22.1 Synopsis for Dark Aemilia
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Index
