Creative Writing Practice: Reflections on Form and Process

✍ Scribed by Debra Adelaide, Sarah Attfield

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 266
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Creative Writing Practice: reflections on form and process explores the craft of creative writing by illuminating the practices of writers and writer-educators. Demonstrating solutions to problems in different forms and genres, the contributors draw on their professional and personal experiences to examine specific and practical challenges that writers must confront and solve in order to write. 

This book discusses a range of approaches to writing, such as the early working out of projects, the idea of experimentation, of narrative time, and of failure.  With its strong focus on process, Creative Writing Practice is a valuable guide for students, scholars and practitioners of creative writing.  

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Part I: Theoretical Challenges: Working It Out
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: The Ethics of Working-Class Realism in Poetry
References
Chapter 3: The Golden Rules
Learning, Not Being Taught
The PhD Versus the MFA
Textualist Atheism and the Death of the Author
Art and Craft
Easy Answers, Hard Questions
Qualified Advice
The Golden Rules
Theory, Practice, Reading and Writing
References
Chapter 4: Screenwriting Beyond the Paradigms: Creative Thinking and Script Development
Introduction
Creative Approaches to Screenwriting
Critical Approaches to Screenwriting
Creative Thinking and Script Development Models
Creative Thinking in Action
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Everything You Can Imagine Is Real: Worldbuilding, the Donnée and the Magic of Writing
Backstage at the Aquarium
The Imagination of Nature
Top Down and Bottom Up: From Concept to Story Mechanics to Sentence
How Do You Know? Research and Beyond
Worldbuilding Traps and Techniques: Exposition, ‘Infodumping’ and ‘Incluing’
Why a Story Is a Journey
This Is Your Brain on Fiction: Beyond Reality
References
Chapter 6: Adaptation: Essence, Originality and Radical Transformation
Introduction
Breaking Free of the Original
Re-visioning the Source Text
Certain Women (Reichardt 2016)—Case Study
Radical Transformations
Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder 1974) a Case Study
Far from Heaven (Haynes 2002)
The Television Scene—Comparative Scene Analysis
Conclusion
References
Part II: Practical Challenges: Starting, Stopping and Failing
Chapter 7: The Writer’s Notebook
References
Chapter 8: Prompting Creativity: Revisiting Aristotle’s Advice on Plot and Character
Introduction
Theory
Example
Exercises
Plot Versus Character
Plot Structure
Plot Complexity
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Trading Hours: Time, Order, and Narration in Lucky’s
Causation, Time, Order
Narration and Time
References
Chapter 10: Writing Without Frames
References
Chapter 11: The Corrections: Succeeding at Failure in the Creative Process
Introduction
Creative Corrections
Completion
Rejection: Losing the Fight with One’s Own Imagination
Uncertainty
Failure of Language
References
Part III: Consolidating the Process: Success and Resilience
Chapter 12: Counting Coco Pops: On Constraint and Creativity
Reading
‘Riting
‘Rithmetic
Appendix
References
Chapter 13: When Your Subjects Do Not Agree: An ‘Idiosyncratically Australian Perspective’
References
Interviews
Chapter 14: Critical Distance: Creative Writing as a Critic-Fan
Critic-Fans as Critical Creative Writers
Creativity Versus Criticism—Is It a Battle?
So What Does All of This Mean for the Creative Writer Who Is (or Wants to Be) a Critic?
How I Approach Creative Writing Work as a Critic-Fan
A Final Note on Critical Writing, Fandom and the Problem of Gender and Identity
References
Chapter 15: Art, Design and Communicating the Story: The Cover of Coach Fitz
References
Chapter 16: Behrouz Boochani: Writing as Resilience and Resistance
Introduction
Cultural Activism in Ilam
Writing from Manus Prison
Victory
References
Index