Theories And Strategies For Teaching Creative Writing Online

As the online world of creative writing teaching, learning, and collaborating grows in popularity and necessity, this book explores the challenges and unique benefits of teaching creative writing online. This collection highlights expert voices who have taught creative writing effectively in the online environment, to broaden the conversation regarding online education in the discipline, and to provide clarity for English and writing departments interested in expanding their offerings to include online creative writing courses but doing so in a way that serves students and the discipline appropriately. Interesting as it is useful, Theories and Strategies for Teaching Creative Writing Online offers a contribution to creative writing scholarship and begins a vibrant discussion specifically regarding effectiveness of online education in the discipline.

Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City explores the common psychological symptom of depersonalization, its influence on literature and the insights it can provide into the writing process. Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel detached from their own selves and the world. Often associated with psychological disorders, it can also affect healthy people at times of stress. Beginning with a first-hand account of the experience, the book goes on to argue that many well-known literary texts, including Camus’s The Outsider and Sartre’s Nausea, evoke a similar psychological state. It shows how a concept of depersonalized writing can be found in the work of literary theorists from widely different traditions, including T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes and Viktor Shklovsky. Finally, it maintains that creative writers can make use of the lessons learned from a study of depersonalization to arrive at a deeper understanding of writing. Given this knowledge, the controversial writing teacher’s maxim show, don’t tell, so often misapplied or misunderstood, can be repurposed as a practical instruction for taking students’ writing to a new level of sophistication and wisdom.

In Creative Writing Scholars on the Publishing Trade: Practice, Praxis, Print, Sam Meekings and Marshall Moore, along with prominent scholar-practitioners, undertake a critical examination of the intersection of creative writing scholarship and the publishing industry. Recent years have seen dramatic shifts within the publishing industry as well as rapid evolution and development in academic creative writing programs. This book addresses all of these core areas and transformations, such as the pros and cons of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, issues of diversity and representation within the publishing industry, digital transformations, and possible career pathways for writing students. It is crucial for creative writing pedagogy to deal with the issues raised by the sudden changes within the industry and this book will be of interest to creative writing students and practitioners as well as publishing students and professionals.

The first study to explore deeply and intimately the complex and multifaceted nature of creative writing practice, The Scholarship of Creative Writing and Practice offers a new route in scholarly inquiry for creative writing studies, probing beyond pedagogical methods (with which most of the field's scholarship is occupied) to explore the writing life as it is experienced by a wealth of international writer/academics. With academic creative writing programs beginning to adopt a more pragmatic, industry-focused stance, students of writing increasingly need and expect to complete their degrees moderately prepared to monetize the skills they have learned – so there is now more than ever a great responsibility to present studies, methodologies and experience that can inform students and instructors. In response, Sam Meekings and Marshall Moore have pulled together academic investigations from some of the most prominent names in creative writing studies to take stock of the diverse definitions and pluralities of creative practice, to examine how they have carved out a 'writing life', what work habits they have adopted to achieve this, how these practitioners work as creatives both within and outside of the academy and to put forward strategies for a viable writing life. Offering intelligent, philosophical, pragmatic and actionable methods for robust writing practice, this book provides a multi-national perspective on the various aspects of practice and process. Essays explore what writing practice means for individuals and how this can be modeled for students; how the mythic nature of creativity can be channeled though practical working habits; practice through the lenses of social responsibility, sensitivity, empathy and imagination; writing during times of duress and the barriers writers encounter in their craft; the demand of author platforms; the role of the creative writing academic/writer; and the process of learning from published and practicing authors. Wide-ranging in its investigations and generous in insight, The Scholarship of Creative Writing and Practice presents creative, imaginative and transdisciplinary approaches to this under-researched area.

Creative Writing in the Digital Age explores the vast array of opportunities that technology provides the Creative Writing teacher, ranging from effective online workshop models to methods that blur the boundaries of genre. From social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to more advanced software like Inform 7, the book investigates the benefits and potential challenges these technologies present instructors in the classroom. Written with the everyday instructor in mind, the book includes practical classroom lessons that can be easily adapted to creative writing courses regardless of the instructor's technical expertise.

Digital Storytelling and Ethics: Collaborative Creation and Facilitation provides a method for analyzing digital storytelling practices that focuses on the rhetorical, dialogic, co-productive, creative storymaking space rather than the finished stories or the technologies. Looking through a new media lens, Amanda Hill situates the digital storytelling genre and writing practice as a co-creative media process created between writers, storytellers, educators/facilitators, institutions, and the audience, and discusses the inter-relationships within the collaborative writing workshop as well as in those found in the dissemination of the final digital stories. Digital Storytelling and Ethics provides a reflexive look at the responsibility of the facilitator in co-creative digital storytelling writing spaces and makes use of diverse international case studies as examples. Hill shows that writing educators/facilitators should interpret their roles within the collaborative creation process. This will ensure that responsible facilitation practices based in witnessing guide the storytelling process and create an environment that treats participants as subjects with the ability to respond to the world. This innovative book is an essential read for collaborative digital writers and facilitators.

For decades theorists have opined that the lines between creative writing and composition need to be lifted, yet little has been written about the pedagogical methods that allow a cohesive approach between the disciplines. This book brings together contemporary authors and well-respected creative writing instructors and theorists to explore ways creativity in composition may be encouraged in student writers. The question in this anthology is not ‘Can writing be taught?’ but ‘How can we inspire students to embrace the creative process no matter what they write?’ This book offers multiple strategies to merge the best practices of teaching writing, regardless of the genre.