Tradition In Creative Writing

Tradition in Creative Writing: Finding Inspiration Through Your Roots encourages writers to rediscover sources of creativity in the everyday, showing students how to see your writing as connected to your life. Adrian May addresses a key question for many beginning writers: Where do you get your ideas from? May argues that tradition does not mean anti-progress-but is instead a kind of hidden wealth that stems from literary and historical traditions, folk and songs, self and nature, and community. By drawing on these personal and traditional wellsprings of inspiration, writers will learn to see their writing as part of a greater continuum of influences and view their work as having innate value as part of that cultural and artistic ecology. Each chapter includes accessible discussion, literary and critical readings, creative examples, and writing exercises. While the creative examples are drawn from song lyrics and poetry, the writing exercises are appropriate for all genres. Undergraduates and practitioners will benefit from this guide to finding originality in writing through exploring sources of creative inspiration.

Tradition in Creative Writing: Finding Inspiration Through Your Roots encourages writers to rediscover sources of creativity in the everyday, showing students how to see your writing as connected to your life. Adrian May addresses a key question for many beginning writers: Where do you get your ideas from? May argues that tradition does not mean anti-progress—but is instead a kind of hidden wealth that stems from literary and historical traditions, folk and songs, self and nature, and community. By drawing on these personal and traditional wellsprings of inspiration, writers will learn to see their writing as part of a greater continuum of influences and view their work as having innate value as part of that cultural and artistic ecology. Each chapter includes accessible discussion, literary and critical readings, creative examples, and writing exercises. While the creative examples are drawn from song lyrics and poetry, the writing exercises are appropriate for all genres. Undergraduates and practitioners will benefit from this guide to finding originality in writing through exploring sources of creative inspiration.

Myth and Creative Writing is a unique and practical guide to the arts of creative writing. It: Gives a historical perspective on the storyteller's art Takes a wide view of myth, to include: legends, folklore, biblical myth, classical myth, belief myths, balladry and song. Considers all aspects of the creative process, from conception to completion Provides tips on seeking inspiration from classical and mythic sources Shows how myths can be linked to contemporary concerns Enables beginning writers to tap into the deeper resonances of myth Guides students to further critical and creative resources A secret that all writers know is that they are part of a long tradition of storytelling - whether they call it mythic, intertextual, interactive or original. And in the pantheon of storytelling, myths (those stories that tell us, in often magical terms, how the world and the creatures in it came to be) are the bedrock, a source of unending inspiration. One can dress the study of literature in the finest critical clothing - or intellectualise it until the cows come home - but at its heart it is nothing more - and nothing less - than the study of the human instinct to tell stories, to order the world into patterns we can more readily understand. Exploring the mythic nature of writing (by considering where the connections between instinct and art are made, and where the writer is also seen as a mythic adventurer) is a way of finding close links to what it is we demand from literature, which is - again - something to do with the essences of human nature. Further, in the course of examining the nature of myth, Adrian May provides a very practical guide to the aspiring writer - whether in a formal course or working alone - on how to write stories (myths) of their own, from how to begin, how to develop and how to close.

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

Writers write—but what do they do for money? In a widely read essay entitled "MFA vs NYC," bestselling novelist Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding) argued that the American literary scene has split into two cultures: New York publishing versus university MFA programs. This book brings together established writers, MFA professors and students, and New York editors, publicists, and agents to talk about these overlapping worlds, and the ways writers make (or fail to make) a living within them. Should you seek an advanced degree, or will workshops smother your style? Do you need to move to New York, or will the high cost of living undo you? What's worse—having a day job or not having health insurance? How do agents decide what to represent? Will Big Publishing survive? How has the rise of MFA programs affected American fiction? The expert contributors, including George Saunders, Elif Batuman, and Fredric Jameson, consider all these questions and more, with humor and rigor. MFA vs NYC is a must-read for aspiring writers, and for anyone interested in the present and future of American letters.

Creative Writing Analysis is a guide to solving creative writing problems; acting as a practical introduction to progressing a creative writing project as well as an exploration of the many ways in which creative writing can be understood. Through chapters on topics including writing methods, textual analysis, practice-led research, interdisciplinarity, and cultural contexts, this book explores the various forms of analysis that can be employed. Graeme Harper provides information to assist in creative decision making, and as a means for discussing approaches and outcomes in creative writing. The book also includes an Afterword by Dianne Donnelly, whose work in Creative Writing Studies has been widely recognized as a contribution to the critical examination of creative writing. Whether you are a creative writer seeking to improve your work or you are simply interested in analysing the practice and outcomes of others doing creative writing, Creative Writing Analysis offers strategies to assist students and practitioners of creative writing and literary studies.

Craft lives inside the artist, and it operates in the mind, not in standards or techniques. Creative writers navigate thresholds in consciousness as they develop their arts practice. Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writing explores what it is to be an artist as it traces radical, feminist, and culturally embedded traditions in craft. The new term "craft consciousness" identifies the nexus from which writers explore making processes and practitioner knowledge. Writers, as with all artists, create and reimagine themselves anew, and it is in this perpetual state of becoming that they find ways to enlarge their sense of artistry through an exploration of forms, processes, and mediums beyond the written word. For writers, this book initiates a reexamination of the mission of creative writing through disrupting patriarchal, racist, colonialist, ableist, and capitalist associations with dominant craft. Drawing from twenty-five interviews with living artists outside of writing and in a host of fields from conceptual art to leatherwork and dance, the book shines a light on how the processes associated with craft are embodied. Craft is an internalized matrix; it need not be commodified for the marketplace or codified in the standards necessitated by institutions of higher education. By redesigning writing workshops and MFA/PhD programs through craft consciousness, new potentials and collaborations emerge, and it becomes more conceivable to imagine dynamic, inclusive relationships between writers, scientists, and other artists.

This book explores narrative imagination and emotion as resources for learning critical meta-reflection. The author examines the learning trajectories of several students as they engage in learning to think critically through a new approach to creative writing, and details how learning through writing is linked to new discoursal identities which are trialled in the writing process. In doing so, she analyses the processes of expansion and change that result from the negotiations involved in learning through writing. This volume offers a completely new approach to creative writing, including useful practical advice as well as a solid theoretical base. It is sure to appeal to students of creative writing and discourse analysis as well as applied linguistics and language as identity.