Transcript for:
Creative Writing Course Overview

Week 1 - Introduction to the course

Readings:

Write Moves: A Creative Writing Guide and Anthology:

• “Why I Write?” (pg. 19)
• “Practicing Perception” (pg. 25)
• “Drafting” (pg. 36)
• “Revision” (pg. 48)

Online Reading:

• David Ly’s “Same Ocean”: http://puritan-magazine.com/winner-same-ocean-2021/

This Lecture Will Cover:

• What This Course Is (2)
• The Readings in the Course (3)
• The Lectures in the Course (4)
• The Structure of the Course (5)
• Developing as a Writer (7)
• Reading as a Writer (8)
• Starting to Think About Poetry (9)
• To Dos for Week 1 (10)

What This Course Is:

• An introductory creative writing course. We will cover the four basic genres of creative writing (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and script writing).
• You will be asked to write in the first three genres and you will have the opportunity to write in the fourth if you want to try your hand at play or film writing.
• Along the way, you’ll learn some grammar, workshop your writing with your peers, and read some great writing by a wide range of authors
• One of the most wonderful and most challenging things about creative writing is that the process of becoming a writer and learning to write is never ending. In a very real way, you learn to write all over again with each new project you start, or, as Write Moves tells you, you reinvent writing each time you do it.
• So, the best way to approach this course is to see it as a way to invent/reinvent the writing you do and the way that you do it. Approach every reading and assignment with an open mind as an opportunity to discover something new about writing and about yourself as a writer.

The Readings in the Course:

• Every week there will be readings that you will need to do. You will find these listed on the syllabus, and at the top of the lecture for each week.
• First, you have readings assigned from Write Moves: A Creative Writing Guide & Anthology. This is a creative writing textbook whose chapters cover topics ranging from building a writing practice to the various genres of creative writing. It also includes examples of writing that you will be asked to read and that will be discussed in the lectures.
• At the end of each chapter in Write Moves, you will find a section titled “Your Moves.” This section gives you a numbered list of writing tasks/prompts. One of the best ways to develop as a writer is to write consistently. Some people will tell you that you should write every day. This works for some people, but it isn’t possible for others. “Consistently” means different things to different people, and you should try to figure out what it means for you by seeing how often you can write. On weeks when you are not working on an assignment, consider picking one of the tasks/prompts and doing some writing.
• Second, you will have readings from The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. This is a basic grammar handbook, and your readings will cover the basic elements of grammar. Although this is a creative writing course, it is still important to understand grammar. No matter how creative you are, it is difficult to be an effective writer if your stories, poems, and personal essays are filled with grammatical errors. You need to know the rules before you can bend them as creative writers.
• Third, each week, there will be a lecture like the one that you are currently reading. I’ll tell you more about these, what they will contain, and how you should engage with them in the next section.
• Fourth, in Weeks 3, 4, and 5, you will also have readings assigned from the short fiction collection Her First Palestian, written by this year’s Writer-in-Residence, Saeed Teebi. These stories will offer strong additional examples of the concepts discussed in Write Moves and the weekly lecture notes. At some point during the term, our class will receive an asynchronous video class visit from the Writer-in-Residence. Please note that the link above also gives information about booking an in-person appointment with Saeed if you are living in London, Ontario.

The Lectures in the Course:

• Every week, there will be a lecture like this one that you should read. These lectures will follow the same format:

  • Readings
  • Table of contents
  • Creative writing material
  • Grammar
  • To dos

• At the top of the lecture, you will find a list of the readings that you need to do for the week. Read these first, and then read the lecture for the week. The lectures assume that you have done these readings. They build on and refer to this material. If you read the lectures before you do the other readings for the week, you are going to find that you are a little bit lost.

• You will then see a list of topics that will lay out what the lecture for that particular week will cover.

• The body of the lectures will consist of two types of content.

1. First, the lectures will discuss topics related to creative writing. They will add, build on, and sometimes modify the material from Write Moves that you have been asked to read for that particular week. For example, in short order, this lecture is going to discuss developing as a writer and crafting poetry.
2. Second, the lectures will contain a section discussing the grammar for the week. Instead of reviewing the material from The Canadian Writer’s Handbook, these sections will assume that you have done the assigned readings and will focus on understanding grammar from the perspective of a creative writer. For example, when we cover the comma in Week 5, the lecture will look at how we can use commas to control the pace of our sentences and create a variety of different effects.
3. Finally, every lecture will end with a To Dos list that will tell you what to do for the week of the lecture, and often remind you about what you need to prepare to do the following week.

• Every week, you want to check the syllabus for the week’s topics (noting assignment/workshop due dates), do the weekly textbook readings, then read the weekly lecture

The Structure of the Course:

• This course follows a straightforward structure. We cover the four major genres of creative writing in the following order:

  • Poetry
  • Fiction
  • Creative Nonfiction
  • Script Writing

• You should come away from the course with a sense of the possibilities of creative writing and a solid grasp of grammar.

• In this course, there are four assignments and a final exam. I’m now going to briefly describe each of these in the order that we do them. You can find full descriptions of the assignments in the Assignments folder in Resources on our OWL site, and you will be given the instructions for the exam well in advance so that you have a good sense of what it entails.

  • Assignment 1: Free Verse Poem (10%): This assignment asks you to write a free verse poem—that is, a poem without a rhyme scheme or a regular structure. This is the first assignment in the course, and it is worth the least. There is a good reason for this. It is here to give you a sense of what the expectations are for the course and where you stand in relation to them with an assignment that will have a minimal impact on your final grade. If you are a recent high school graduate, it is important to understand the expectations for high school creative writing and university creative writing are very different, and you want to use this assignment to start adjusting to what is expected of you as a university level creative writer.
  • Assignment 2: Flash Fiction (15%): This assignment asks you to write a piece of flash fiction—basically, a very short story. It gives you the opportunity to experiment with prose and narrative, although in a very small package.
  • Assignment 3: Flash Creative Nonfiction (15%): This assignment asks you to write a piece of flash creative nonfiction. It gives you the opportunity to experiment with creative nonfiction, the most flexible and amorphous of the four literary genres. I will provide more on its characteristics when we get to the weeks on creative nonfiction.
  • Assignment 4: Capstone Assignment (40%): This is the last assignment in the course, the longest and the one that is worth the most. You can write in any of the four genres, and the length and format of the assignment depends on the genre that you pick (see the assignment guidelines). This assignment also goes through a more elaborate developmental process than the other assignments. First, in Weeks 8, 9, and 10, you will create a brief written presentation about your idea, posting (in the OWL Forums) a one-page explanation of what you are planning to do as well as a sample excerpt for your peers to respond to. Presentation dates/groups will be assigned in Week 6; in the following weeks, I will also be booking brief one-on-one Zoom consultations with all students. Then, in Week 11, you post a draft for your peers to workshop.
  • Exam (20%): Every first-year course at Western must have a final exam, and Writing 1000 is no exception. The exam will be written in person, and it will focus on a practical application of our discussions of editing and craft (i.e., essay-style responses). I will give you all details about the exam closer to the end of term.

• Format: All assignments need to be submitted as Word documents (docx, with the exception of scripts—more on this later). As Western students, you all have access to Microsoft Office, which includes Microsoft Word, and you must download and use it for this course.

• Online workshops: All assignments will be workshopped online in the week before the final draft deadline. You will be assigned to groups in the OWL Brightspace Forums and post a draft of your assignment by noon of the Monday of the week in which that assignment is being workshopped. For example, your free verse poem draft must be posted on Monday September 16 (the first day of Week 2). You will then have ONE WEEK to read and provide feedback on all the drafts posted by your group members. You will revise your assignment based on your peers’ feedback and then submit your final draft for grading the next week (usually by Friday). Check the syllabus weekly schedule for all workshop and final submission deadlines.

• We workshop our writing for two reasons. First, the feedback we get from workshopping allows us to improve our writing. Second, reading, thinking about, and providing feedback on other people’s writing makes us better writers.

• Next week’s lecture will contain some additional material on how to provide feedback when workshopping, and on how to respond to the feedback that you get.

Developing as a Writer:

• We are going to be doing a lot of things in this course—learning about the 4 genres, writing in at least three of these genres, learning about grammar, reading and discussing writing, learning how to give and receive feedback, etc.—but, at the core of this course, your goal is to do just one thing. Your goal is to develop as a writer. I write “your goal” intentionally to highlight the fact that you must take personal responsibility for your writing. It is your job to start to answer a series of questions: what kind of writer am I? What do I write? How do I write?
• There is a lot of advice in the textbook, and you will get more advice from these lectures. In fact, as soon as you start to look for it, you will discover that there is an almost endless supply of advice about writing and being a writer. All that advice is good advice—but all of it can be bad advice.
• What do I mean by that? The reality is that everyone writes a little bit differently, and most of us change the way we write over the course of our careers and from one project to the next. What might be good advice for you now might be bad advice for someone else or bad advice for you in a year or two.
• Your responsibility as a developing writer is to pay attention to the advice that you are getting, to try it, and to see if it works. If you find something that works, keep doing it. If something doesn’t work for you, stop doing it and try something else.
• If there is one bit of advice that applies to everyone, it is that perspiration precedes inspiration. There is a basic mistake that a lot of beginning writers make: they think they need to wait for inspiration to start writing. This is rarely how writing works. More often, inspiration emerges out of the process of writing.
• So, even if you don’t feel inspired—perhaps especially when you don’t feel inspired—make yourself sit down and start writing. Write Moves recommends ‘timed practice.’ Try it. Set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes and force yourself to write continuously for that period of time. At first, you might write “I can’t write” over and over again, but, eventually, you will find that words start to come, and, more often than not, there will be something in those words that you can build on, an image, an idea, a starting point. And, once you have a starting point, you are on your way.
• Simply put, almost all writers benefit from remembering the simple truth that putting time into writing is what most consistently leads to inspiration.

Reading as a Writer:

• Write Moves talks about reading as practice, and this is an essential lesson. Anyone can write. Writing is just a matter of putting a pen to paper or tapping away at a keyboard with your fingers.
  • However, if you want to write well, you need to read, and you need to learn from what you are reading. An essential part of developing as a writer is seeing what other people have done and learning from it.
• The poet Paul Vermeersch has coined a wonderful metaphor to describe the importance of reading for writing. He says that, if writing is breathing out, then reading is breathing in. We need to inhale to exhale; we need to read to write.
  • But we don’t just need to read. We need to read like writers. We need to read to learn.
• When you are reading in this course (and outside of it), start to pay attention to what you are reading. Pay attention to what writers are doing and how they are doing it. Pay attention to how pieces of writing affect you, and ask yourself what they are doing to produce this effect.
• A significant portion of the lectures in this course will be dedicated to looking at pieces of writing and talking about how they work. These lectures will be modeling the kind of attentive reading that is essential for developing as a writer, and you want to take your cue from them.

Starting to Think About Poetry:

• In the last section, I wrote about the importance of attentive reading. In this section, I want to start to put that into practice by looking at David Ly’s poem “Same Ocean” and writing a little bit about what it can tell us about contemporary poetry and what we can do with our poetry. I want to talk about two things: tone/language and structure.

  • First, notice the tone and language of the poem. Although it is carefully crafted, the poem uses everyday, contemporary language. It is elegant, but it is not flowery or obscure or archaic. There are times when it reads like a conversation, like the poet is talking to you.

• One of the most common misconceptions that students bring into a course like this is that poetry should be written in a special kind of language that is distinct from the language that they use every day. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most contemporary poetry is written in everyday language, and some of it is even written in slang. This does not mean that it is not carefully crafted, beautiful, moving, etc.; it means that it is all those things while also being familiar and immediate.

• Your first assignment in this course is a free verse poem. When you are sitting down to write it, keep this lesson in mind. Try to use language that you are familiar with, that is close to you. Avoid outdated, ostentatious language from earlier time periods. Shakespeare wrote in the language of his time, but English has changed since then!

  • Second, notice how Ly answers the opening question “Where are you from?” with IMAGES: sensory descriptions that appeal to the five senses (taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound). His imagery focuses on the mixing bodies of water and the grandfather who “rigged his boat with a tractor engine” to travel across those waters. Readers usually find specific images far more memorable and impactful than generalizations and abstractions (i.e., descriptions of feelings and concepts/ideas). For example, instead of discussing anger/rage and its destructive power, why not create an image of a volcano spewing lava that creeps towards the edge of a village of dry wooden houses? Or, instead of stating how freedom makes you feel happy, why not create an image of riding a mountain bike on Muskoka trails, wind funneling over your body, the smell of pines and lake air washing past you? Previously, you might have heard this concept described as “show, don’t tell”—that is to say, SHOW your readers a tangible sensory scene, and try not to TELL them how they should feel about it. That feeling should already be built into the image itself. Images are your most powerful poetic tool: they make the world of your poem real and vivid, and they subtly convey emotions and ideas in subtext. The more specific your image is, the more real it will feel to readers.

  • Third, notice how Ly uses spacing and justification. This poem is about meetings, about migration, and about two bodies of water coming together. The structure of the poem plays with this idea of meeting and mixing by moving the lines from left to right and back again.

• In poetry, there is a connection between structure and content, between the placement of words on the page and their meaning. In a more conventional poem where every line starts at the left-hand margin, the point where one line ends and another begins can be important. It can affect the way in which the poem is read and even the meaning of the poem.

• When you are sitting down to write your free verse poem, keep this lesson in mind. Think about where you are placing words on the page, where you are starting and ending lines, and, more generally, about how the meaning of those words is related to the structure that you have chosen for them.

  • Lastly, read David Ly’s poem aloud to yourself. Poetry is meant to be heard; where does he use sound devices (e.g., alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme) that give the poem a musical quality? As you work on your poem draft, think about how your word choices create certain patterns of sound that might match your poem’s theme.

To Do:

• Review

  • The syllabus
  • The grading rubric

• Purchase the textbooks

• Read the guidelines for Assignment 1: Free Verse Poem