Creative Writing 101

You may simply be laying words and thoughts down on a page, unsure even whether you are writing prose or poetry, or something else altogether.Is this something you’ll want to share with people, or is it strictly private, for your eyes alone?The second part outlines two basic principles of editing–adding stuff, taking stuff away–and the advantages of reading your work aloud and editing by ear.

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You tuck it away in your folder or on your hard drive. It’s likely—almost certain, in fact—that what’s really on the page is going to be different than how you remember it.

It might be better, it might be worse, but in any case—different. What matters is that you take the time out to survey the lay of the land, and make those (re)discoveries, whatever they might happen to be.

So you write and you write, and you wind up with—something. Any good writer has a file somewhere filled with all their abandoned and aborted first drafts—all the stuff that seemed like it was worth attempting but then later turned out to not be.

A mess, probably, but maybe one with some genuine promise. If the writer doesn’t have this, it’s either because (1) s/he is a heaven-sent Genius, (2) s/he is a hack with no self-editing skills and no sense, or else (3) s/he burned the file up in an oil drum by the highway and scattered the ashes in the sea, like you’re supposed to. You’ve got this piece, and you think it’s pretty good, or anyway you think it could be pretty good. The first thing you want to do is re-read what you’ve written.

Revising Up, Revising Down At the most basic level, there are only two ways to revise something. (Or you can spend all day moving commas around, but that’s a whole other thing.) If you’re adding, the main concerns are what to add, and where.

What Is The Main Purpose Of Critical Thinking - Creative Writing 101

If you’re writing prose, especially prose fiction, you might be looking for opportunities to add detail, to the emotional state of a character, or the physical details of the world of the story, or wherever else it seems relevant and useful.

, the nature of the class shifted and we went into workshop mode.

Since we’re now reading student work and not publicly available work, it doesn’t leave me with a whole lot to share.

As such, even a very important detail need not be repeated over and over.

There’s no hard and fast rule about this (or about anything when it comes to writing) and sometimes, of course, the repetition itself is the point, but generally speaking, if the writer repeats something once or twice, its importance is going to be established in the reader’s mind.