NCWRT 10 (Hettchen): Library

Fun and innovative exercises and prompts for creative writing students   Once Upon a Time in the Twenty-First Century: Unexpected Exercises in Creative Writing is a unique creative writing text that will appeal to a wide range of readers and writers--from grade nine through college and beyond. Successful creative writers from numerous genres constructed these exercises, including poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to one-act plays, song lyrics, genre fiction, travel guides, comics and beyond. The exercises use a broad range of creative approaches, aesthetics, and voices, all with an emphasis on demystifying the writing process and having fun.   Editor Robin Behn has divided the book into three writing sections: Genres and Forms, Sources and Methods, and Style and Subject. In each section, Behn offers a brief introduction which explains how to get started and specific ways to develop one's writing. Each introduction is followed by extensive exercises that draw on literature from classic to contemporary, as well as other art forms and popular culture. Examples range from Flannery O'Connor and Langston Hughes to Allen Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein, from Jamaica Kincaid and James Joyce to Arlo Guthrie and Harryette Mullen. Integrated within the exercises are apt examples of student writings that have emerged from actual use of the exercises in both the classroom and in writing groups. The book concludes with general advice and direction on how to get published.   Based on years of hands-on experiences in the teaching of creative writing in high schools, colleges, and after-school writing clubs, this volume of exercises offers inestimable value to students and teachers in the traditional classroom, as well as a growing number of homeschoolers, those who are part of a writing club or group, and independent writers and learners of all ages.  

Enhancing Writing Skills includes conference presentation papers from the Carnegie Writers, Inc. 1st Annual Conference. The anthology provides published and aspiring writers resources for sustaining, enhancing and evaluating their writing skills. The chapter themes focus on genre-based writing, creativity in writing, mechanics of writing, academic writing, and writing as a business. Enhancing writing skills is beneficial to diverse writers as it impacts the community, working, and educational environments. Anthology goals and ojbjectives: - Enable writers to learn from other writers for the development of networking relationships and professional development. - Assist writers with techniques on sustaining their writing talents in their chosen genre or various genres. - Provide meaningful publishing resources related to non-traditional and traditional publication venues. - Enhance writers understanding for marketing strategies in the 21st century.

Young adult fantasy (YA fantasy) brings together two established genres - young adult fiction and fantasy fiction - and in so doing amplifies, energises, and leverages the textual, social, and industrial practices of the two genres: combining the fantastic with adolescent concerns; engaging passionate online fandoms; proliferating quickly into series and related works. By considering the texts alongside the way they are circulated and marketed, this Element aims to show that the YA fantasy genre is a dynamic formation that takes shape and reshapes itself responsively in a continuing process over time.

Arising from a research project conducted over two years, Transformative Learning through Creative Life Writing examines the effects of fictional autobiography on adult learners' sense of self. Starting from a teaching and learning perspective, Hunt draws together ideas from psychodynamic psychotherapy, literary and learning theory, and work in the cognitive and neurosciences of the self and consciousness, to argue that creative life writing undertaken in a supportive learning environment, alongside opportunities for critical reflection, has the power to transform the way people think and learn. It does this by opening them up to a more embodied self-experience, which increases their awareness of the source of their thinking in bodily feeling and enables them to develop a more reflexive approach to learning. Hunt locates this work within recent developments in the influential field of transformative learning. She also identifies it as a form of therapeutic education arguing, contrary to those who say that this approach leads to a diminished sense of self, that it can help people to develop a stronger sense of agency, whether for writing or learning or relations with others. Topics covered include: Creative writing as a tool for personal and professional development The transformative benefits and challenges of creative writing as a therapeutic activity The relationships between literary structures and the processes of thinking and feeling The role of cognitive-emotional learning in adult education Collaborative learning and the role of the group This book will interest teachers in adult, further and higher education who wish to use creative life writing as a tool for learning, as well as health care professionals seeking art-based techniques for use in their practice. It will also prove useful to academics interested in the relationship between education and psychotherapy, and in the theory and practice of transformative learning. Additionally, it will appeal to writers seeking a deeper understanding of the creative process.

The goal of the writer is to live with the keenness of the foreigner. To experience, wide-eyed, the sensations aroused and the events offered up by peculiar surrounds and then to evoke them so brightly on the page that the reader, too, experiences the foreigner's frisson. A time-honored way this is accomplished is through the keeping of a field notebook--through the faithful recording of the this-and-that of life; the atmospheres and incidents; the bells, the beer, the bread. Based on what accomplished nonfiction writer Sara Mansfield Taber learned in her many years of field notebook keeping, Chance Particulars is a unique and handy primer for writers who want to use their experiences to tell a lively, satisfying story. Often, writers try to turn their notes into a memoir, essay, travel piece, or story, only to find that they haven't recorded enough of the concrete, sensory details necessary to create evocative description. To help writers overcome this problem, Taber has composed a true "field notebook for field notebook keepers." Enhanced by beautiful illustrations, this charming and comprehensive guide is a practical manual for anyone who wishes to learn or hone the crafts of writing, ethnography, or journalism. Writers of all levels, genres, and ages, as well as teachers of writing, will appreciate this useful tool for learning how to record the details that build vibrant prose. With this book in hand, you will be able to recreate times and places, conjure up intricate character portraits, and paint pictures of particular landscapes, cultures, and locales.