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223 pages

English

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If you've ever been on a creative writing course, are thinking of going on one, or you simply love writing - then this book is the ideal companion. Most courses will teach you the mechanics of how to write - choosing the right words, plot-building, developing characters and the like - which are all absolutely essential, but are only half the ingredients of your novel, story, poem or play. How Writers Write is a no-nonsense, practical and approachable book that supplies the missing half, taking one step back and helping you understand why successful writers make the creative decisions they do; in short, what goes on in their imaginations as perception leads to thought, and thought ultimately finds form in expression. So this book won't tell you which adjective is the right one or whether the hero should get the girl at the end. But it will provide the essential background that enables you to put your own creative decisions in context; not just what decisions you make, but how and why you make them. Each chapter contains practical exercises, allowing you to work through what you've learned and, at the end, there's a useful list of topics and texts for further reading and thinking. Along the way, we'll learn about what's been going on in writers' minds these last four thousand years or so; how different social attitudes have shaped their creativity; how they've tried to understand themselves and their role; and how technical advances have allowed them to express themselves in an ever-expanding variety of ways. How Writers Write + practical creative writing course = all you need to know about what makes great writing great... and achievable.

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Publié par	Creative Content
Date de parution	30 septembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781908807267
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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HOW WRITERS WRITE
by
Paul Kent
© Paul Kent 2014
HOW WRITERS WRITE
First published in 2014 By Creative Content Ltd, Roxburghe House, 273-287 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HA. Copyright © 2014 Paul Kent
The moral right of Paul Kent to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
In view of the possibility of human error by the authors, editors or publishers of the material contained herein, neither Creative Content Ltd. nor any other party involved in the preparation of this material warrants that the information contained herein is in every respect accurate or complete and they are not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from the use of such material.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or policy of Creative Content Ltd. or any employing organization unless specifically stated.
Typesetting by Creative Content
Cover Design by Daniel at HCT Design
eISBN 9781908807267
CONTENTS
Preface
Writers appearing in this book
PART ONE:
WHAT WRITING IS
Chapter 1 .
Damn, this person can write
Chapter 2 .
So you want to be a writer, do you? Really?
Chapter 3 .
The writer’s ultimate tool
Chapter 4 .
Telling stories – truth and the writer
Chapter 5 .
You are what you write / you write what you are
Chapter 6 .
Putting pen to paper
PART TWO:
HOW WRITERS WROTE
Chapter 7 .
Anarchy in ancient Greece
Chapter 8 .
Did I really write that?
Chapter 9 .
I’m a writer – deal with it
Chapter 10 .
It’s all natural
Chapter 11 .
Everything is everything
PART THREE:
THE WRITER’S TOOLBOX
Chapter 12 .
The facts, ma’am, just the facts
Chapter 13 .
Metaphorical expression: an overview
Chapter 14 .
Seven types of metaphorical expression
1 .     The adjective and adverb
2 .     Similes and comparisons
3 .     The conceit
4 .     The metaphor
5 .     The symbol
6 .     Allegory
7 .     Myth
PART FOUR:
THE WRITER’S WORLD
Chapter 15 .
How writers connect with the world: ‘down’, ‘out’, and ‘onto’
Chapter 16 .
My world, my rules: the writer as control freak
Chapter 17 .
The best of a bad job: the writer as pessimist
Chapter 18 .
Whatever … : the writer as opportunist
Chapter 19 .
More to life than meets the eye: the writer as a great big tease
Chapter 20 .
Stuck inside of Lexicon with the Roget’s Thesaurus blues again: the writer as mystic
Chapter 21 .
Out there: the writer as anarchist
Epilogue
PART FIVE:
AFTERTHOUGHTS AND FURTHER READING / THINKING
WRITERS APPEARING IN THIS BOOK
Aesop, Conrad Aiken, Henri Alain-Fournier, Laura Albert, Richard Aldington, Woody Allen, Isabel Allende, Martin Amis, Sherwood Anderson, Maya Angelou, Louis Aragon, Aristotle, Matthew Arnold, Margaret Atwood, W. H. Auden, St Augustine, Jane Austen, Francis Bacon, Beryl Bainbridge, Hugo Ball, Howard Barker, Julian Barnes, John Barth, Charles Baudelaire, Matt Beaumont, Samuel Beckett, Aphra Behn, Saul Bellow, Pat Benatar, John Berger, Louis de Bernières, Bruno Bettelheim, William Blake, Umberto Boccioni, James Boswell, David Bowie, William Boyd, Ray Bradbury, André Breton, Robert Browning, Johann Jakob Brücker, Richard Maurice Bucke, John Bunyan, Fanny Burney, William Burroughs, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Italo Calvino, Albert Camus, Truman Capote, John Carey, Peter Carey, E. H. Carr, Angela Carter, W. J. Cash, Lodovico Castelvetro, Miguel de Cervantes, Bruce Chatwin, Geoffrey Chaucer, Anton Chekhov, Vincent Cheng, Agatha Christie, the Coen brothers, J. M. Coetzee, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, Peter Cook, Rachel Cooke, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, Michael Cunningham, Donald Cupitt, S. Foster Damon, Dante, Louis de Bernières, Choderlos de Laclos, Thomas De Quincey, Daniel Defoe, Don DeLillo, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, John Donne, Hilda Doolittle, John Dryden, Édouard Dujardin, Paul Dukes, Umberto Eco, Albert Einstein, James Elford, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Paul Éluard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Empsom, Brian Eno, Euripides, William Faulkner, Henry Fielding, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. M. Forster, Sir James Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Carlos Fuentes, Lady Gaga, José Ortega y Gasset, André Gide, Allen Ginsberg, George Gissing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Adam Gopnik, Nadine Gordimer, Edmund Gosse, Graham Greene, Philippa Gregory, Thomas Hardy, Joanne Harris, Robert Harris, Jim Harrison, Raoul Hausmann, Martin Heidegger, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Heraclitus, Hesiod, Hermann Hesse, George Birkbeck Hill, E. D. Hirsch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Homer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Horace, Richard Huelsenbeck, T. E. Hulme, Aldous Huxley, J. K. Huysmans, Lewis Hyde, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, William James, Marcel Janco, Juan Ramón Jimémez, Billy Joel, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Jack Kerouac, Chaka Khan, Stephen King, Charles Kingsley, Louis Kronenberger, Milan Kundera, William Langland, D. H. Lawrence, Annie Lennox, C. S. Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, Longinus, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, Louis MacNeice, Norman Mailer, Stephen Mallarmé, David Malouf, Thomas Mann, Hilary Mantel, Gabriel García Márquez, Yann Martel, W. Somerset Maugham, André Maurois, Pete McCarthy, John Milton, Dudley Moore, Marianne Moore, Sir Thomas More, Jean Moréas, William Morris, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Johnny Nash, Frank Norris, Patrick O’Brian, C. K. Ogden, Ben Okri, George Orwell, Chuck Palahniuk, John Dos Passos, Thomas Love Peacock, Walker Percy, Pindar, Sylvia Plath, Plato, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett, Marcel Proust, Philip Pullman, Herbert Read, I. A. Richards, Samuel Richardson, Arthur Rimbaud, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Rolle, Philip Roth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J. K. Rowling, Arundhati Roy, Todd Rundgren, Salman Rushdie, J. D. Salinger, Carl Sandburg, Dorothy L. Sayers, Kurt Schwitters, Clive Scott, Sir Walter Scott, Vikram Seth, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alan Sherman, Sir Philip Sidney, Upton Sinclair, Zadie Smith, Socrates, Robert Southey, Edmund Spenser, Lee Spinks, Gertrude Stein, George Steiner, Laurence Sterne, Wallace Stevens, Bram Stoker, William Styron, Jonathan Swift, Arthur Symons, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Paul Theroux, Hunter S. Thompson, Henry David Thoreau, J. R. R. Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Traherne, Anthony Trollope, Tristan Tzara, John Updike, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine, Gore Vidal, Tom Waits, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Dale Wasserman, Evelyn Waugh, E. B. White, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Geoffrey Willans, Edmund Wilson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, P. G. Wodehouse, Thomas Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Pete Wylie, Xenophanes, W. B. Yeats, Natan Zach, Frank Zappa, Émile Zola
PREFACE
Let’s be realistic: we can’t all be great instinctive literary geniuses. Most of us can’t simply pick up a pen or sit at a keyboard and bash out deathless prose, poetry or drama that’s going to be read, appreciated and studied long into the future. It’s not a gift granted to many.
But it doesn’t stop thousands, even millions, of us wanting to write and/or taking up writing as a hobby or even as a career. The popularity of creative-writing courses is testimony to that: in fact, they’re part of an entire industry for which the digital world could almost have been created to order. Just about anyone with access to a computer can not only be a writer, but be their own agent and publisher as well. Writing has been democratized.
So now the means are in place, what about the motive? What makes so many of us want to write? According to the celebrated novelist Don DeLillo, the act of writing addresses a deep-seated human need:
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals .
Self-expression can be fundamental not just to our sense of identity, but also, DeLillo implies, to our sanity. Which is why taking a writing course is often recommended to those who have experienced life-changing trauma. Actively working with and through thoughts and feelings, giving them form and meaning, can result in greater success than more passive forms of therapy involving couches, Viennese neurologists, and large bank loans.
But once you’ve decided to take a writing course, it’s as likely as not that the course will ignore these more elusive aspects of creativity and confine its attentions to the mechanics of composition – choosing the right words, structuring stories, character development and the like – which are mightily important but which are only part of the story. It’s the premise of this book that to get the full picture, it’s vital to understand why writers make the creative decisions they do: in short, to understand what goes on in their minds as perception proceeds through thought to expression. Because great writing is the successful marriage of creativity with technique, there’s very little point in examining the second of these key ingredients at the expense of the first.
So this book won’t tell you which adjective is the right one or whether the hero should die at the end of the story. But read in conjunction with a practically-focused creative-writing course, it will provide the necessary background that will enable you to put your own creative decisi