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Creative Writer's Handbook
Third Edition
by Philip K. Jason and Allan B. Lefcowitz
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The Creative Writer's Handbook is designed to help beginners. While creativity itself cannot be taught, our premise is that you can learn to tap and shape your creative energies. We do not hold with that popular image of the creative artist as a solitary, inspired soul who spins out a sublime work without sweat and labor. Paradoxically, you need to be "practical" about creative writing.
Just as people with physical gifts can be coached so that these gifts are perfected, people with creative imaginations can be led to exercise and develop that creativity. They can be "coached" in the intricacies of language and literary structure. Though abilities will differ, our experience with hundreds of students in creative writing classes and workshops has shown us that most people have more creative talent than they realize. When they first begin to practice the craft, however, they need some direction about conventions, forms, and procedures. Each writer does not need to invent the game for him or herself.
This book began because we felt that the texts available to us, though admirable, were too advanced for beginners. They were like calculus to those who need algebra. We wanted a text that responded to the issues we faced in the classroom and the workshop with novice writers who needed to know everything from the rules of the game, to the proper formats, to the professional lingo. We had in mind a text that students could refer to for specific information and help on basic issues and problems.
In each chapter, we have combined the most useful theory, practical advice, and examples. The many questions and exercises are designed to involve you in the issues and practice of literary craft. Some of them may even spark results worth developing into poems, stories, or plays.
Although your creative energies can be directed to produce successful results, not every writer can or deserves to make it into print, just as not every athlete can make it to the Olympics. Still, with hard work in a sport, craft, or art, you can improve, learn from experience and from authority, and find ways of making any such activity pleasurable and useful. Our first premise is rooted in the idea that doing creative writing is valuable in itself, if only to increase one's understanding of just how hard it is to write successfully.
Another premise is that any successful writing is, finally, the result of rigorous editing. As important as it is to get something down on paper in the first place--and we have given that problem much of our attention--it is even more important to learn how to shape and reshape, how to spot your problems, and how to work out your solutions. Every writer must learn how to take and use criticism and, at some point, every successful writer must take on the role of self-editor.
In the Creative Writer's Handbook we have provided a series of occasions for you to think, read, investigate, write, write again, and rewrite-and also to imitate, invent, respond, discover, and surprise yourself. However, even though we have given the order of presentation considerable thought, there can be as many paths through the book as there are readers. While this text is aimed at the student in the creative writing course, we have kept in mind the needs of the writer who wants to go at it solo.
The five chapters of "Part I: A Writer's Concerns" take up issues of importance to every creative writer; the next ten chapters - Parts II, III, and IV - focus on specific issues in the major genres; the final two chapters, Part V, contain reference materials for writers.
Chapter 1 provides an opportunity for you to assess your motives and attitudes as a student of writing. We suggest ways that will help you to become assertive, disciplined, and ready for work. We encourage you to be serious, but not sour. Once you are "Working like a Writer," you have a fighting chance of doing the work of a writer.
Chapter 2, "Keeping a Journal," aims to show one way that a writer forces commitment. Writers write. We provide a full box of suggestions to keep you working, but the goal is for you to strike off on your own. The journal is your lab, your practice field, where you can make false starts, mistakes, and discoveries.
Chapter 3 contains the broad, somewhat technical subject of "Point of View." In the journal, a person very close to the intimate "I" does almost all of the recording. Literary creations, however, often involve a less literally autobiographical "I." Who is the speaker in the story or poem? What difference does it make? Exploring these key questions requires careful reading and a number of exercises--occasions--to help you become confident in handling this complex, unavoidable issue.
In Chapter 4, "Language Is Your Medium," you have an opportunity to exercise all the muscles in the body of words that you need to command, and to get them working in harmony. You don't expect a landscape painter to succeed without knowing anything about lines, shapes, and colors, and about brushes, pigments, and canvas. The writer too must master the materials, in this case the materials of language. Most of us take language for granted--it's something we're born to. Remember, however, that just as the demands put upon your language skills are now heightened, your concern for language must be similarly heightened. We think you will enjoy these jumping jacks, push-ups, and other language calisthenics.
Chapter 5 takes up the interplay between imagination and fact. In "Invention and Research" we share ideas and techniques, collected in many places over many years, that will enable you to access your creative energies. This chapter includes suggestions on how to find the facts you need to build the worlds your imagination will create. It also provides exercises that show how to use facts to stimulate creativity. In these exercises we show how writers can create their own games.
These first five chapters are grounded in general issues, so you can come to understand the ways in which any writing task can be "creative." In the next ten chapters, you will explore the specific conventions and special concerns of the major genres: poetry, prose narrative, and drama. These chapters, the next three parts of the book, are, of course, the heart of the book; they are substantially more detailed than the preliminary chapters and require a slower pace.
The genre chapters combine information, examples, and exercises and contain both professional and student work to show various levels of achievement. We have isolated the major problems that beginners have and examined the nature and causes of those problems. Often we suggest solutions. We are convinced that effective creative writing is a network of solved problems.
Each of the three parts devoted to genre exploration begins with a chapter focusing on the conventions through which that genre defines itself. Our bias here is that without coming to grips with the conventions, you cannot reach an audience, nor can you ever become effectively unconventional.
In this book, "conventional" refers to the customs or protocols of a literary type. Just as religious groups have set patterns of observance, just as a meeting of foreign ministers has its established courtesies, just as a formal meeting has its way of getting things done (following, for instance, Robert's Rules of Order), so literary types have their conventional--customary--methods of expression. Conventions enable everyone to start off with an agreement about the ground rules, and so, it is through these conventions, not despite them, that creative expression takes place. Through them, you meet the audience halfway.
Part V provides a writer's toolbox. Chapter 16, "From Revision to Submission," aims at further development of editorial skills. It also explains and illustrates the conventions of manuscript form and discusses strategies for submitting work to editors. The lists in "Tools and Resources," Chapter 17, are not meant to be definitive but suggestive, illustrating the kinds of books a creative writer wants to know about or own. The book concludes with a glossary of key terms.
As much as possible we have followed our own classroom practice. We have tried to provide occasions for writing. Our approach is more like that of editors and writers than of critics. We have tried to give a realistic picture of the processes, demands, and rewards of the game. We cannot, of course, touch on everything. You will need someone--a teacher, workshop leader, or editor--to deal with the exceptions and complications.
For a Teacher or Workshop Leader
We have included many more examples and exercises than anyone could use, even in a yearlong course or workshop, so that both you and your students might have a variety from which to choose.
We invite you, as we do all our readers, to send us the results of these exercises for possible inclusion in future editions, as well as exercises of your own. We would also like to hear about aspects of craft you would like to see treated more fully. On the other hand, where do you think we could cut back? Remembering that this text is for beginning creative writers, please let us know what elements we missed completely. As editor out in the field, you become our best source for improving the book.
Preface to the Third Edition
This new edition evolved through our continuing dialogue with students and teachers. As with the second edition, we have continued to stress the interweave of techniques among poetry, fiction, and drama. This time, however, we have reconceived the section on fiction as a section on storytelling, and in so doing we have added a new chapter, Creative Nonfiction, to engage students in the memoir and related forms of true life narratives. While we recognize that creative (or literary) nonfiction is not always structured as narrative, we assume that narratives are what students will wish to write. Furthermore, even essays that are expository or analytical benefit from narrative components.
Stemming from the introduction of the new chapter are expanded discussions of related points in other chapters, most notably in Chapter 3, "Point of View." Other expansions include additional observations, with examples, on free verse and a fuller discussion on writing for movies and television. We have changed the opening of our first chapter to sound a note of warmer welcome.
We have replaced the longish story "The Lost Cottage" by David Leavitt with two shorter ones: "Something More" by Jeff Minerd and "Our Beautiful Clock" by Marian Pierce. Minerd's story, we believe, provides an attainable model for the ambitious student, while at the same time offering characters to whom many will easily relate. Pierce's story, on the other hand, demonstrates the mature writer's ability to imagine and make credible and meaningful the sensibility of those distant from the writer's self. In order to provoke consideration of the borderlines between the genres, we have placed two nonfiction narratives in Chapter 12, newly titled "Stories and Memoirs."
Elsewhere, we have once again tightened and clarified commentary and exercises. Chapter 17, "Tools and Resources," has been brought up-to-date.
We wish to thank the following reviewers for their valuable contribution: Patrick Parks, Elgin Community College; Frederick Rissover, St. Louis Community College--Meramec; Gary L. Myers, Mississippi State University; Alice G. Brand, SUNY Brockport; and Mark Fleming, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Once again, we invite you to share your experiences in using this text so that we can continue to improve it.
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