Key Issues in Creative Writing explores the teaching, learning and researching of creative writing. It outlines current issues, as defined by experts from the UK, USA and Australia. These expert contributors suggest solutions that will positively impact on the development of the discipline of creative writing in universities and colleges today and in the future.

The Writer's Key is a complete beginner's guide to writing for self-reflection and personal development. Creative writing can deepen our understanding of ourselves and our lives. This book unlocks the potential for gaining these insights, widening perspectives, finding new positivity, increasing confidence and reducing stress through writing. It: - introduces creative writing as a very enjoyable process for enabling reflective personal and professional development - provides strategies and inspiration for getting started, continuing despite hesitations and getting the most out of writing - features uplifting accounts of individuals' successful use of the Key for self-exploration and development through creative writing. The Writer's Key assumes no prior writing experience and will inspire and encourage anyone who wants to tell and explore their story, whether they feel trapped by issues at work or home because of loss, trauma or relationships, or simply want to make more of life.

When she was twenty-seven, Nell Stevens—a lifelong aspiring novelist—won an all-expenses-paid fellowship to go anywhere in the world to write. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell picked Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. Other than sheep, penguins, paranoia, and the weather, there aren’t many distractions, but as Nell soon discovers, total isolation and 1,085 calories a day are far from ideal conditions for literary production. With deft humor, this memoir traces her island days and slowly reveals the life and people she has left behind in pursuit of her writing. It seems that there is nowhere she can run—an island or the pages of her notebook—to escape the big questions of love, art, and, ambition.

Bringing together 25 essential works of creative writing criticism in a single volume, this is a comprehensive introduction to the key debates in creative writing today, from the ethics of appropriation to the politics of literary evaluation. Critical Creative Writing covers such topics as: · Craft & Politics · Language & Community · Identity & Authorship · Representation & Counternarrative · Appropriation & Intertextuality · Evaluation & Genre The book anthologizes critical essays written by international literary writers. Each essay is contextualized with an introduction as well as sample questions, writing prompts and suggested readings. The book also has a companion website (www.criticalcreativewriting.org) offering supplemental materials such as lesson plans and course materials. Includes writings by: Ayana Mathis, Leslie Marmon Silko, Craig Santos Perez, Natasha Sajé, Porochista Khakpour, Taiye Selasi, Michael Nardone, Conchitina Cruz, Benjamin Paloff, Dorothy Wang, and many more.

This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review). The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing—including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability—and aspects of workshop—including the silenced writer and the imagined reader—Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces? Drawing from examples including One Thousand and One Nights, Curious George, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Asian American classic No-No Boy, Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will find suggestions for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds us, "When we write fiction, we write the world."

This book describes an alternative way to teach Creative Writing, one that replaces the silent writer taking criticism and advice from the teacher-led workshop with an active writer who reflects upon and publically questions the work-in-progress in order to solicit response, from a writers' group as well as from the teacher. Both accompany the writer, first as readers and fellow writers, only later as critics. Because writers ask, they listen, and dialogues with responders become an inner dialogue that guides later writing and revision. But when teachers accompany writers, teaching CW becomes even more a negotiation of the personal because this teacher who is listener and mentor is also a model for some students of the writer and even the person they would like to become - and still the Authority who gives the grades.

The Psychology of Creative Writing takes a scholarly, psychological look at multiple aspects of creative writing, including the creative writer as a person, the text itself, the creative process, the writer's development, the link between creative writing and mental illness, the personality traits of comedy and screen writers, and how to teach creative writing. This book will appeal to psychologists interested in creativity, writers who want to understand more about the magic behind their talents, and educated laypeople who enjoy reading, writing, or both. From scholars to bloggers to artists, The Psychology of Creative Writing has something for everyone.