What is Creative Writing?

Creative writing is anything where the purpose is to express thoughts, feelings and emotions rather than to simply convey information.

I’ll be focusing on creative fiction in this post (mainly short stories and novels), but poetry, (auto)biography and creative non-fiction are all other forms of creative writing. Here’s a couple of definitions:

Creative writing is writing that expresses the writer’s thoughts and feelings in an imaginative, often unique, and poetic way.
(Sil.org – What is Creative Writing?)

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.
(Don DeLillo)

Writing of any sort is hard, but rewarding work – you’ll gain a huge amount of satisfaction from a finished piece. Being creative can also be difficult and challenging at times, but immensely fun.

How to get started

Many people think that just because they’ve read a lot of stories (or even if they haven’t!) they should be able to write one. But as Nigel Watts writes:

There is a common belief that because most of us are literate and fluent, there is no need to serve an apprenticeship if we want to become a successful wordsmith. … That’s what I thought until I tried to write my first novel. I soon learnt that a novel, like a piece of furniture, has its own set of requirements, laws of construction that have to be learnt. Just because I had read plenty of novels didn’t mean I could write one, any more than I could make a chair because I had sat on enough of them.
(Nigel Watts, Teach Yourself Writing a Novel)

By all means, if you’re keen, jump straight in and have a go: but don’t be too disappointed if your first efforts aren’t as good as you’d hoped. To extend Watts’ metaphor, you may find that these early attempts have wonky legs and an unsteady seat. There are lots of great books aimed at new fiction writers, and I’d strongly recommend buying or borrowing one of these:

• Wannabe a Writer? (Jane Wenham-Jones)
• Teach Yourself … Writing a Novel (Nigel Watts)
• How to Write Fiction (and Think About It) (Robert Graham)
• On Writing (Stephen King)

I’d also recommend starting small. Rather than beginning with an epic fantasy trilogy, a family saga spanning five generations, or an entire adventure series … have a go at a short story or a poem.

And if you end up chewing your pen and staring at a sheet of paper, or gazing at a blank screen for hours, try kickstarting your writing with a short exercise. Don’t stop to think too much about it … just get going, without worrying about the quality of the work you produce.

Tips and tricks for beginners

• Do some short exercises to stretch your writing muscles – if you’re short of ideas, read the Daily Writing Tips article on “Writing Bursts”. Many new creative writers find that doing the washing up or weeding the garden suddenly looks appealing, compared to the effort of sitting down and putting words onto the page. Force yourself to get through these early doubts, and it really will get easier. Try to get into the habit of writing every day, even if it’s just for ten minutes.
• If you’re stuck for ideas, carry a notebook everywhere and write down your observations. You’ll get some great lines of dialogue by keeping your ears open on the bus or in cafes, and an unusual phrase may be prompted by something you see or smell.
• Work out the time of day when you’re at your most creative. For many writers, this is first thing in the morning – before all the demands of the day jostle for attention. Others write well late at night, after the rest of the family have gone to bed. Don’t be afraid to experiment!
• Don’t agonize over getting it right. All writers have to revise and edit their work – it’s rare that a story, scene or even a sentence comes out perfectly the first time. Once you’ve completed the initial draft, leave the piece for a few days – then come back to it fresh, with a red pen in hand. If you know there are problems with your story but can’t pinpoint them, ask a fellow writer to read through it and give feedback.
• HAVE FUN! Sometimes, we writers can end up feeling that our writing is a chore, something that “must” be done, or something to procrastinate over for as long as possible. If your plot seems wildly far-fetched, your characters bore you to tears and you’re convinced that a five-year old with a crayon could write better prose … take a break. Start a completely new project, something which is purely for fun. Write a poem or a 60-word “mini saga”. Just completing a small finished piece can help if you’re bogged down in a longer story.

Online resources

NaNoWriMo
Every November, hundreds of thousands of people just like you do something extraordinary: they write a novel in just thirty days. Want to be part of the coffee-fueled, manic-typing, adrenaline-rush that is National Novel Writing Month? (NaNoWriMo for short). Make sure you sign up by October 31st. The “rules” state that you can’t start writing Chapter 1 until 00.01am on November 1st but you can spend as long as you like before that planning…

Authors’ websites and blogs
I read lots of websites and blogs written by authors and these give real (sometimes harsh) insights into what it’s like to write professionally. One which has been a strong favourite of mine for many years is Holly Lisle’s. Check out her
advice for writers and her weblog. She also has an excellent newsletter which I subscribe to, and some very thorough and helpful e-books on various aspects of writing available for purchase.

Competitions listings
Having a theme and a deadline can make a startling difference to a writer’s motivation! If you’re in the UK, Sally Quilford’s competition listings are a comprehensive and regularly-updated list.

I Should Be Writing podcast
This is a practical and inspiring podcast: I Should Be Writing by Mur Lafferty. She describes the podcast as “For wanna-be fiction writers, by a wanna-be fiction writer” (though since starting it several years ago, she’s had considerable success selling her short stories) and focuses on science fiction and fantasy.

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/creative-writing-101/

Britain’s Strange Identity Crisis

LONDON — THE United Kingdom is lying on the psychiatrist’s couch. Suddenly the country seems uncertain of its identity, its place in the world, its relationships with its closest family members and its neighbors.



It is a bizarre moment in the history of an ancient realm, insufficiently grasped by its allies, especially across the ocean. Britain is having a kind of nervous breakdown, and its friends aren’t sure whether to say something or just look away.

Many Britons ask: Does Scotland still love us? Will it stay or vote for divorce? Even if we don’t love the European Union, do we really want to leave? And if we leave, will America still think we have a “special relationship,” or is it more committed to others, like Beijing and Berlin?

Britons wonder if they can still afford to sit at the high table of international powers. Even if they keep their expensive nuclear deterrent, do they really want an army smaller than it has been since Waterloo? Military intervention alongside the Americans after Tony Blair, Iraq and Afghanistan, is well, all a bit difficult now, so much so that the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, can lose a parliamentary vote on a key issue — bombing Syria — and not feel he has to resign.

Queen Elizabeth II is a wonderful old trouper, in her fuchsia suits and matching hats, tromping along her dutiful path in sensible court shoes. But King Charles III? Divorced, impatient, meddling — some suggest skipping a generation and going right to that nice young William, with his pretty wife and perfect baby.

Then there’s the odd coalition government, the first in decades, and party leaders who all lack a certain gravitas. Plus all the heated agonizing about those Eastern European immigrants, let alone Muslims — Mr. Cameron was criticized for insisting that Britain remains a Christian country. The BBC is marred by scandal, and even the famous British tabloids, the “red tops,” have to be careful these days, after the phone hacking trials. And let’s not get started on England’s humiliation in the World Cup.

Along with institutions like the Church of England, the sense of nationhood is being diluted, many Britons say. Time, Mr. Cameron has said, for a restoration of “British values,” even if no one can quite define what they are.

Just the other day, Mr. Cameron went on about Magna Carta, which turns 800 next year, and how he wanted to ensure that all students were taught its lessons of citizenship and parliamentary power. Two years ago, Mr. Cameron couldn’t translate Magna Carta into English for David Letterman. (Great Charter, by the way.) But now he admonished that “we should not be squeamish about our achievements, or bashful about our Britishness”; he called “belief in freedom, tolerance of others, accepting personal and social responsibility, respecting and upholding the rule of law,” as “British as the Union Flag, football and fish and chips.”

Of course, those are essentially French and German values too, minus the flag and the fish and chips. The lukewarm attitudes of a growing immigrant population to national symbols and ideals, from the monarchy to the military and the troubled BBC, are also echoed on the left, as they have traditionally been.

A recent survey of social attitudes was particularly revealing about what it means to be British these days. In 2003, 86 percent of respondents thought it was important to speak English to be considered “truly British”; now, 95 percent do. And while 69 percent in 2003 thought it vital to have lived in Britain “most of your life,” now 77 percent do.

“I don’t think we’ve had such a rocky ride in a very, very long time, since your lot parted company with us,” said Martin Woollacott, an editorial writer for The Guardian, referring to the United States. The Scottish referendum in September, the general election next May and Mr. Cameron’s promise of a referendum on British membership in the European Union “will greatly affect our future,” he said. “They could break up the state or take the state out of the E.U.”

No matter what happens in Scotland, Mr. Woollacott said, “there will have to be a new start for British politics.”

If Scotland leaves, it will be a radical new start for all four countries of the kingdom; if Scotland stays, there will be further federalization.

 

It’s all quite a departure from the poorer, far less cosmopolitan Britain I encountered more than 30 years ago, when I first lived here as a journalist. Then, Margaret Thatcher was fresh off her military victory in the Falklands; she was sometimes referred to as Boadicea, after the Celtic queen who fought the Romans, and sometimes as “the Leaderene,” and sometimes as Tina — as in, there is no alternative. A verb was created for her management style — she attacked, or “handbagged,” institutions and even the members of her cabinet, nearly all men, one of whom, John Nott, expressed his love for her.

 

MORE important, she had a plan. She changed Britain from the inside, and not always to everyone’s liking, humbling militant unions and forcing the Labour Party into a necessary confrontation with modernity. Internationally, too, she was admired, from the Reagan White House to the Kremlin. It was Mrs. Thatcher who identified Mikhail S. Gorbachev as a comer and invited him to London in December 1984, four months before he became Soviet general secretary.

 

Britain then “punched above its weight,” its counsel sought eagerly, if not always happily, by Reagan and his successor, George Bush, whom she admonished after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, that “this is no time to go wobbly.”

 

Britain today is far richer and more sophisticated, with London’s having become an almost impossibly expensive global capital, a hot spot and sanctuary for money and power, culture and art. Yet London can seem a country of its own, an empire sucking in workers and money not just from the rest of the world, but from the rest of Britain, too, where life goes on in a more traditional, modest fashion, but where people are less happy with the sense of flux.

 

Simon Jenkins, a British political columnist and historian, thinks that even though the country is going through a puzzled period, it has become a more self-assured place than it was in the 1970s. “Then Britain was seriously in a mess,” he said, before Mrs. Thatcher began to alter political life. Then the clichés were about “the British disease” and “the sick man of Europe,” and that’s gone, he said.

 

Still, he added, Britain has made serious errors — “allying itself too closely to the United States in its neo-imperialist burst” under President George W. Bush, for one thing. Then “we became drunk on money and ignored inequality and the provinces and the downside of borrow and spend, and we never made our peace with Europe.”

 

When I raised the diagnosis of national neurosis recently to a group of establishment Britons, there was something of a collective sigh. David Howell, now Baron Howell of Guildford, a former Conservative cabinet minister, was prompted to respond in “The World Today,” a magazine of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

 

“A London-based American correspondent,” he wrote, referring to me, said that Britain these days appeared to be having an identity crisis. “Unfair?” he wrote. “Definitely. Irritating? Very. Yet with a maddening tinge of truth. Somehow, on a fast-shifting world stage, the British story does seem to have become more confused.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/sunday-review/britains-strange-identity-crisis.html?ref=opinion&_r=1