Creative writing

[Psychoqueen]

For the next two weeks leading up to the school certificate trials, we are working on creative writing. We've had three lessons, and it is complete and utter hell.

Lesson #1 - We were given the beginning of a story written by a year 12 student which we were expected to add on to. This wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been something very boring and uninspiring about two people in a motel and we have more than 15 minutes to write, but I tried to turn in something worthwhile. Unfortunately it was 'too plot orientated, with not enough discription'.

I disagreed with that, but I wasn't going to argue. It wasn't my best work, and I didn't really care about the marks. What bothered me was that we had been given something so uninspiring for our first lesson.

Lesson #2 - We were given a book and spent the whole lesson learning ways to make verbs sound more interesting and intelligent. I was just about killing myself by the end of this.

Lesson #3 - We had a 45 minute long spelling test (that spilled over in to recess because he wanted to teach us more words). The basis of this lesson was 'To be creative, you much know how to use and spell complex words. If you cannot spell complex words, you cannot be creative'. Bullshit.

I enjoy writing; it is something that I am happy to sit down and do for fun. I enjoy being creative, and researching things to write about. I really like that sort of thing. But I don't like being told exactly what to write and how to write, and I certainly don't appreciate being told that the fact that I didn't spell Ostentatious correctly in a spelling test means I can't be creative.

[Kittty]

"You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. ... You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically an correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going somewhere?" - Stephen King

Personally, I don't like Stephen King's writing, but I bet he's had much more success with it than your teacher. Just ignore him. I mean, he's a teacher, so he obviously wasn't good enough at writing to make a living off of it.

One thing about big, fancy words: if readers don't understand your writing, they won't like it. Don't use words of which nobody knows the meanings. Maybe your teacher just likes being pretentious.

[maxh]

Your teacher is flat-out wrong. One tries to keep editing and writing as seperate as possible. For one thing, it's faster. For another: in the words of Ernest Hemingway, "the first draft of anything is shit". You don't want to know that you're in the process of writing shit. This is the advice I received before starting my first novel, and that I give to you now as I am preparing my latest novel for publication.