On Creative Writing

Graeme Harper 2010

E-Book: 152 English pages

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Price: 1000 Toman

Download: On Creative Writing (Harper 2010).

What is Creative Writing? Millions of people do it, but how do we do it, really? What evidence of its human undertaking does Creative Writing produce? How do we explore Creative Writing, as both an art form and a mode of communication? How do we come to understand Creative Writing, creatively and critically? Posing questions about the nature of Creative Writing, On Creative Writing asks us to consider what Creative Writing actually is, and in doing so encourages us to reflect on how our knowledge of Creative Writing can be increased. Emphasizing Creative Writing as an act and actions, On Creative Writing considers what lies at the core of the activity called Creative Writing.

Review

Graeme Harper’s book comes at the right time for the discipline of Creative Writing. It is a bold statement of the human-centred view of writing, in which nothing is alien to the writer at work or reflecting on that work: the practical, the personal, the intellectual and above all the unformed and the unfinished are all part of the reflection. There are new tools here to help writing students to connect the academic viewpoint to the true and secret lives of their own writing. It also widens the terms in which writing educators can pursue the debate with each other. Harper does the job with clarity and wit and, above all, good creative questions.

— (Philip Gross, Professor of Creative Writing, University of Glamorgan, Wales.)

This book is an engaging attempt to explore a field of artistic enterprise from an angle that is very much often ignored. It is refreshing to see act/process/mysterious game (call it what you will) that we term Creative Writing discussed in such a thorough and rigorous manner.

— (John Weldon, lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Victoria University, in Text Vol 14 No 2 October 2010)

 

About the Author

Graeme Harper is a Professor of Creative Writing at Oakland University, Michigan, USA. He is Series Editor of New Writing Viewpoints, as well as Editor of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. Graeme was the inaugural chair of the Higher Education Committee at the UK’s National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE). He is an award-winning fiction writer and a former Commonwealth Scholar in Creative Writing.