Creative Writing Course – Week #5
The next few weeks of the course are to be lead by another tutor, one who has written and published several books, so is pretty well versed in the writing process. The course has a half theory, half practical approach, which seems well suited to learning the craft.
The first half of this week's course was spent giving our thoughts about the course so far. The feedback was mostly positive, with a few suggestions about maybe having some writing exercises or group work during some of the class time, but I can see how this would be difficult given the two hour length of the class. Two hours flies by when you have fifteen or so people talking about books and writing, so keeping a structured approach to each session must be quite hard.
This week there was some discussion of the 'Writer Vs Planner' approach to writing. Some people are writers, in that they just sit down and spill out their thoughts without any structural notes or plans, and let the story and characters form organically. Others are planners, those who methodically make notes and lists and charts about plot and characters and locations etc, so that it's all laid out before them before they commit pen to paper for chapter one. The group seemed to have a slightly higher proportion of planners from what I could tell.
I, I think, am a cross between the two. I find I have to write a scene if it's nagging at me or has just come to me in a flash of inspiration, even if I'm not sure where it fits into the narrative. I can work this out later. This would put me in the 'writer' camp. But on the other hand, in order to work out why something has happened, I often find myself having to plan the plot out, so that I can see the progression of the storyline. I often make a list of character traits, which incidentally, was last weeks homework task, and this would put me in the 'planner' camp. So, just to be contrary, I think I am neither one nor the other. But at the end of the day, a writer has to do whatever works for them.
The first term of the course is aimed at producing the opening chapter of our novels, which is to be handed in in the next three weeks. Better get editing. In fact, I have to add a little more wordcount, as mine is a little on the light side at approx. 1,600 words. To get an idea of the kind of techniques and approaches found in opening chapters, and opening paragraphs of opening chapters, we looked at four extracts from published books. Without knowing the title and writer, we discussed our feelings about what we'd heard. This is where a creative writing course becomes interesting, in much the same way a book club does, there's usually a consensus in the group about the atmosphere and genre of the writing. These kind of responses are the type of things a writer wants to elicit from a reader. Of course, it could have gone the other way if the four openings weren't well received.
In general the opening chapter should do the following things:
Introduce the main character(s)
Set the scene/location
Establish a tone
Ask the reader a question which is only partly answered
Of course, the 'rules' of writing are amorphous and ill-defined, but these principles should give us some guidance. You can take away and add more as you see fit.
The task for next week is more reading out of our work. This time it will be a passage selected from wherever we want within our first chapters, to be read by the tutor so as to give the work the same 'voice'. I can see this is going to cause me to pore over my work before then, to find a section worthy of being delivered to 15 or so critics. I might well end up changing or adding in whole new sections. There's no better test than having your work read out, though.
Are you a writer or a planner? Notes or instinct? Research or diving straight in? Are you a mix of both, like me? I'm interested to see how others do it.
