Creative Writing Course – Week #6
Most of this week's class was spent listening to excerpts from classmates' first chapters, read by the tutor. Hearing the various styles from across the group is fascinating, and each piece was offered constructive feedback from both the tutor and everyone else.
Two hours is not long enough to spend discussing the dark art of creative writing, so the class is often wound up before everyone has a chance to have their work shared, and I was one of those who will get that honour next week. More time to endlessly insert, edit and then remove words here and there in the eternal pursuit of the perfect paragraph.
There's only a couple of weeks until the end of the term, whereby we'll have to submit our first chapter. Mine is already written, but it might need a few hundred words added to increase the word count a little. It's currently at around 1,550 words, the upper limit suggestion being around the 2,000 mark. We have to send our first chapters to the tutor this week for his comments to be returned to us next week, so I'll be working on mine again over the next couple of days.
We spent the second half of the class discussing the issue of formatting, looking at fonts, spacing, sizes, indenting and all the other industry criteria used when submitting work to publishers etc. Like a lot of the things covered in the course, some of it I knew, and some of it was entirely new to me, so all very interesting and valuable.
Like I already mentioned, a two hour class is not enough time to discuss creative writing, especially when you have fifteen or so people with various levels of experience and very different approaches to the craft. Time flies by and I can appreciate how hard it is to keep to a structured lesson plan when you a have a room full of people who want to discuss their projects and ask questions etc. Last week email addresses were exchanged, so hopefully we'll start to critique work between us and share our thoughts.
Enough of this, back to editing my (supposedly already finished) first chapter…!
