Discovering Creative Writing

This is a book about discovering how you do creative writing. How you begin, how you structure, how your writing process works, how a work embodies movement and change, what influences you, and, ultimately, how you end. Discovering Creative Writing points you toward clues that can assist you in understanding your own creative writing as well as the creative writing of others. This book is both a practical guide and a critical examination that empowers the reader to find things out and use that information to develop and support their own creative writing. This book will enable students of creative writing at both undergraduate and postgraduate level to deepen their understanding of their practice, and will be a valuable guide and inspiration for anyone wishing to begin, continue, or improve their writing.

Harper’s refreshing focus on creative writing as activities infuses his book with value: when he writes about 'structuring' and 'ending', he means writerly actions rather than features of texts. If you, in the author’s words, 'yearn for knowledge' and 'seek understanding' of creative writing processes, this is your book., Graeme Harper invites the writer on a voyage unlike any other, a multifaceted archaeological expedition into creative writing in culture writ large, and creative writing in particular, inviting writers to probe their processes like a detective, to ‘Live the questions’ about their own work just as Rilke advised his young poet. Those who accept his invitation are in for a treat as they come to a new understanding of themselves as writers., Discovering Creative Writing is essential reading for any writer. Through a discussion of form, structure, technique and influence, Harper brilliantly shows how creative writing has never mattered so much, nor been so vital, to our own self discovery.

Graeme Harper is Professor of Creative Writing and Dean of The Honors College, Oakland University, USA. He has published numerous books on creative writing, as well as novels under the name Brooke Biaz. He is Chair of the Creative Writing Studies Organization and edits New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (Routledge).