Introduction to Creative Writing: Getting Started

What does the term Creative Writing mean and what does it mean to be a creative writer? This lecture explores those concepts.

This lecture looks at the various reasons writers tell themselves why they should not write, along with some tips on how to get past writers' blocks, apathy, self-doubt, and excuses.

Prewriting is the time when a writer plays with ideas and gathers information to prepare for the actual drafting. In this planning phase you brainstorm and research ideas. Brainstorming can be simply thinking about what you want to write. Researching often involves reading or talking about a topic. At a minimum, prewriting means coming up with an idea!

Drafting is the stage when the writer begins to record ideas in rough form. It is simply a time to gather, explore, and discover ideas and is not expected to produce a final, polished writing. In this stage writers will often use diagrams for mapping out thoughts.

It is important to keep a journal to discover deeper levels of the human condition, which you can use in your writing.

Clustering is a powerful tool because it taps into the right brain, which drives creativity.

Free-writing is a technique where you write nonstop, capturing as many ideas as possible. It may resolve itself as single words, phrases, full sentences, even paragraphs, and it may not make any sense to the casual reader. Ideas come with great speed and momentum often triggering other ideas along the way, and ideas are the goal of the first draft.

What are the creative writing elements? This video will look at what these are and why they are important to know.

Characters are the real or imaginary people you write about in your fiction, creative nonfiction, or drama. Characters can make or break a story even if you have a good plot. Characters are essential to drawing in the reader because people relate to other people, even if they’re imaginary.

Plot constitutes the substance of a story. It shows the arrangement of events and actions within it. For the writing to be worth reading, something has to happen by the end.

Point of view, or POV for short, is the perspective from which you tell a work of writing.

Setting is where your story takes place. It is significant as the physical details often have metaphorical value. That is, the setting is associated with values, ideals, attitudes, and beliefs. As setting is the place and time where the story happens, it often reflects upon the characters and reveals their emotional or psychological state.

The last writing exercise of the Getting Started Journal, along with further instructions on how to complete this exercise.

A quick summary of the major points from the course.