creative writing workbook with readings

Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings, Second edition

‘A wonderful, invaluable resource, full of useful frameworks and ideas. Highly recommended.’ – Irenosen Okojie FRSL MBE, Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature

‘Offers pertinent, perceptive and plentiful advice for those first starting out or building their skills in creative writing. Enlivening chapter discussions rub shoulders with well-chosen readings to create dynamic conversations which it feels a pleasure to eavesdrop on.’ – Andrew McMillan, Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University

‘A refreshingly practical book that invites writers at whatever stage to dive in and out with exercises, encouragement, information, reading and guidance.’ – Yvonne Battle-Felton, fiction writer, Sheffield Hallam University

‘Creative Writing is astonishing in its thoughtfulness: there’s a calm, authoritative thoroughness about the way skills and topics are introduced, supported by readings, and paired with exercises. This would be a very useful workbook for instructors as well as new writers.’ – Marshall Moore, Course Leader in Creative Writing at Falmouth University

‘Offers practical, clear, and substantial advice for writing in a range of genres. As you will find from using this imaginative, generous and ingenious book, the journey will surprise and transform you.’ – David Morley FRSL, Warwick Writing Programme at Warwick University, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing

‘This distils the basic elements of complicated artistic practice into inspiring guidelines that will enhance the work of both students and teachers of creative writing.’ – Winsome Pinnock FRSL, Associate Professor Emerita at Kingston University

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This comprehensive creative writing guide serves as a practical workbook, introducing the broad concerns of creative process and providing a thorough review of elements specific to poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The chapters are full of helpful insights, methods, tips, and exercises on topics such as character, setting, point of view, structure, voice, imagery, and theme. The second part is an anthology of the exemplary writing referenced in the workbook by authors including Raymond Carver, Joan Didion, Patricia Highsmith, Richard Hugo, Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Mansfield, Hilary Mantel, Flannery O’Connor, and Wole Soyinka. 

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Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

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Creative writing: a workbook with readings.

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Anderson, Linda ed. (2005). Creative writing: A workbook with readings. Abingdon, UK: Routledge and The Open University.

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'Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings' is a complete writing course that will jump-start your writing and guide you through your first steps towards publication. Suitable for use by students, tutors, writers’ groups or writers working alone, this book offers: * a practical and inspiring section on the creative process, showing you how to stimulate your creativity and use your memory and experience in inventive ways; * in-depth coverage of the most popular forms of writing, in extended sections on fiction, poetry and life writing, including biography and autobiography, giving you practice in all three forms so that you might discover and develop your particular strengths; * a sensible, up-to-date guide to going public, to help you to edit your work to a professional standard and to identify and approach suitable publishers; * a distinctive collection of exciting exercises, spread throughout the workbook to spark your imagination and increase your technical flexibility and control; * a substantial array of illuminating readings, bringing together extracts from contemporary and classic writings in order to demonstrate a range of techniques that you can use or adapt in your own work. 'Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings' presents a unique opportunity to benefit from the advice and experience of a team of published authors who have also taught successful writing courses at a wide range of institutions, helping large numbers of new writers to develop their talents as well as their abilities to evaluate and polish their work to professional standards. These institutions include Lancaster University and the University of East Anglia, renowned as consistent producers of published writers.

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Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings Hardcover – 6 Dec. 2005

Creative Writing is a complete writing course that will jump-start your writing and guide you through your first steps towards publication.

Suitable for use by students, tutors, writers’ groups or writers working alone, this book offers:

• a practical and inspiring section on the creative process, showing you how to stimulate your creativity and use your memory and experience in inventive ways
• in-depth coverage of the most popular forms of writing, in extended sections on fiction , poetry and life writing, including biography and autobiography, giving you practice in all three forms so that you might discover and develop your particular strengths
• a sensible, up-to-date guide to going public, to help you to edit your work to a professional standard and to identify and approach suitable publishers
• a distinctive collection of exciting exercises, spread throughout the workbook to spark your imagination and increase your technical flexibility and control
• a substantial array of illuminating readings, bringing together extracts from contemporary and classic writings in order to demonstrate a range of techniques that you can use or adapt in your own work.

Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings presents a unique opportunity to benefit from the advice and experience of a team of published authors who have also taught successful writing courses at a wide range of institutions, helping large numbers of new writers to develop their talents as well as their abilities to evaluate and polish their work to professional standards. These institutions include Lancaster University and the University of East Anglia, renowned as consistent producers of published writers.

• ISBN-10 0415372429
• ISBN-13 978-0415372428
• Edition 1st
• Publisher Routledge
• Publication date 6 Dec. 2005
• Language English
• Dimensions 19.05 x 3.81 x 24.77 cm
• Print length 664 pages
• See all details

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Product description

‘For anyone getting going as a writer (and even for those who have already made a start), this is an invaluable how-to guide, full of useful tips, mind-freeing exercises, and inspiring wisdom from established authors. A book to banish the terror of the blank page.’ – Blake Morrison, journalist, critic and acclaimed author of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including the multi-award-winning And When Did You Last See Your Father? (Granta, 1993)

'The book seems to be universally appreciated in the way it gently guides thtough practical exercises and opens out areas for discussion in the inspiring readings section. With so much well-structured and accessible content, students do not feel alone. A key advantage is that the book is available and accessible to all.' - Jane Bluett, NATE

About the Author

Linda Anderson is an award-winning novelist ( To Stay Alive and Cuckoo , both published by Bodley Head) and writer of short stories, poetry, performance pieces, and critical reviews. Her work has been published in Britain, Ireland, the USA, and Australia. She has taught at Goldsmiths' College and at Lancaster University for ten years, becoming Head of Creative Writing from 1995-2002. She has designed several successful courses including a training programme for new writing tutors and an MA in Creative Writing by distance learning. She has also worked as a producer and director for BBC Radio Drama. She has a PhD in Creative Writing.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Routledge; 1st edition (6 Dec. 2005)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 664 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0415372429
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0415372428
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 19.05 x 3.81 x 24.77 cm

About the author

Linda anderson.

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The challenge of being a creative person once you’ve created a person

A very tired parent’s tips for writing a book while also doing all the other things.

Eight or nine years ago, an old friend called seeking advice. She was trying to write a novel, but she was also a new mom with a full-time job, and she was exhausted. I, who had breezily published a couple of books by then, offered my best wisdom. You have to push through, I told her sternly. You have to take your own writing seriously, or nobody else will. Set aside two hours every night. Put on the coffee and push through the exhaustion. You can and will do it.

Years passed. Then I, too, had a baby. Then I, too, set out to write a book while also being a mother with a full-time job. And somewhere in the middle of this endeavor, I called my friend and asked whether my advice had been as bad as I was beginning to sense it had been. No, she told me cheerfully, it had actually been much worse. The callousness of it had shocked her, she said, until she decided that I simply hadn’t known any better and that, when I did, I would apologize.

God, I’m so sorry.

My first post-baby book came out today, and I have been thinking, almost nonstop, about the relationship between creativity and motherhood. I used to love reading articles with titles such as “The daily routines of 10 famous artists,” until I realized that Leo Tolstoy may have finished his masterpieces by locking his study doors to ensure uninterrupted productivity, but, like, what were his 13 children doing while he was in there? Did anyone check in on Mrs. Tolstoy? For the women I know, there is no setting aside a few hours at the end of the workday. The end of the workday is the beginning of the parent day. The end of the parent day is never, because 2-year-olds wake cheerfully at 5 a.m., and strep throat comes for us all.

Where, in this schedule, was the life of the mind? TikTok would not stop showing me videos of mothers showing off their “realistic beauty routines,” but what I really wanted were realistic creativity routines: the mothers who didn’t give a crap about heatless curlers, but had somehow composed a cello sonata while working five days a week as a dental hygienist.

In my bleariest days of early parenthood, I met a woman at the playground who had just finished doing something extraordinary (Triathlon? Solo art exhibit?), and when the rest of us asked her how she’d found the time, she shrugged and said, modestly, “Oh, you know.” But the point was that we didn’t know, and we were desperate for her to tell us. (Live-in grandparents? Adderall?)

The bigger point is that we weren’t really trying to figure out how to compete in triathlons. We were trying to figure out how to be people.

When you have a baby or a toddler, reminding yourself that you are a full person with your own dreams and needs can feel both completely vital and completely impossible. But being a full person is a sacred legacy to give to a child. My own mother is a folk artist. When I was growing up, she made Ukrainian eggs in the frigid concrete sunroom, a space heater at her feet, and her works were shown and sold at galleries around the Midwest. I knew then, and I know now, that my mother would die and kill for me. But I also knew that she loved other things, too. She had loved those things before she ever knew me. She had secrets and wisdom to pass on.

Her work had nothing to do with me, yet it was a gift. It paid for my brother and me to go to summer camp. It went on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, and we visited it, as well as the Seurats and the Hoppers, and ate granola bars. When my mother dies, I will carefully unwrap the tissue paper surrounding the astonishing works of art she gave to me over the years, and I will sob.

I want that for my own daughter. I want her to know that motherhood doesn’t have to atrophy personhood; it can expand it.

And in wanting that, desperately, I came up with a routine that allowed me to maintain a grip on the parts of me that were me before I was a mother. A realistic creativity routine, if you will.

I write between the hours of 10 p.m. and midnight, unless it turns out that I write between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4. I write 300 to 400 words every time I am on the Metro; I write 30 to 40 words each time I pick my daughter up from day care, in the three-minute gap between when I ring the outer bell and when a teacher’s aide comes to let me inside. I write badly. I write very, very badly, vaguely remembering a quote I’d once heard attributed to author Jodi Picoult, about how you can always edit a bad page, but you can never edit a blank page.

Does it look like the routines of Tolstoy, or Virginia Woolf, or anyone else I may have once read about in an article about the routines of famous artists? It does not. But the bad pages get edited, and then they get good.

Pursuing creativity as a working mom means, in other words, letting go of any romantic notions of what creativity means or looks like.

It means not waiting for inspiration to strike, but instead striking inspiration, bludgeoning it upside the head and wrestling it to the ground. Inspiration is a luxury, and once you realize that, you can also understand that the ability to create something through sheer force of will — without inspiration, without routine, without time — is a far more creative act than relying on a muse.

If my old friend called me now, I think that is what I would say to her. That, and:

You will not be Mark Twain, summoned by a horn when it’s time to eat the dinner someone else has prepared. You will not be going on Tchaikovsky’s vigorous two-hour walks through the countryside or spending the morning shopping for inspiring objects like Andy Warhol.

But you will create something. Not by pushing through the exhaustion so much as living alongside it, and then peering beyond it, and then stopping, and then starting, and then having superhuman discipline, and then eating a whole package of Oreos, and then finishing something beautiful at 2 a.m. and sneaking into your child’s room to see another beautiful thing, and then thinking about how the things that make us the most tired are the things that give us reason to create at all.