Creative Writing: Your Writing Life

In this course, you will explore a variety of genres to discover your unique author's voice. Stretch your creative muscles in this writing workshop as you compose a memoir, devotional, poetry, fiction, and a children’s book. New this year, we will write a movie/book review. This is an important skill, and a wonderful way for you to engage your Christian worldview into the broader cultural conversation!

You will also learn how to resonate as a small group of writers, just like Tolkien, Lewis, and the Inklings. We will take some of your writing to the final stage, other projects will remain at a draft level, but you will have a writing portfolio at the end of the year. Students should have a foundation in writing and grammar and be able to apply those skills to these creative projects.

Course Objectives:

1. To familiarize the student with a wide range of writing genre.
2. To establish a writers' group to encourage and resonate with each other in an Inklings style.
3. To assist the student in finding their personal writing niche by writing in a wide range of styles.
4. To refer to classics of poetry and literature as inspiration for the student's own work.
5. To create a portfolio of writing samples, both draft and finished pieces.

Texts

• Bandersnatch by Diana Glyer
• An autobiography of your choice. Your choice can be a book that you’ve read before, but it’s important that it’s an autobiography because we need this kind of writing for our Memoir writing. If you are stuck trying to think of one, Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis is one of my favorites.
• The Singing Bowl collected poems by Malcolm Guite.
• Poetic Meter and Form by Octavia Wynne.
• Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Make sure you get the original, unabridged copy. Arthur Rackham and Ernest H. Shepard are the illustrators of the classic versions.
• Choose a copy or two of your favorite children's picture books.
• A Biblical devotional that has resonated with you.
• Selections of mysteries from G. K. Chesterton from The Innocence of Father Brown. You can order a copy but it is also available free online at Gutenberg.org.

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