Explorations in Creative Writing by Kevin Brophy

Explorations in Creative Writing Reviews

• 
  Rhonda

  So far very exciting in terms of what it is to be a writer. Fvourite lines so far - 'Writers are peculiarly subjective to language. For many of them the world is one long and complex sentence not yet ended.' Yes! 20/2/2013 and approx 1 month of living with this book at work lunch breaks and night time reading roughly one page at a time since thats all I can deal with before crashing not because its boring - went through a sticky middle patch because I was reading it wanting to explore creative writing through someone else's eyes, not get into literary discussions, which to be fair, you have to if you are going to explore creative writing. Something this exploration probably showed me was my limitations in thinking about creative writing. I realised I don't want to think about it theoretically, I just want to write stuff, which forces me to think more about how I think about writing, particularly about how, what and why I don't think about it - and does that matter? I have thought about why I want/need to write, and what it is I want to say, roughly, and about how writing is ultimately about communication and communication comes down to content. I don't want to do it for its own sake no matter how much I love the process. For someone thinking about how writing fits into their life and into the environment they inhabit therefore I would say this is worth reading because of its scope. It explores creative writing from a range of perspectives, from intensely personal to scholarly. There were also two sentences apart from the one that starts this response that I have copied and will glue into my journal simply because they said things that made me feel less alone in my writing and in my reading, because they were things I thought only I believed - one is 'Writing, the sort of writing that matters, has something to do with never having thought about how to make a living from it, ...' and the other is 'One of the great problems here for ..... creative writers, is that it is often only other writers who can see how many hours and weeks, indeed years of research could have gone into the choice of a single word in a sentence that takes less than a few seconds to read.'