Creative Writing – Lecture 1

 How to comment on creative writing (or any writing)

- Identify a strength you found in the writing; indicate why it was a strength
- Identify an area or areas that could use some improvement; indicate how this could be
improved
- You don’t need to overwhelm the writer with feedback  try for 3 sentences of insightful
commentary

Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

 American short-story writer and poet

 Known for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (short story collection,
published in 1981)

 Credited with reviving the short-story form in the US, a legacy extending from 1970s-
present

Short stories
 Conventionally thought of a piece of prose fiction that can be read in one sitting (as Edgar
Allan Poe described it in 1946)

 Ascended as a genre in the mid-19th Century

 Typically considered to be between 1000-20,000 words in length

- Anything less is categorized as “flash fiction”, and anything more is categorized as a
novella

 How are short stories different from novels, apart from length?
- Often fewer characters
- Different levels of development
- Reader engagement early on in the story is crucial
- Like novels, contain all the “elements of fiction”
- Although all successful writing is based on the principle that “every word counts”, the
short story and the poem takes this even more to heart
 Alice Munro considers shot stories as “snapshots”
- You might wonder about the person before or after the “snapshot”, it suggests more
material or more story, yet still satisfies the reader

Popular Mechanics
 How would you describe Carver’s story in terms of its language?

 You can easily tell the woman from the man, in terms of how each character is written
emotionally

 There is no abundance of detail, allowing the readers to interpret it how they want

 Very matter of fact; interesting take for describing a scene on domestic violence

 No names, nothing personal

 Spare, economical, “minimalist”  very straightforward, basic, and functional; no flowery

language or descriptions

 His editors instilled in him to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five (First Editor- Josh
Gardner) and then to use five instead of fifteen (Second Editor-Gordon Lish), when writing
a sentence; this was a way of carving everything down to the bare minimum

o “Less is more” has become a mantra of teaching creative writing

- Try to reduce your word count, so more is up for interpretation from the reader and they are
not suffocated by the detail provided by the writer
- LESS IS MORE: Saying the most with only the necessary amount of words
- Remember that this doesn’t mean that each word is “symbolic”  This means that each
words are chosen in deference to supporting the characters, mood, setting, and any other
element that builds the world of the story
- Be more specific versus writing with detail (e.g. instead of writing about a dog that is fast,
mention that the dog is a greyhound, which people will then be able to make the assumption
that it is fast)

o First goal of writing  To communicate well with your reader with simple and
straightforward writing, add description later
- Limit adjectives and adverbs, modifiers that describe nouns and verbs, respectively 
Instead, choose strong, specific nouns and verbs, those which stand on their own