The fun and benefit of learning creative writing
LikeWhat is creativity? People say it can't be taught, but providing students with the skills and tips needed to produce credible, readable - even publishable - work is definitely teachable through the likes of private English tuition. The key is reveal the inspiration all around us as well as in our own heads. This is firmly backed up by teaching reviewing, editing and workshopping skills, and the vital necessity of accepting feedback.
Writing is also quietly therapeutic for students. Feelings can be transformed by writing them down into more manageable states. More than one student has reported increased confidence when they went back to school, as they'd moved their fellow students, or made them laugh, when reading out loud. Quick fire writing sessions based on a huge variety of prompts also gave them courage to complete work to a tight deadline.
With a background in magazines and newspapers, I've always trained and mentored young people in the fine arts of features writing, copywriting and rigorous editing. Now I'm moving into teaching students of all ages how to marshall their thoughts and emotions, and their ideas for stories, and presenting them in ways that other people will want to read.
It's fine to write just for yourself, but creative writing, as I teach it, definitely must be written for an audience. My students are taught for entrance exams, for competitions and journal entries, and even for submission to publishers if appropriate.
In 2023, my first poetry collection was long-listed for the Poetry Book Awards 2023 - the last 25 titles out of hundreds. A week later, the title of my novel in progress got into the short list of 10 in the Title Awards from SelfPubCon 2023. Again, hundreds of titles and synopses were sent in from all over the world.
In 2019 I gained distinction in my Master's in Creative Writing at Brunel University London - and won the outstanding dissertation prize for the whole faculty. I chose a course that included teaching skills.
All through covid lockdowns, I taught adults how to write the best poetry they could via Zoom and messaging. These fun sessions were cheering for the isolated and fun for me too as I saw them blossom with better and more exciting choices of material, words and images.
July this year was spent in Oxford teaching 18 very bright American teenagers everything from site-specific poetry to the art of the short story, formal poetic forms to flash fiction challenges. It was very intense and great fun, and the bespoke textbook I wrote went down very well with the students.
The final project was a volume of their enjoyable short stories. One talented student created a cover that combined Oxford's famous Radcliffe Camera with Peter Pan and the children flying. The fantastic story of Peter Pan had been a running theme through our sessions with a walk in Kensington Garden to view his statue, and a visit to the house nearby where J.M.Barrie wrote the original story.
My students also performed their poetry to an audience of their friends and my fellow tutors. The standard was very high - not just because they showed talent and enthusiasm, but also because I made them review and edit every word to come up with the best version of their original idea.
My youngest student is 6 - and we've been enjoying learning figurative writing - in particular similes, alliteration and onomatopoeia. The last is always fun for children as they get to make animal, car and train noises in class and add them to their stories.
If you are interested in working with a private English tutor and learning some skills to boost your creative writing, please feel free to get in touch with me.