The Writing Experiment: Strategies for innovative creative writing

by Hazel Smith

The Writing Experiment demystifies the process of creative writing, showing that successful work does not arise from talent or inspiration alone. Hazel Smith breaks down writing into incremental stages, revealing processes that are often unconscious or unacknowledged, and shows how they can become part of a systematic writing strategy.

The book encourages writers to take an explorative and experimental approach to their work. It relates practical strategies for writing to major twentieth century literary and cultural movements, including postmodernism.

Suitable for both beginners and experienced writers, The Writing Experiment covers many genres including fiction, poetry, writing for performance and new media. Each chapter is illustrated with extensive examples of both student work and published writing, and challenging exercises offer writers at all levels opportunities to develop their skills.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Reference

304 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2005

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Hazel Smith is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra, Co-leader of the Sonic Communications Research Group and Deputy Director of the University of Canberra Centre for Writing. She founded the creative writing program at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara and co-author of Improvisation, Hypermedia and the Arts Since 1945. She has published two books of poetry, two CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia and hypermedia works

Reviews

[Lit-Creek]

Phrase Manipulation

This exercise consists of three aspects, Phrase Permutation, Word Substitution and Addition and Subtraction. I recommend it for anyone who is feeling stuck for ideas or feeling stale. It’s another technique to explore the endless shades of grey in phrase structure and meaning. It’s like stretching before you play sports, limber up those literary muscles. The more you do it the easier it will come whilst writing, you will start mixing up your phrasing without even thinking about it, and choosing what best conveys your intent. As you play with words, new lines of thought will present themselves, multiple referents, layers of meaning.

Phrase Permutation :
Just change the position of the words in the phrase.

Example:
Death of the Author
The author of death
Or
The rolling landscape
The landscape rolls away

Substitution means replace a word

Example:
the Death of the Author
The death of Autumn
The death of the daughter
Deleting the author

Adition and subtraction can open the process up by adding words from your word pool (see Word Association)

Example:
Reversing the death of the author
Death in the fist of the author

You can mix these aspects to whatever degree you wish, just at first, note what technique you are using.

Note: Phrase Manipulation works equally will for poetry and prose.

[nee]

anything for the goodreads reading challenge

[B Phoebe]

After reading this book, I honestly felt the need to force every single English I know to become aware of it. Really amazing stuff, this is a book I believe anyone interested in creative writing must own a copy of, really a well informative book covering all concepts of creative writing.

[Helen McClory]

Lots of practical exercises, neatly arranged. Useful for students and teachers alike.

[Susan]

This book is amazing if you are trying to improve your writing. It is great for any type of writer too. Doesn't matter if you are a poet, prose, etc. Everyone can find something in this book.

[Fernando]

I rate this book with just three stars cause I did skip all the poetry, have not sensibility for it. But book is kind of curious and inspiring. It gives some clues and exercises about writing; for example when you have a blank page for days, or even if you have a vague idea but are clueless about putting it on paper.

[Heather]

This book was a bit too technical to be of use in the classroom. I did appreciate all of the samples but many of the techniques were too esoteric so the samples wouldn’t be much help anyway. The one chapter that I thought gave practical and tangible help was the one that focused on world building.

[Laura]

Great teaching tool!

[Allison]

Perhaps if I had my PhD this book would make sense to me. As it stands I have no idea why it is marketed as an Intro to Creative Writing Textbook.

[Jessica Lewenda]

This focuses more on poetry than novels/short stories, but still offers some great advice when it comes to linguistics.

[Loren]

some interesting exercises and some not so interesting ones.