How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play by Barbara Baig

by Barbara Baig, Unknown Author

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About the author

I am a writer who is passionate about teaching writing--something I've done for thirty years. I started out working with undergraduates and graduate students (I created the popular Writing Workshops at Harvard Divinity School), then moved on to teaching working adults and aspiring creative writers.I now teach in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.

My teaching journey has been focused on the questions: What makes someone a good writer? How do I help aspiring writers to improve? After much thought, I arrived at the idea that writers need to practice their skills, just like athletes and musicians. I've developed a teaching approach that is entirely skills-based, and grounded in the findings of scientific researchers in the field of expertise studies, such as Dr. K. Anders Ericsson.

Although I know that writing is a wonderful tool for self-exploration, I'm more interested in writing designed to be read by others--because that's when we need all the skills we can develop. To reach other people with our words, we need to be able to come up with and develop ideas and material, and we also need to have excellent craft skills. I cover the first set of skills in How To Be a Writer, the second in Spellbinding Sentences.