Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

by Jane Yeh (editor), Sally O'Reilly (Editor)

Creative Writing is a complete writing course that will jump-start your writing and guide you through your first steps towards publication.

Suitable for use by students, tutors, writers’ groups or writers working alone, this book






Creative A Workbook with Readings presents a unique opportunity to benefit from the advice and experience of a team of published authors who have also taught successful writing courses at a wide range of institutions, helping large numbers of new writers to develop their talents as well as their abilities to evaluate and polish their work to professional standards. These institutions include Lancaster University and the University of East Anglia, renowned as consistent producers of published writers.

648 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2022

About the author

Jane Yeh is a poet and journalist. Her first collection of poems, Marabou (Carcanet, 2005), was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward, and Aldeburgh poetry prizes. Her next collection, The Ninjas, was published by Carcanet in 2012. She was a judge for the 2013 National Poetry Competition and was named a Next Generation poet by the Poetry Book Society in 2014. Her poems have appeared in The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Nation (US), Poetry Review, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including The Best British Poetry 2012 and The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 and 2006.

Jane was educated at Harvard University and holds master’s degrees in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa and Manchester Metropolitan University. Before coming to the Open University, she was a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston and Oxford Brookes universities, and was Co-Director of the MA in Creative Writing Programme at the latter. As a journalist, she writes on books, theatre, fashion, and sport for such publications as The Times Literary Supplement, Time Out, and The Village Voice (US).

Reviews

[Bloss ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as part of an Open University module I took. This is a review of the text as a standalone workbook, not the course or the book's integration with the course.

What worked for me:
👍 For the most part, I didn’t get a sense of gatekeeping here. The introductory sections were very open and welcoming, even encouraging workbook users to claim the identity of writers.
👍 While it felt repetitious at times, there’s an attempt to draw the sections (fiction, poetry, and life-writing) together cohesively, encouraging writers to borrow and shape techniques across forms.
👍 I found the fiction exercises and prompts the strongest in the book - there was a good mix of activities and, early on, it’s evident how the exercises are crafted to build and shape skill.
👍 The contributors all had different styles and voices. Some I gelled with, others I didn’t. I was grateful for the sheer number of contributors across fiction and life-writing as it gave me a rounded view of the topics without getting bogged down by an instruction style that didn’t work for me.

What I wasn’t so keen on:
👎 Some of the sections are written in very dry, corporate language that didn’t suit the theme of creative writing particularly well.
👎 Heavy emphasis on western tropes and storytelling mechanics. I was disappointed that there wasn't much space for deviation or experimentation.
👎 I was disappointed by the lack of depth to the workbook. It’s very general and high-level.
👎 I found the extracts very English, culturally (they felt overly bleak across sections too).
👎 The content warnings were so robotic and stilted: list the warnings, please don’t tell us how we should feel about them!
👎 The poetry section felt the most inaccessible to me. I found the readings reinforced my dislike for poetry rather than opening my mind to this diverse form. The exercises in the poetry chapters were also the most uninspired in the book, for me.
👎 The publishing section felt like filler. Basic research into submitting work makes this section feel dated and clunky. For a book this introductory, including a section on getting published feels really premature.

Personally, I found this book most useful when paired with edX and Coursera courses to broaden my perspective, examine more diverse forms of fiction and poetry, and deepen my understanding.

Like any workbook, the usefulness of this book will depend on your existing knowledge and what you’re trying to achieve. Overall, I found it too surface-level and very geared toward an England readership. It was fine to work through but I’m glad it was a companion to a course, rather than something I purchased alone.

[Gee Liz Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book through my university course, Creative Writing. It's a good book which teaches techniques for being able to become a writer.