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Discussion » Questions » Books and Literature » Do you think creative writing courses kill a potential writer's creativity or enhance it? How?

Do you think creative writing courses kill a potential writer's creativity or enhance it? How?

Posted - June 27, 2018

Responses


  • 5835
    It depends on the teacher. Exactly half of my professors admitted in class that they didn't know what to teach or how to teach it. One thought he was being a nice guy when he advised his class "You shouldn't expect much from your teachers because we didn't get our jobs by being good teachers." IOW it is the student's responsibility to avoid embarrassing his inept teachers. 

    Bottom line: You do not need permission from any school to be a scholar, and it is somewhat rare to find a school where they actually teach anything. 
      June 27, 2018 11:17 AM MDT
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  • 6023
    Yep.  I agree - it's the teacher.
    A good "creative writing" teacher will find where you're at, and encourage you to challenge yourself to grow.


      June 27, 2018 3:18 PM MDT
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  • 22891
    i dont think so
      June 27, 2018 5:53 PM MDT
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  • 17614
    It's all about the teacher.  They have to let you be.  Let you write.  It's the same thing as There is no correct or incorrect answer to any question that starts with What do you think......?

    I had a discussion about this with an AP teacher when my oldest was in high school.

    If done right the class will be enriching.  Creative writing flows from creative thinking.   This post was edited by Thriftymaid at June 28, 2018 12:33 PM MDT
      June 28, 2018 1:28 AM MDT
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  • 5835
    When I took ENG 101 I wrote my essay on "How To Be A Better Teacher." The teacher kinda scoffed, but he gave me an A and when I saw him the next semester he was wearing a tie and long sleeved shirt. My chemistry professor heard about that and asked for a copy.
      June 28, 2018 3:20 AM MDT
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  • 6098
    Probably enhance because you can learn different points of view and expand your scope. 
      June 28, 2018 7:05 AM MDT
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  • 53524

      I disagree with the answers so far that it depends upon the teacher.  There are great teachers and not-so-great teachers, as there are great students and not-so-great students.  

      My personal experience with a particular college-level creative writing course was completely positive, but that's partially because of my background. My mother is a writer and poet, and almost from the time I began to talk, she began teaching me some important language-related fundamentals at home, such as the alphabet, reading, writing, diction, grammar, spelling, punctuation, syntax, composition, definitions, word origins, etc. As such, I've had a lifelong love affair with reading, storytelling, imagination, and many other things associated with language. For me, creative writing comes naturally. 
     
      Conversely, I used to be terrible at mathematics. No matter how competent the teacher, mathematics never made sense to me in my formative years. I did very poorly at it, and it never "clicked" for me until about the age of 18 or 20. Even then, only the most basic and simple concepts of mathematics come easily to me. I cannot do algebra, calculus, trigonometry, etc. Geometry, only to a certain extent. I've had class after class in advanced mathematics, some of the best practitioners of it have taught them, some very patient and osssionate math-lovers, and I've still failed every time.  That isn't attributed to them as educators, it's on me as the student. 

    ~
      July 7, 2018 10:03 AM MDT
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  • 5835
    Get a ruler in your hands. Measure things until you start to understand how a ruler works. Measure some stuff and figure out where the center is. Say you measure a book and it's 7/8" thick. You look at your ruler and see that every eighth is divided into two sixteenths, so obviously half of 7/8" is going to be 7/16". If you write that out you have 1/2 x 7/8 = 7/16. And you notice that 1/2 is divided into 2/4 and then into 4/8 and so on, so you can convert anything to anything by multiplying all the numbers on top and then all the numbers on bottom.

    Other rulers are divided into 10 and 100 parts. But an inch is still an inch, so anything on one ruler can be translated to the other ruler. A half inch on one ruler is 5/10 or 50/100 on the other. An eighth inch is just 12.5 marks when you have 100 marks per inch. A metric ruler divides an inch into 25.4 parts, so a half inch would be 12.7 of those parts. Pretty simple, isn't it? Practice this a bit and people will think you went to wizard school.
      July 7, 2018 5:46 PM MDT
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