Oak Meadow School

Los Angeles

Creative Writing

Text: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott. You will need to purchase this book, possibly by ordering it from Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.com.

Anne Lamott’s opening sentence in chapter one of her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life is this: “The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth.” Think about that for a minute. For example, recall the last great comedian that you heard: why was she or he so funny? Inevitably, the humor that really rocks our tummies is that which is so close to home that it hurts. Bill Cosby has made a great career of describing just exactly how we live our lives--and we humans are hilarious people!

Creative writing is the act of writing the truth about life--in prose or poetry, briefly or at great length--in a fashion which is so real that it captures the hearts and minds of the reader. This course will be built on three pillars; one of the three is much bigger than the rest:

1. Each week, you will submit your creative writing. This is the huge foundation for this course: you must write! You may write something different every week, or you may conceive of one larger project that will take you more than a week to complete (it can span the entire semester or year, for that matter), and you will turn in the work you have accomplished each week. Thus, it is not possible to do all of your writing crammed into a few weeks at the end of the term; you must write consistently all term long. You may write prose or poetry. You need not turn in “finished work” each week: serious first drafts (even crummy first drafts that demonstrate hard work and serious effort) are fine. A reworked first draft can also be the work that you submit for a particular week. The point is, write! Get it?

2. Read Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. Lamott’s book is luminous. She writes not only to tell us about how to write, but also to show us how to do it. Her book is itself an act of creative writing. Write a two page book report on the book, in which you talk about (1) the most important two things you learned about the process of creative writing from the book, and (2) how Lamott’s book is itself a creatively written book.

3. During the course, you will be required to choose any two pieces of literature to analyze, as long as one of them is prose and the other is poetry. You may choose a short story or a novel, an epic poem, or a haiku. Length is not the issue. Choose two pieces that you think will appeal to you.

The purpose of this assignment is to get you thinking critically about someone else’s creativity, as you are developing your own. Please write at least two pages (more would be better!) explaining specifically why you like the piece, or why you do not like the piece. That, after all, is the “bottom line” in all creative writing: we write to capture the hearts and minds of our readers. You will need to explain the details of why the piece does or does not accomplish that for you.