Ruben Said:

Creative Writing, Practice Exam Question?

We Answered:

"AAARGH" he threw up ...
or something like that . it has to be different . eg. "AAARGH" a blood-curdling scream is mundane .

i know the above example is pathetic , but i hope you understand what i was trying to convey . remember ,it has to be different . besides , there is only so much you can do with a starting sentence . it has to get better with each passing line or paragraph, or the reader will feel let down if the rest of the story doesnt live upto his/her expectation after a superb start .

Clifton Said:

A good way to practice creative writing? correcting grammer and word usage? I need some laws to writing please?

We Answered:

As a recent college graduate, I suggest you stay in school. It is difficult to develop professional writing skills, it takes time, and dedication. Go to college! Without a college degree, it is very difficult to develop the skills and knowledge that is essential for writing. As you advance in your college career, you will see you writing improve drastically.

June Said:

Can anyone give me some practice 'questions' for creative writing exam?

We Answered:

I like analytical type essays but here are some which are a mix of both.

Try some of these:

Use these lines as the beginning of your story,
As I opened the box, I saw something that I hadn't seen in 10 years.

As I walked into the room, the smell of death reeked around me.

I awoke slowly on the last day of the holidays.

The rain was falling hard, like bullets on the roof of a car.

Mike Said:

Will I become more creative if I practice writing with my left hand?

We Answered:

Left- and right-handedness have nothing to do with creativity. And praticing writing with your left hand won't help you become more creative. Another myth is that juggling will make you more creative. I don't know where this nonsense comes from, but people love this fun stuff and quickly believe it.

If you want to become more creative, get involved in activities that require creativity. Such as art and creative writing. And stay with it...a little dabbling won't help you. While you're doing these activities, allow yourself to experiment with new colors, textures, subjects, images, contexts, perspectives, themes. The key to creativity is the willingness to try new things.

Creative people allow themselves TRY new things. In this phase, they SUSPEND JUDGMENT. This is harder than it sounds. Your mind will say something like, "Oh, that would be dumb..." trying to keep you from trying it. Playing around with images, ideas...that's what will help make you more creative.

Later, they refine their work into something excellent by applying judgment. They discard the ideas, images, etc. that don't work for what they're doing at the time.

Dolores Said:

Help me with a creative writing practice?

We Answered:

When faced with a six foot tall toad, there are only three things one can do; and I didn't speak German so there went two of them.


They say that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. The same cannot be said for inventing a better biological weapon


When Michelle had decided to learn to knit, she thought it would be a fun hobby. Now that the war had come and society had gone, it was the only skill that was keeping her alive.


Children are afraid of me now.


It was hotter than a Roman bathhouse that July afternoon, and damned near as steamy too, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise when I awoke in the park to find myself naked and surrounded at least a dozen others in a similar natural state.

Anne Said:

How can I practice defamiliarization in writing?

We Answered:

Poetic technique shocks readers into awareness of Other realities. Several literary tactics explored in this article.

Poets are charged with a duty to disrupt habits, overcome barriers of cultural perceptions and see the world fresh or new. The poet’s task doesn’t stray far from defamiliarization’s charge to make the familiar strange. And when a poet accepts this task, powerful communications result- witness Pan's Labyrinth, written and directed by Del Toro, a film in teh magic realism genre.

The term “defamiliarization” was first used by Russian Formalists following the Tolstoy and Doestoevsky period. Writers at that time were expected to be political figures and philosophers as well as craftsmen. It was taboo to write for aesthetic or illogical effect.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1905, writers like Victor Shklovsky searched for a way to “Recover the sensation of life: to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” He believed the purpose of art was to impart the sensation of things as they were perceived and not as they were known. He and others created the Formalist movement to “make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, and to increase the difficulty and length of perception.

Writers accomplish this through novel linguistic features in a story or poem that strike a reader as interesting. Features that are playful and slow the story, allowing emotions released by these devices to emerge; devices like alliteration, inversion, metaphor, and the unfamiliar agglutination.

Agglutination is a process of forming new words by combining other words or word elements like splitting the word “defamiliarization” with playful precision:

De bunking the Familiar I Zensation

Forces me to STOP.

To absorb a tree in its forestflesh.

A tree NOTME.

In making the common uncommon, defamiliarization techniques pull the reader into a reading experience. Barbara Harrison, founding Director of the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College says, “Experience has the capacity to diminish, but it also has the capacity to ennoble. It can be disillusioning and even tragic, but not necessarily either one—although because of it we are not the same person we were a moment before. Something has happened—a change, an awakening, an understanding.”

Defamiliarization techniques turn readers upside down, which is exactly what Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina intended. He created “magico-mythical worlds in which everything was related.” Borges had what Coleridge would call Poetic Imagination; “the ability to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar.”

This poetic imagination has an additional task- to take readers beyond their own experience towards understanding and empathy with The Other.