English, Writing.  #academic #creative

This class is the first in a series of Creative Writing Classes that I will be presenting to help students become more confident and enthusiastic writers.  

Beginning writers often struggle with the vocabulary to describe the environment in which their story is set.  We will look at interesting landscapes and explore the different ways that we can describe them.  We will be going over how different words that mean something similar can take on an entirely different connotation, for instance, the words damp and dank.  "The room was damp" might refer to a shiny clean bathroom with steamy warm mirrors and fluffy white towels, even though there is moisture, the term damp doesn't automatically evoke dirty or musty.  "The room was dank" is not a clean connotation.  A dank room will at the very least be musty, possibly bringing to mind a dim locker room with a flickering fluorescent light. The moisture is implied in the term "dank", but so is the smell and feel of the place.  Choosing the right words molds the world you are writing about.

We will then move on to words written by other authors about other worlds and the feelings they evoke.  Using excerpts from well-loved children's stories that many already know, we'll talk about what makes an intriguing world. 

Using these conversations, your learner will begin to create a world that will form the physical perspective of his/her story.   As this is a 55-minute class, the goal is merely to begin to form the world in which each student's story will take place.  Depending on each class this may produce a paragraph or even a page of writing, however, the goal is the firing of creativity that builds the writing.