Research Guides: OER: Creative Writing

Creative Writing OER

Textbooks

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Exploring Perspectives: A Concise Guide to Analysis
Oregon Writes Open Writing Text
Writing Commons
Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom

Writing Prompts and Exercises

The Names Generator Project
The Names Generator Project created by Danish web developer, Niels Gamborg, is an easy way to randomly generate a list of names for business, creative writing, projects, etc. with the simple click of button. He has created three name generator categories to choose from: Business Names; Nicknames, and Fantasy Names.
Prompt Literary Magazine
The prompt literary magazine is a biannual online magazine that publishes creative work that reflects experimental and traditional work based on writing prompts and exercises.
Start Writing Fiction
This course from The Open University in Britain looks at how characters might be drawn and how setting is established. It works on the different levels of characterization, from flat to round, and how character and place interact. It also works on the effect of genre and how genre can be used. Contents: 1) Character. 2) Setting. 3) Genre.
Writing What You Know
This unit will introduce and briefly elaborate on some of the ways in which you might"know' the world around you. By looking at the commonplace details of your life in a different way, using your sensory perceptions and learning to use your own memories, you will be exercising certain writing muscles, ones that need regular flexing.

Open Courses

The Creative Spark
An MIT course about not just creative writing but about all of creative activity: What does the creative process look like? Under what conditions does it flourish - what ignites the creative spark? Attempting to answer these questions, this class explores ways creativity has been understood in Western culture.
Interactive and Non-Linear Narrative: Theory and Practice
This course covers techniques of creating narratives that take advantage of the flexibility of form offered by the computer. The course studies the structural properties of book-based narratives that experiment with digression, multiple points of view, disruptions of time and of storyline. The class analyzes the structure and evaluates the literary qualities of computer-based narratives including hypertexts, adventure games, and classic artificial intelligence programs like Eliza. With this base, students use authoring systems to model a variety of narrative techniques and to create their own fictions. Knowledge of programming is helpful but not necessary.
Playwriting I
This class introduces the craft of writing for the theater. Through weekly assignments, in class writing exercises, and work on a sustained piece, students explore scene structure, action, events, voice, and dialogue. We examine produced play scripts and discuss student work. This class's emphasis is on process, risk-taking, and finding one's own voice and vision.
Playwrights' Workshop
This course provides continued work in the development of play scripts for the theater. Writers work on sustained pieces in weekly workshop meetings, individual consultation with the instructor, and in collaboration with student actors, directors, and designers. Fully developed scripts are eligible for inclusion in the Playwrights' Workshop Production.
Transmedia Storytelling: Modern Science Fiction
Transmedia narratives exist across multiple storytelling platforms, using the advantages of each to enhance the experience of the audience. No matter which medium nor how many, the heart of any successful transmedia project is a good story. In this class we will spend time on the basics of solid storytelling in speculative fiction before we move on to how to translate those elements into various media. We will then explore how different presentations in different media can complement and enhance our storytelling. While we will read scholarly articles and discuss ideas about transmedia, this is primarily a class in making speculative fiction transmedia projects. We will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of various mediums and consider how they complement each other, and how by using several different media we can give the audience a more complete, rewarding, and immersive experience.
Writing and Reading Poems
This course is an examination of the formal structural and textual variety in poetry. Students engage in extensive practice in the making of poems and the analysis of both students' manuscripts and 20th-century poetry. The course attempts to make relevant the traditional elements of poetry and their contemporary alternatives. There are weekly writing assignments, including some exercises in prosody.

Videos

Inside Creative Writing: Robert Olen Butler
Watch a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer create a short story in real time, from first inspiration through all the bad sentences and wrong turns to final, polished story, commenting on his process as he works. (1st of 17 episodes)
Your Book Starts Here -- Storyboarding For Writers
Popular book-writing blogger (http://HowtoPlanWriteandDevelopaBook....),
award-winning author, and master writing instructor Mary Carroll Moore helps you take your novel, memoir, or nonfiction book from idea to print!
K urt Vonnegut On The Shapes Of Stories
Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the 'simple shapes of stories.'

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Creative Writing OER

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Writing Prompts and Exercises

Open Courses

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