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I've always been OBSESSED with reading, I've read all of G.R.R.Martin, all of Robert Jordan, all of Salvatore, all of Dune, all of Hyperion, all of dragon lance, Lord of the Rings..etc as well as hundreds of less remarkable books. At one point I was reading 300 pages a day average, I skipped school to read.
I never really considered writing as a profession because I didn't know where to start. I recently realized that I really like writing, even essays or editing other peoples work. It was just the procrastination and the fact that it was school work that dampened it for me. Well recently I've decided I want to start writing. I applied for a transfer to a different uni with a Creative Writing program, and I bought a few books that are considered more as "literature".
Now that you have a little background info here comes the plea for help. I have two months to make a literary portfolio. I've never creatively written (academically) in my life.
I assume they expect short stories and that short stories are also the best way to learn. However I have NO idea what else to expect, what they expect, how to get started or what good credible resources are for rules, not-to-dos and general guidelines.
Help me out TL writers! If you know any resources at all or can tell me anything about portfolios or academic expectations of creative writing please do!
By the way I'm transferring to UVIC, if anyone goes there then holla!
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Canada5556 Posts
There is a TL member who won a huge science fiction short story contest a couple months ago. Forget his name, might have "Stork" in it.
Stephen King says one of the most important things a writer needs to do is read a lot himself, you're already doing that so good job 
Definitely just write short stories and post them on creative writing or genre related websites. I know that there lots of free contests at writing.com you can enter and they will usually be happy to read and review your work if you become a part of the community.
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I'm registering, I hope the site doesn't own stories people post. I'm making a pen name. I can't decide what to be called.
Also the prizewinner is StorkHwaiting, we talked a bit over pm.
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If you search on the site, there was a dude about a month or two ago who won some creative writing award... like a pretty prestigious one too. I don't know if they expect your portfolio to have academic stuff though, but I would assume so. Seeing as you're not going to get that now, might as well just start writing away. You wanna give them a broad idea of what your abilities are, so try to have a few different examples. I don't know if there's a standard accept style (like AP for journalism) but whatever you do, just make sure it's consistent throughout.
Writing as a profession is fun and always interesting, but it's a fucking bitch to break into in any capacity.
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hehehe my pen name is "Will Pen" hehehe
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Don't do a pen name if you're trying to write stuff for your portfolio. Pen name is when you're established, it kind of defeats the purpose for you now =p
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oh..i thought i had to make a pen name to get an account on that site..w/e
there is some good stuff for beginners on that site thanks Xxio! Lots of reading to do.
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Good luck with this, here are some tips I've learnt about creative writing from various books and teachers:
Write shit drafts: dont worry about getting it perfect, just get it on paper. Often your opening line will be a page or two in and you just had to work out the story in your head. Prune mercilessly. One of my tutors tells students to pick the favourite line from your piece, the one you're protecting, and remove it.
Writing is habit: set aside time every morning. Sit down at your computer; do nothing else and stay there until boredom > procrastination and you start writing
Show don't tell: trust your reader, use adjectives sparingly. Pared back prose is nearly always better. Never use whispered/yelled etc. where 'said' would do, good dialogue should convey tone for you.
Try to leave out parts readers tend to skip. Don't over-do description of place or character. Don't use "suddenly", "all hell broke loose" etc
Write about your own experiences and/or research thoroughly.
Hope that helps
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The creative writing process is a very personal thing. The best thing you can do is write stories and ask friends to read them and try to analyse what parts they like most, and what parts they like least. When you get to school and you're writing for a professor, you'll need to pick up on what they like. They'll probably give you lots of assignments so you'll get to know what he or she is looking for by the end of the year.
Just always remember that you're writing for an audience, so the bottom line is writing something that will affect them the way you want them to be affected.
Dos and don'ts are personal and vary from person to person. Some people really hate cliches. Some people really hate absurd metaphors. Some people will just hate particular writing styles. There isn't anything that applies for everyone, so you'll have to figure out what the majority of the audience you're writing to wants. I could tell you things I personally hate to see (or like to see) in writing, but then I might narrow your vision.
In the end, taking a class for creative writing is probably going to hurt more than in helps, in my opinion. Teachers have a way of infecting students with their very personal, very subjective opinions about how things should be written. You have to have the mental fortitude to know you're writing for them, and when you leave their classes, you'll be writing for completely different people. Creative writing isn't really something that can be taught, it can only be practiced. Classes will just give you an excuse to do so.
PS: Please realise creative writing is a very lucrative career. It's akin to trying to play guitar for a living, so don't think classes are going to guarantee any job for this market. It's more luck than anything else.
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Don't write fantasy/sci fi
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On March 20 2010 07:26 floor exercise wrote:
Don't write fantasy/sci fi
Genre fiction is fine, just do it well.
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No cliches is a safe rule, cuz that's amateur shit no matter who writes it. The only way you could possibly pass it is if you're creating dialogue and maybe you want to make one person seem dumb or real or something. But pretty much you never wanna use cliches.
That's also another important thing: making real dialogue. Listen to all the different ways your friends talk. A fun exercise we used to do in writing was walk around campus and just secretly record shit people were talking about. Gives you a good feel for how diverse our language is. You don't want a mechanic talking like an educated professor, and you probably don't want some dude from Harvard cursing like a sailor.
Basically, if the narrorator, your main character and all of the supporting cast sound the same, it's not good.
On March 20 2010 07:15 Scarecrow wrote:
Write shit drafts: dont worry about getting it perfect, just get it on paper. Often your opening line will be a page or two in and you just had to work out the story in your head. Prune mercilessly. One of my tutors tells students to pick the favourite line from your piece, the one you're protecting, and remove it.
Writing is habit: set aside time every morning. Sit down at your computer; do nothing else and stay there until boredom > procrastination and you start writing
Show don't tell: trust your reader, use adjectives sparingly. Pared back prose is nearly always better. Never use whispered/yelled etc. where 'said' would do, good dialogue should convey tone for you.
Try to leave out parts readers tend to skip. Don't over-do description of place or character. Don't use "suddenly", "all hell broke loose" etc
Write about your own experiences and/or research thoroughly.
Hope that helps
This is all pretty solid, but I disagree about the never use whisper/tell, etc. That's more of a journalistic approach (fine if you're going that way. Hemmingway writes almost in a newsy way, writing just what you need to know and nothing else) but creative writing gives you flexibility to do other stuff. A lot of it is situational and/or personal preference, but you can certainly make it look good if it's done correctly.
This is another weird one, but professors will explain that you can break some rules if you know you're doing it, like maybe using sentence fragments to be real blunt about what's in a room or i don't know. I don't care to make a detailed example, haha
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Thanks for the detailed responses guys. I think the biggest difficulty for me to overcome is laziness/procrastination, I need to pick up writing as a habit and have people review the work and analyze it myself on a regular basis.
I compare the process to watching your own replays and analyzing them.
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Just remember to keep the reader interested.
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Just want to say good luck man : )
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Write erotica and you'll definitely sell. Apparently people love sex.
I kid. Most important thing I think is to have a good idea. The language in harry potter isn't that great, its the story that won people over. Of course, you can't be completely useless, you gotta keep the reader interested long enough to want to know what happens next.
I haven't written in a while, but the biggest epiphany I had while doing it was to be sparse. Don't use two words when one will do, like Brad Pitt said. Let the reader fill in the blanks, they'll do it to their liking and as such you'll appeal to more people.
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No cliches is a safe rule, cuz that's amateur shit no matter who writes it. The only way you could possibly pass it is if you're creating dialogue and maybe you want to make one person seem dumb or real or something. But pretty much you never wanna use cliches.
I think that's very untrue, especially with writing aimed at a young audience. Harry Potter is full of cliches and it's extremely popular. It won't win you points with literary critics, but literary critics are a bunch of asshats that nobody likes anyway. Detective and horror fiction are also examples of genres that are not particularly hurt by cliches. Sherlock Holmes is ridiculously cliche, and yet it's still popular 100 years after its conception. They're not moving stories by any means, and I don't personally like them, but you can't deny cliches appeal to a lot of people.
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Rowlings is a fucking terrible writer. That's not the same as telling a captivating story, which she obviously does well. Those are two totally different things, and the books don't sell because she abuses cliches...
Plus, it's absurd to cite Potter and a few other popular things as proof that cliches work they're exemptions to the rule. Nearly everyone else would fail if they churned out the shitty writing in Potter and you shouldn't strive to write at the lowest level because it worked for one person.
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Well also, there are cliches in writing that are just cookie cutter figurative language, that have lost effect and then there are classic structures and ideas that almost all fiction borrows from classic mythology.
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On March 22 2010 02:26 Hawk wrote:
Rowlings is a fucking terrible writer. That's not the same as telling a captivating story, which she obviously does well. Those are two totally different things, and the books don't sell because she abuses cliches...
Plus, it's absurd to cite Potter and a few other popular things as proof that cliches work they're exemptions to the rule. Nearly everyone else would fail if they churned out the shitty writing in Potter and you shouldn't strive to write at the lowest level because it worked for one person.
Calling Rowling a terrible writer, but a good story teller is pretty cliche  Her whole plot is pretty cliche as well, if you didn't notice. Am I supposed to cite examples you haven't heard of? Does that even make sense to you? Detective fiction is a very popular genre that is almost always cliche.
Nearly everyone 'fails' regardless. There's a business end of entertainment careers that is more related to profit than the actual writing. All I'm saying is that if you're claiming cliches are necessarily bad and not entertaining, you're going against a huge majority. People like familiarity, and cliches are a very direct way of achieving that. It's not very artistic, but it's certainly a successful form of entertainment (which you see in TV shows, movies, video games, etc). I think it's really unfair to tell someone something is bad just based on your personal preference.
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EPT
