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THE WRITING EXPERIMENT
Strategies for innovative creative writing
Hazel Smith
Number of Pages: 304
Australian Price (Incl GST): $39.95

Experienced writing teacher Hazel Smith demystifies the process of creative writing, providing exercises and examples to show how it can be systematically learnt.
'a systematic and engaging approach to creative writing' - Carla Harryman, Wayne State University

'By suggesting that students who are not born poets can yet learn to become good ones, Smith performs a very important service.' - Professor Susan M. Schultz, University of Hawaii

'This is an impressive book, because it covers areas of creative writing practice and theory that have not been covered in published form ... It links radical practice with radical (but better-known) theory, and will appeal to anyone looking for a different approach ...' - Robert Sheppard, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, UK

The Writing Experiment demystifies the process of creative writing, showing that successful work does not arise from talent or inspiration alone. Hazel Smith breaks down writing into incremental stages, revealing processes that are often unconscious or unacknowledged, and shows how they can become part of a systematic writing strategy. 

The book encourages writers to take an explorative and experimental approach to their work. It relates practical strategies for writing to major twentieth century literary and cultural movements, including postmodernism.

Suitable for both beginners and experienced writers, The Writing Experiment covers many genres including fiction, poetry, writing for performance and new media. Each chapter is illustrated with extensive examples of both student work and published writing, and challenging exercises offer writers at all levels opportunities to develop their skills.


Hazel Smith is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra, Co-leader of the Sonic Communications Research Group and Deputy Director of the University of Canberra Centre for Writing. She founded the creative writing program at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara and co-author of Improvisation, Hypermedia and the Arts Since 1945. She has published two books of poetry, two CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia and hypermedia works.

Table of Contents:
Preface

Introduction

Part 1: Introductory strategies

Chapter 1: Playing with language, running with referents

Chapter 2: Genre as a moveable feast

Chapter 3: Working out with structures

Chapter 4: Writing as recycling

Chapter 5: Narrative, narratology, power

Chapter 6: Dialoguing

Part 2: Advanced strategies

Chapter 7: Postmodern f(r)ictions

Chapter 8: Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics

Chapter 9: The invert, the cross-dresser, the fictocritic

Chapter 10: Tongues, talk and technologies

Chapter 11: New media travels

Chapter 12: Mapping worlds, moving cities

Conclusion: The ongoing editor

Acknowledgments

Index