LET THE CRAZY CHILD WRITE! Finding Your Creative Writing Voice celebrates the role of the creative unconscious or "crazy child" in writing stories, poems, plays, and essays. Examples show how the Crazy Child informs our writing and gives it texture and flair, and a plethora of exercises allow you to demonstrate for yourself the power of the knowledge in your own body. Topics covered are Image Detail, Slow Motion, Hook, Persona Writing, Point of View, Dialogue, Plot, Narrative Presence, Good Clichés, Character, Surrealism, and Resolution.
Once you have a first draft, the next step is shaping your writing into its most powerful form. LET THE CRAZY CHILD WRITE! shows you how easy it is to follow the “kindergarten rules” of the syngenetic workshop. These guidelines honor your original, primary impulse to write and make rewriting a positive, fulfilling experience. You can use them with your internal editor, your writing partner, or your writing group.
Information
published by: New World Library, 1998
ISBN: 978-1-880032-35-0
format: perfect bound, 5.5 x 8.5 inches
numbered pages: 267
EXCERPTS
The Crazy Child is an aspect of your personality that is directly linked to your creative unconscious. It is the place in your body that wants to express things. It may want to tell jokes, to throw rocks, to give a flower to someone, to watch the sunset, to make up insults, to sit quietly—or to play video games. All these impulses, all the thrilling, scary or ordinary ones, come from your Crazy Child.
Your "creative unconscious," your "creative source," and your "Crazy Child" are close cousins. I often use the terms interchangeably, but "Crazy Child" has the virtue of sounding playful and wild. When you address it as your Crazy Child, your creative unconscious may feel invited to come out, make itself comfortable, and start writing.
All You Need Is the Urge to Write - Let the Crazy Child Write! is for anyone who wants to write. You may have no experience whatsoever, or you may have written as a child and are interested in trying it again. Perhaps you keep a journal or have begun stories, poems, plays or essays on your own.
How it Works:
Let the Crazy Child Write! is meant to be read on your own or with a writing group—either way. The chapters build one upon another, so it's useful to read them in sequence. But you don't need to; you might learn as much by following your nose and skipping around.
Each chapter introduces a writing technique. A discussion explores the technique, an exercise gives you a taste of it, and a workshop section, which is optional, suggests how to give and receive feedback. Each chapter closes with a short writing practice that gives you experience with the technique.
Praise For Let The Crazy Child Write Method
Clive Matson, a master teacher, set me on the path to writing freely, to writing with exuberance and joy. ~ Isabelle Maynard, author of China Dreams
Clive encourages the discovery of what so impassions us to write in the first place, what he calls the voice of 'the Crazy Child' — the intuitive, the raw, the bloody. ~ Laura Glen Louis, author of "Fur" from The Best American Short Stories 1994
I've seen every kind of writer come from Clive's workshops very much improved and with a newfound confidence. He cherishes the primary impulse to create in everyone. He leads his merry band of writers to a place of vibrant self-realization; his humor and enthusiasm are as infectious as his wisdom. ~ Joe Quirk, author of The Ultimate Rush