The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Challenges of creative writing
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To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Using a school dictionary, I counted forward seven nouns from the word
‘season’ and reached the word seawall. Every single noun is swapped by the serendipitous new word a quite different potential poem develops:
To Aviation
Sea-wall of mistresses and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bother fringe of the maturing Sunday-school;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With frustration the vintners that round the theatres run;
To bend with appointments the moss’d cotton trench,
And fill all frustration with riptide to the cork;
To swell the governess, and plump the headache shelters
With a sweet ketchup to set budding more,
And still more, later fluids for the beggars,
Until they think warm deaconesses will never cease,
For summons has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cellulite.
The point is not to produce anew and great work of literature, nor is the purpose to subject existing work to ridicule. The point is to play, and to yield fresh ideas and connections. The approach is clever and charming, but it is not an ideology as some followers think it is the opposite. The OuLiPo create thought-experiments out of a scrabble of letters and language. Nothing might come of it, but the potential is there, as in scientific and thought-experiment.
One might do worse, for example, than write a poem that takes as its starting point headache shelters or to write a short story that unfolds the reasons why the vintners are frustrated and why they might be running around a theatre,
who is bent with appointments and why the governess is pregnant.
Writing Game
E
X ER CI SE SINS T Y LE Write a short story of no more than a hundred words. It must be as mundane as possible. Rewrite this story ten times overusing different styles or points of view.
Here is a selection of styles from which to choose:

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Creative writing
opera libretto soap opera bullet-point list passive tense phrasebook translation news report comedy abstract language concrete poem minutes of meeting romantic novel sonnet erotic novel permutations by groups of 1, 2, and 4 words vehicle manual insincere self-therapy book political broadcast nihilist suicide note end-of-dinner speech postmodern novel a series of haiku confessional TV chat show scientific paper memo impenetrable critical prose free verse sensationalist enigmatic
A
I M All writing is rewriting to some degree and this game is a humorous means for student writers to do the equivalent of practising the scales of their voice, as well as fitting a body of words within a form of style or a form of poetry.

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