Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)There aren't a lot of creative writing texts that cover all four genres out there, and "Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief" seemed a promising, inexpensive option to assign for my college creative writing class. The discussions of craft are solid and each section is followed by a checklist that my students found useful. Each chapter includes three opening examples that the craft lessons refer back to in order to illustrate their points, and I found this to be very clear and effective. My two main complaints have to do with the selection of plays and editorial problems with the book. There are only 7 plays in this book (by contrast, there are 26 poems, 14 stories, and 13 essays). I'm guessing the decision to include so few plays was made because the plays take up more pages than the entries in the other genres, but the result is a very limited (and somewhat lackluster) selection of dramatic works. A more annoying issue was the rather embarrassing extent of typographical errors in this book. There are small typos here and there, and at one point, a whole paragraph is repeated verbatim. The complete table of contents in the front matter is correct, but there is also an abbreviated table of contents inside the front cover, and this table of contents contains the incorrect page numbers! Besides being irksome, these typos make it hard to make the case to students that they should treat their writing with care and precision. Why do so when the very textbook they've paid almost $40 for appears not to have been proofread?! With a better/wider selection of plays and some good proofreading/copyediting, this could have been a fantastic book, so it's really too bad.

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How can students with widely varied levels of literary experience learn to write poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama — over the course of only one semester? In Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief, David Starkey offers some solutions to the challenges of teaching the introductory creative writing course: (1) concise, accessible instruction in literary basics; (2) short models of literature to analyze, admire and emulate; (3) inventive and imaginative assignments that inspire and motivate.

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