Creative Writing: Finding Your Voice – Pat Pattison

The course will also challenge you to dive deeply into the way you see the world. When you look at a river, do you think of it as rushing to the sea to get home? Your ability to see what’s in front of you as though it were something else— that is, the ability to create metaphor—is uniquely yours. Aristotle calls it the “only truly creative human act.”

The first four weeks of the course move through sense-bound writing from four different platforms, allowing you to dig deeply into different aspects of your senses. You’’ll practice using different points of view and tense. From there, you’’ll take progressive steps toward creating effective metaphor. You’’ll also work on sentence structure and sentence types as an expressive tool.

Each day, you’’ll be asked to write in response to prompts, and you’’ll comment on the posts of other students in the class. For your weekly assignments, you’’ll choose a favorite from your week’s writing and craft it into a longer piece for the instructor to assess. This process of combining sense-bound writing and metaphor will take you to the heart of your writer’s voice.

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Make conscious and informed choices about point of view and tense
• Employ your senses effectively
• Create interesting and effective metaphor
• Make conscious and informed choices about sentence type and structure

Syllabus

Lesson 1 Sense-Bound Writing—What Writing

Lesson 2 Writing from Person—Who Writing

Lesson 3 Writing from Time—When Writing

Lesson 4 Writing from Place—Where Writing

Lesson 5 Metaphor—Adjectives and Nouns

Lesson 6 Metaphor—Nouns and Verbs

Lesson 7 Metaphor—Expressed Identity

Lesson 8 Metaphor—Linking Qualities

Lesson 9 Finding Linking Qualities

Lesson 10 Working Both Directions

Lesson 11 Reversing Direction through Linking Qualities

Lesson 12 The Grand Finale

Requirements

Prerequisites and Course-Specific Requirements