Is “The Creative Writer” Right for You?

In this video, Susan Wise Bauer introduces you to The Creative Writer curriculum. This series is perfect for middle-school and high-school students who want to improve their creative writing and sharpen their skills at crafting exciting fiction and vivid poetry.

I’m Susan Wise Bauer. I’m the co-author of the book The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home” And I’m the author of the Writing With Skill expository writing series from Well-Trained Mind Press.

Now, Writing With Skill teaches students how to write essays and research papers and persuasive papers, all that great non-fiction stuff they have to know how to do in order to do their freshman composition at college. But you might not know that we also have a series that approaches writing in a completely different way, it’s called The Creative Writer.  The Creative Writer comes in four volumes, and it was written by my very good friend, the award-winning novelist and writing teacher Boris Fishman.

Now, these four books walk students through the basics of creative writing. Each level getting a little bit more difficult as it goes. So the first one is five-finger exercises, and this introduces them to character development and plot and setting in fiction, and also the basics of poetry. Level Two leads them into doing longer works, short stories on longer points. Level Three really focuses in on craft, on things like complex point of view, word choice, different poetry formats. And then Level Four really guides students on how to think and live like writers: how to write in different genres, how to plan out writing time, how to really delve deep into the craft.

So, if you’ve got a kid who enjoys creative writing, is interested in fiction and poetry, I’d encourage you to check out the four levels of The Creative Writer at welltrainedmind.com.