Category Archives: Examples

Here are a few poems for us to talk about.

From David Starkey’s excellent Creative Writing, these are some strategies for starting a story.

First, from David Starkey’s Creative Writing, I.A. Richards coined the terms tenor for the subject to which a metaphor is applied and vehicle for the metaphoric term itself. If we say, to borrow an example from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, that a warrior was … Continue reading →

Here are suggestions on starting and examples of villanelles, prose poems, ghazals, pantoums, and the sestina.

From Patrick Gillespie’s “PoemShape” site, consider how he moves from a prose paragraph and works it into iambic pentameter lines. Gillespie’s lines are in italics; Plutarch’s aren’t. Here are the prose paragraphs he starts with: Therefore when she was sent unto … Continue reading →

Three by students: In contrast, there are other proposed solutions aimed at reducing recidivism. Recent Princeton MPA graduate and government consultant Daniel Edelman writes in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that, “By addressing head-on the financial troubles of people leaving … Continue reading →

Consider this structure for plotting from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat and Publishingcrawl.com: Opening image An image/setting/concept that sets the stage for the story to come. Long ago, in a galaxy far away, a controlling government called the Empire takes control … Continue reading →

We’ll talk about Ted Kooser’s discussion of details in class.

Consider this example of syllabics from Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual.

Here is an example of some of the planning of a book you’re probably familiar with.