Tag archives for Open University - Page 6
Book review – Strategy Bites Back by Henry Mintzberg
Strategy Bites Back: It Is A Lot More, And Less, Than You Ever Imagined by Henry Mintzberg My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read this as pre-reading before studying Strategy with the Open University. It was very clear and easy to read, explained things ownderfully, made me laugh in places, and was genuinely useful in getting my head round what strategy actually is. The book is a series of short articles, put into language most people can read rather than the drier academic style or cringeworthy business speak that these sort of books are often written in. This is a plain english text that works. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand strategy, read this before trying anything else (and as a second reading I would go for Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why…
How I write poetry
Before I started studying the Open University's A215 Creative Writing course I had never tried to write poetry, even though I've written several short stories and novellas. For TMA3 of A215 I had to write 40 lines of poetry. How I write poetry With one exception, which was my first attempt, all of my poems start as a freewrite on the subject, title or prompt. Normally I discard the first paragraph of the freewrite because it is overly literal, I use words and phrases from the remainder to form the basis of the first draft of a poem. Unlike my prose, where I typically draft in scrivener, the poetry starts on paper or a basic text editor. Subsequent drafts use the track changes feaure in a word processor. This allows me to see how each poem develops. Each draft is its…
Poetry Station
my desk for writing poetry I am busy crafting poetry for the third assignment of my Open University course A215 Creative Writing. Or rather I am indulging in a little displacement activity right now. However I will be back to work in a few moments. You will see from the picture of the table I'm using as my desk a number of things. Most useful being Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled which is a very good introduction to poetry that I heartily recommend. Next is the video camera that I've been using to record myself reading the poetry out loud so that I can listen back and refine it. This is my own take on poetry being about the sound of the thing, much more so than prose. I think that's what makes poetry harder for many people…
A215 What They Teach you at Creative Writing School
I read this article about Hanif Kureishi's views on what is missing from the teaching of creative writing to people. I'm not sure that I entirely agree with Hanif Kureishi. Perhaps if he'd studied with the OU he would have had plenty of practice in recognising the plentiful supply of good ideas that we have. He might also have been taught some techniques to fire up his imagination and to harness it to produce material. On the other hand I do agree that there is (rightly) a lot of focus in text books on the 'hard' skills that writers need. On use of language, structure and the practicalities of how to produce good prose, poetry etc. This is not just down to creative writing schools though, all disciplines have a mixture of 'hard' and 'soft' skills. The masters of the discipline can…
A215 – Meta Poetry
The third online tutorial is now on the go, following a poetry day school last weekend (where I read out some Burns since it was the 25th). Anyway the exercise is to write a poem based on the model of Amanda Dalton's How to Disappear. So this is the second draft of my meta poem, a further draft (poetry as a process) will be posted later on when I've had some feedback and had time to let it rest a wee bit. How to write poetry How can an ordinary person like me possibly do it? How am I supposed to get all those words arranged on the page? How do I learn to write beautiful poetry? Recognise that poetry doesn't appear ready to read. Like a block of stone, it needs careful chiselling, chip by chip, into shape. What goes…