The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing (Cambridge Companions to Literature) Paperback – Illustrated, 2 Feb. 2012

great

excellent and very useful for A2 Creative writing

On the reading list for my MA Creative Writing

Given the usual high standard of Cambridge Companions, and their position as extremely good starting points on any topic, this is a very strange collection. Supposed to be for students and academics it's at best a classroom companion/workbook, full of superficial essays and even more superficial exercises. Don't look to it for essays about the practice of Creative Writing, it would more properly have been called the Companion to Creative Writing Teaching but that begs the question who the audience is, teacher trainees?I turned first to the chapter on "Speculative Genres" which were defined as horror, science fiction and fantasy, but which actually dealt with horror, crime and epic fantasy and did so without any reference to any of the many excellent How To books in this area. The chapter on trans cultural fiction can best be described as "my mission to bring good literature to China" and is utterly without any awareness of current discussions about appropriation and colonisation of literatures. The essay on Workshops was all criticism but very little active suggestion. I rather gave up after that. Even the chapter by Michelene Wandor on Drama seemed pitched as a textbook rather than a critical essay.Oddly the chapters don't have further reading suggestions--unlike other Cambridge Companions to--and I had the feeling this was because the chapter authors didn't have any to make.