Creative Process

My Creative Process

Creative writing has been a hobby of mine for a few years, so much of the research for this workshop was done before I even started planning. Already knowing roughly what topics I wanted to explore, I searched for supporting materials that furthered my understanding of those specified topics. I revisited resources and found new ones to supplement my old, and in this way I strengthened my knowledge enough to convey it to others. My main sources of information were published authors, such as Brandon Sanderson and Abbie Emmons. The expertise of these writers helped me to identify what it was that I found important on these topics. Particularly interested in prioritizing characters, I explored the different ways my resources approached character complexity and relationships.

In relaying content to students, I found discussions to be a crucial point of engagement as well as an indicator of prior knowledge and synthesis. I emphasized crafting questions that weren’t leading toward a certain opinion on a topic, but instead encouraged students to add their perspective. Lesson planning was also instrumental to my process, the organization of my ideas ensuring that lessons were cohesive, and allowing me to generate new ideas to fill in blanks before making my presentations. One of the biggest things I learned to improve were objectives. “Writing Assessable Learning Outcomes,” a material provided by CPSA260 was especially helpful in classifying objectives into different categories of learning goals, which helped my identify what kind of outcome I should be writing for, per objective.