Notes on Creative Writing Workshop, First Day
(In the Palm of Your Hand iii-6)

 Although creative writing results in stacks of typed pages just as essay writing does, writing poems for this workshop will differ from writing expository essays. The two stacks speak differently and probably say different things. In much of the writing you do in college, the purpose is to demonstrate to a professor or a committee that you have taken in a particular amount of information, come to a conclusion about what you've read and constructed an argument to support or explain your conclusion.

Creative writing, however, does not require the writer to learn a designated body of knowledge beyond the basic elements of fiction and poetry such as complex character or meter.  Because voice is significant part of creative writing, and voices are distinct and diverse, there are often several strategies for a creative writing problem. Consequently, the criteria for an effective poem or story differs. Nearly everything is allowed given the right context. The poet Steve Kowit warns of only three dangers to the creative writer:

How much writing time is enough? For a story or novel, an hour a day is good (however, I know that I have written whole stories over a twelve hour stretch, the first two or three hours being just a warm up).

Hemingway said he stopped his daily writing at a point when he knew what would come next; then after sleep, he picked up where he left off.

But these are examples from fiction. In poetry the language is a bit more concentrated, meaning a poem can say as much in three lines as someone might say in thirty pages of a novel. Kowit recommends 30 minutes minimum. That's not 30 minutes of doodling, but 30 minutes of putting one word after another. The words can be put down slowly or quickly as long as something makes it onto the paper.

Although rewriting is writing, during the 30 minutes that you write, the poem should move forward.  Write fast or write slow but improve on the blank page.  There will always be time to go back and change spelling or punctuation; however, images and ideas are fleeting and if we don't get them into the poem as they come to us, we might miss details later. In other words, if stuck, write what you see.