Creative Writing

I thought the creative writing discussion was interesting the other day but discussing how to help with creative writing is difficult. The one thing that I think I'm particularly wary of is trying to look at literature as a cold process. The best example of this is the beginning of the movie Dead Poets Society where the beginning of their poetry book suggests making a graph in order to rate poems and fit them into this graph. Essentially this is an attempt to understand creative writing scientifically and rationally, which may have some merits, but ultimately misses the point of literature and art in general. I'm wary of looking at creative writing and characters, for example, in terms of whether or not they fulfill different requirements regarding "character as action" and the other different elements.

As far as writing being personal, I personally am quite scared of showing any sort of creative writing I do to anybody. However, if someone brought something into me and asked my opinion, and many of my friends have before I was a consultant, I would give them my honest opinion and not hold anything. If you ask for help, you want someone's opinion. I think that you owe it to someone who asks what you think to be honest with them. I've had friends who ask what I think of some writing they've done, when I tell them I didn't like it they get upset. We as consultants have the ultimate defense here. "You asked for my opinion, that's my opinion."