Grace Paley's Six Lies: A Practical Tool to Enable Creative Writing Students to Refine their Imaginative Writing

Abstract

Redrafting and revising is an essential part of the Creative Writing process, and one that students must learn if their work is to improve both inside and beyond the classroom. This paper examines one way of approaching the sometimes fraught exercise of redrafting: Grace Paley's six lies as expounded in her 1970 essay, ‘Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken’. The paper explores how these lies have been taught and implemented in my Creative Writing prose classes at the University of the Western Cape since 2008.