The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| Writing Game W H OAR E YOU Why do you write and how do you write Are there pressures in your life that force you into a writing silence Write a statement of no more than eight hundred words describing your current reasons and methods. This is your first statement of poetics, a personal credo. Be sure to write about those writers, living or dead, who have influenced your thinking and direction. What drives and what hinders you How can you improve your writing conditions, how can you do it as you can Use these questions as headings from which to write quickly and without too much deliberation. Read it aloud to somebody who knows you well and will be able to tell you which parts of your statement are honest or phoney. Revise it accordingly, then put it to one side fora year. 38 Creative writing A I M We write for many reasons sometimes those reasons converge into writerly purpose. They might include a desire to play with language and/or form share apart of yourself describe an emotion communicate with the world bring a character to life express your opinion or simply tell a story. When you reach the final chapter of this book, I will ask you similar questions. I want you to use this first statement as a measure of how far your creative thinking and reading has progressed. It is a good idea to examine your progress in this way every year. Please be utterly honest with yourself. Do not pretend to achievements or ways of speaking which are not yet your own, or with which you feel uncomfortable. Writers must not fool themselves – except when they are writing. Writing reflective essays In Chapter One , I talked about how a novel or poem is the visible part of an iceberg, that the knowledge a writer brings to their creation is the invisible submerged section of that same iceberg. Reflective essays capsize it they show that working knowledge, partially or completely. They let the world back in. There is personal judgement involved you are assessed not by your ability to interpret literature and knowledge, but on how you translate them into something else, preferably something recognisably of your own invention and on your capacity to understand the process realistically, not idealistically. Your reading will form the basis for the literature that influences and excites you. The knowledge you are translating into new writing maybe nonliterary it could be experiential or drawn from nonliterary areas. It is better to write about details than big, abstract ideas. As Samuel Beckett said, What do I know of man’s destiny I could tell you more about radishes.’ When you write a reflective essay, bear in mind that creative writers seldom begin writing from a theory or to a big theme. John Gardner writes that Nothing. could be farther from the truth than the notion that theme is all ( 1985 : 40). Of course, some writers rationalise a theme, a theory, or even a credo of propositions, after the act. In the case of theories, they are often acts of provocative creativity that say a great deal about the writer and their own practice, such as Ezra Pound’s ‘A Retrospect in 1918 or Frank O’Hara’s ‘Personism: A Manifesto in both reprinted in Herbert and Hollis. However, in the same way that translation theory has little effect on the practice of translation, so literary theory generally has little impact on the way creative writers go about their business. It has to be said that some writers find it creatively disabling to read literary criticism they find it stalls them in the act of making, or it alters their expectations of literature in ways which are simply false or destructive. Many Creative writing in the world 39 writers simply write for themselves, and reading about writing can undo a writer’s useful selfishness to an extent. The poet Elizabeth Bishop warned a would-be writer, you . . . are reading too much about poetry and not enough poetry . . . I always ask my writing classes NOT to read criticism (Herbert and Hollis, 2000 : 105). Reading yourself as a writer Reflective essays on the creative writing process tend towards being small, alert studies in critical realism, what we might term here creative critical realism. This is because they possess personal and interdisciplinary awareness a demand for evidence, as well as argumentative coherence and consistency and realism about the act and action of writing. While the creative work submitted alongside it maybe affectedly postmodern (or not, the account of how and why it was written will be realist to the letter. At the heart of such an essay is an attempted illumination of two dark questions about your aims and processes, questions that provoke and prick at writers from whatever time. Why do you write How do you write They are short questions. They are not small questions. Given how various we all are, they appear at first to require variations and permutations of thought beyond our grasp. Surely, you will say, critics should address these questions. No. You are your own critic. You may not be able to articulate it yet, but you know that when you are drafting your own writing (or even writing it) you must become, as it were, somebody else. You read yourself as a writer. Reflective, critical writing of this type possesses at the very least a sense of argument and development of argument critical thinking and self-reflection; evidence of actual research for writing – for example, interviews with other writers the critical context of your writing the problems faced and overcome or not overcome and, to round it off – to show you’ve read in order to write – a bibliography of creative reading. One of the best ways into your reflective essay is to setup a literary problem and explore it using your own work and influences. 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