The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Introducing creative writing
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A
I M We are making anew poem or story created from a combination of a dream-state and a prompted imagination using a method somewhat like self-hypnosis. It is a good idea to try these questions on yourself regularly, writing with your eyes closed while you are visualising the images in your mind’s eye. Be sure to alter the part of the continent each time you try this. In Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, the protagonists pass through warps or doors in time and space. You are doing the same. What is behind the door is entirely up to your writing self. How far you wish to go is also up to you, but try to go a little bit further every time, and spend more time beyond that door. Learn the entrances,
exits, contours, cities and citizens of your continent of writing.
A psychological apprenticeship
Hemingway again We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master For any prospective writer, it helps to know who you are, what role you are playing and what you wish your language to perform. Many myths and metaphors swirl around the discipline of creative writing. A student is an apprentice to writing and, by innocent attachment, to those selfsame myths and lies. They rub off on them. It is hard for them to know who they are if they area writer at all or whether they are somebody who has never really left the audience, who is still lost in a book.
Some students of creative writing know who they are already, and will have sensed this self-knowledge at some early stage of their lives. Infancy and childhood are the most important periods for the making of the writer the making of their neural complexity. However, talent and vocation are not selfish genes unless constructive nurture in childhood makes them so. Talent and vocation are understandings that need to be then identified, encouraged and corroborated by the external world firstly by your parents very early on, then by friends and teachers and later by your editors, publishers and readers. This is where the teaching of creative writing comes into its own. Your creative writing teachers are your first real readers, and they are editors of your writing. They are also to some extent editors of your character – as parents and teachers are – in this case the editor of the character who writes, for whom the creation of story, of metaphor, of played language, is already, unbreakably, a natural habit of mind.
You need to possess a purpose for writing, and to learn to keep this purpose strong and supple.
If an apprentice of writing does not have some genuine aptitude for these skills, then their time maybe better spent some other way. This has nothing to do with talent being mystically (or even genetically) innate. It has more to do with being trained, taught and encouraged in creative language and writing when you were a child. I believe, however, you can catch up without early

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Creative writing
encouragement: many good writers were once autodidact teenagers, going it alone, teaching themselves, or taking up serious writers as mentors in loco
parentis, becoming their prot´eg´es.
This argument for aptitude (rather than, say, desire) would be accepted for any other profession, and creative writing is no different. It is not some special world where miracles, cures and conversions happen. It may create illusion, it may even invite illusion, but it is both more and less ordinary. It may prove that you can take the lessons of creative writing into the world, and use them to help conduct creative lightning if you are lucky and talented, but that depends on several factors, including your willingness to face failure. And failure rides in the slipstream of so many actions that require vocation.
Passion
Some of what I have just said sounds like a call to vocation and, to some extent it is, but only because vocation is a wholly commonplace state of mind for many people, be they good designers, entrepreneurs or athletes. Vocation is not a holy calling it is about the callings of skill and, surely, it is about passion for that skill. If you are going to write, at least find your passion for writing first. Passion emboldens you. Boris Pasternak defined talent as boldness in the face of the blank sheet. A passion for language will push you through a wall of words, and a passion for writing will push up the temperature of your written voice. It will also smoulder beneath your syntax unnoticed by the reader but, if it is not present, the reader will recognise, unconsciously, its absence. I am sure you have read a book and have not been able to understand why it did not quite work.
The answer is that it was an unwanted child the author did not wish to write it at all. It does not possess what the Spanish poet Federico Garc´ıa Lorca called
duende, its own blood-beat (see Chapter
Four on Inspiration and duende’).
There is nothing wrong with being passionate or even obsessive about creative writing drivenness can oxygenate writing when technique is under pressure.
Vocation’s providence
Vocation is important to many professions, including those of science and medicine. The impulse to write and the desire to be a writer are not the same thing, and a good reader knows this in the same way that the calling to be a doctor and the desire to be one would be a terrifying confusion – for the patient, anyway. However, you can possess more than one vocation. William
Carlos Williams was a poet and a doctor. The poets John Donne, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins were men of the church, although the tradition

Introducing creative writing
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of the writer as an actual believer is thorny and interesting since some writers seem to require a structured belief system in order to write (or their books create belief systems for their reader, as in the work of JR. R. Tolkien. Some believe that creative writing and belief are callings that sit all too shakily on the scales of responsibility and guilt. Does one finally outweigh the other Do they circle each other like opposing magnets?
Some writers can be preachy, especially the godless ones. If that ossifies into a pose, that pose arises from their conception that creative writing is hieratic.
This is false. If vocation is thought of as belonging to somebody who places importance on acquiring and developing literary skills, then creative writing is avocation, humanly commonplace in its constituency. It is delusive to suppose writers are anything at all like priests or shamans. Readers are not congregations,
nor are they tribes for whom writers act as walking, talking language-purifying plants.
If you possess avocation in addition to writing, you may wish to consider the demands on your time and mind before you commit to both. At best, the other vocation offers language, philosophy and material to the vocational practice of writing. Please think about these issues both by the terms of your own character and motivations. Be warned that top-heavy seriousness can create a very disabling tension, putting too much pressure on yourself, expecting miracles of composition – the result is creative constipation. We make our own providence as writers, and there is nothing more spoiling to providence than pomposity or programmatic ideas about writing or outlandish measures of our importance. We can take ourselves far too seriously we can regard our purpose over-earnestly. We over-prepare, overthink, and then undershoot all our objectives in our desire to betaken seriously. It can also make our writing itch with puppy-fat self-consciousness and self-importance, both of which are unattractive qualities for many readers.

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