The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Performing writing
227
work. With a resonant image or persistent motif, try to draw what the writer intended by maybe expanding it in the background across several cells of the comic strip. Now use this technique on your own poems and stories, especially in the period before pre-final drafting. You may wish to use this game as the first step to making short poetry films or adapting your stories into screenplays and filming them.
A
I M This game makes explicitly visual what is verbal it also allows you to get distance on your work. It provides away to revise your work because storyboarding will test every sentence and every image for its translatability in the reader’s visual mind. This is also the routine by which any novel, story, play or poem is prepared for filming a director must be able to visualise the action of the narrative throughout.
Performing your writing as public art
When an artist blends different art forms, the result is a hybrid, as if two different species of flower or fruit tree had been cross-fertilised. In fact, the best experiments do not seem like hybrids but more like anew species of art, or something simply possessing bold taste. The process also leads to your collaborating with other artists, something many writers find emancipating.
For example, many writers work with visual artists such as photographers and painters. Their writing is a direct response to visual art, a process called ecphrasis. If you are working with a particular space, such as a sculpture, its
space increases the restriction within which you work (as time would, were you writing for film or radio. As we discussed in Chapter
Three
, restriction itself is liberating of new ways of saying. Finally, many such projects are published outside books as temporary or even permanent installations in public spaces.
This form of publication raises your stakes it might even make you write differently knowing the audience to be more diverse. It demands you begin to work with people, since such work best arises through partnership and community. You will find working alongside people and artists refreshing, less lonely and more democratic. It will also widen your philosophy and practice.
Many things can be said in literature using words, but they can also be said using other arts, or by means of a building, or even a garden. It all depends on how you place your writing. You develop an eye for placing, as well as an ear for the language of a place.
The poet Ian Hamilton Finlay transformed his garden, Little Sparta in
Scotland, with emblems, word sculptures and conceptual art, writing of the process that certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks. Is his garden a book or a cross-art hybrid What looked revolutionary

228
Creative writing
was actually part of a tradition. Augustan poets and thinkers attempted to transform landscapes so that they reflected ethical and aesthetic values. In the past, poets who sought a place to stand assumed the role of gardener, and gardening was seen as an act of composition, analogous to writing. How might you do the same Finlay comments, Gardening activity is of five kinds, namely sowing, planting, fixing, placing, maintaining. Insofar as gardening is an Art,
all these maybe taken under the one head, composing (quoted in Abrioux,
1994
: This kind of approach to writing can make you think and work using afar larger compass than a page’s four points. It makes you write with a cartographers spirit of scale and multi-dimensionality, mapping a literary idea onto a place or space (be it a garden, park or city. With a project of this type, try to perceive your work from the air. Your writing project might have bird’s-eye perception, like walking the plot of James Joyce’s Ulysses, superimposing a huge question mark on the street map of Dublin. It is a useful paradigm to seethe place in which you live as an open book, one already written by its history, a palace of memory on which you can draw for ideas for this writing.
You should begin on a smaller scale, say by placing your work in various public spaces such as the corridors of your school, office or university – or even by placing them in unusual spaces such as supermarkets, the small ads columns of newspapers – or hand them out as leaflets. Then start thinking sideways about the vehicle that carries your writing. Make your page some- thing unusual. It could be the windows of a building sand on a beach snow in afield sidewalks that are read as they are walked by its readers skywriting seen from below or words made from pebbles, twigs or garbage. The very temporariness and apparent spontaneity are part of the final piece, as is the process. Both process and product must be public in someway and,
better still, involve members of the public or schoolchildren in its composition. Digitally photograph or film both the process of composition and the outcome. Be sure to cleanup afterwards, and leave any site exactly how you found it.

Download 2.89 Mb.

Share with your friends: