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 O B SE SS IVES ER MONS Playfully, write a word monologue spoken by an authority figure (who should be somebody known by everybody in your group. Imitate their speech patterns in your prose. Use an obsessive subject (and keep to it unwaveringly), such as counting ants, ‘skyscraper-hugging’, mouse breath, invisible friends’, etc. Read these aloud, and guess who is being parodied. A I M Parody makes for effective exercises in style, but often ends up saying more about the writer. Becoming aware of the tropes of language used by the powerful allows you to exploit them in creating believable character dialogue. 14 Creative writing Honesty of the amateur As Charlie Chaplin says in Limelight, We are all amateurs. We don’t livelong enough to be anything else There is much to be said for holding onto the mentality of being an amateur or apprentice. Knowing you have a lotto prove means you are freer to play and make errors (and accidental successes. If you go about the business of writing in the mask of The Professional, then you remove most of the fun from the natural guesswork of writing, and stymie your chances at finding your luck or voice. You end up prizing technical ability at the price of your imaginative facility. Nothing kills the energy in prose or poetry like conscious professionalism or mere technical skill. Of course, in your dealings with the world of workshops and publishing, you should act professionally, but you can leave that persona, along with your ego, at the door of your writing room and the workshop room. There is no wrong in being serious or earnest. Playfulness, however, tends to produce honesty, providence and surprise in your work – and closer audiences. Try to view writing as something of a daily habit, rather than amoral activity. You will very likely achieve more by taking the pressure off yourself. Vocation should have the quality of being commonplace, even lighthearted, like having a daily working job, which – lucky us – is to write what we like. Purposes Creative writing is a discipline with many apprentices, but one that respects the fact that, at whatever stage we reach, in the Writing Game we are all beginners. This apparent modesty of self-perception could seem otherworldly to some people. Language is a little like a shifting belief system in which you settle, uncomfortably enough beside its many apostates and revisionists. Thus, writing seems a sharper vocation than most because of the unsettled and unsettling material with which it deals. You live with that by finding your habit for expression. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney, writing of TS. Eliot, believes vocation entails the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of life 38). Getting to this point involves errors as well as epiphanies. You will know yourself better through failure and retrial, however tortuous the process, and learn more about yourself than others would have you know, by going beyond your own intelligence in language and writing. You will acquire different and oscillating rationalisations for your writing from Jane Austen’s Introducing creative writing 15 miniaturist conception of painting upon two inches of ivory, to Franz Kafka’s yearning to smash the frozen sea inside us. We must never confuse literary vocation with literary or personal ambition. Although they wear a similar face, ambition is a mask and vocation is skin. As the writer Cynthia Ozick says, One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language . . . is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to (Plimpton, 1989 : 301). Self-belief is a quality of mind that arrives with time, however waveringly – it allows you to become driven. In the end, much good writing is gained by practice, by knowing your objectives and knowing how to achieve them in language. You just have to know what this means, and that you must put in the time. As the renowned novelist and creative writing teacher John Gardner states in The Art of Fiction: most of the people I’ve known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers. About all that is required is that the would-be writer understand clearly what it is that he wants to become and what he must do to become it ix) Whatever your approach to the continent of writing, you may find yourself serving an audience, sometimes by serving their consciences on their behalf, or by creating work that is entertaining or consoling. Most writing is an argument and a working affair – between you and words. You write it for yourself, in a room, alone. Your first purpose should be to surprise yourself and other people, second. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew – Robert Frost (quoted in Barry, 1973 : 126). Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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