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 A R O OM OF YOUR OWN This is not a writing project it is a means to several projects. Try writing the story or poem that emerges from any Writing Game in this book, but write it indifferent places within a single morning. Try at the very least three places in which you have never written. These might include any of the following a cafe, public transport such as a bus or train, a library, a park table or bench, a garden, a museum of art or history, a zoo, a hide in a nature reserve, the noisiest room in your home. Attempt to bring elements of the place into the poem or story. A I M You will discover that some places and locales suit your writing better. Dislocate your creative practice from the places you expect it to arise the quiet study, the studio, the bedroom. You should adopt this new place as your writing room, a territory for your creativity. Going to work there will trigger ideas and faster writing on subsequent occasions. Serendipity is an important aspect of 240 Creative writing writing, and writing in an unusual place can bring unexpected material. Sometimes you need to leave home to find a home for your writing. Some writers leave their house, walk around the block and return home, simply to prompt the mental aim of going to work’! Rooms of our own Writing as an act of community is important but the space in which you write, and the community writes, is vital. A seminar room can be helpful of course, but a housing project, a foreign city or a walk in the woods can be seminar rooms and writing houses too. TS. Eliot wrote fifty lines of The Waste Land in a seaside shelter in Margate. J. K. Rowling wrote the first drafts for Harry Potter in an Edinburgh cafe. Writing needs seminar rooms, but it also needs more rooms of its own outside the arena of formal education, in the interstitial zones of society. Find these zones yourself, and write in them, and from them. Take the community to these spaces, and occupy them for writing. To this end, I suggest that creative writing students and teachers begin a campaign for every major city in the world to create a Writer’s Room, a low-cost, writerly version of a painter’s studio or atelier. These spaces will be installed in, or built onto, an existing public library. The space will be open for writing, for workshops, for performance. The room’s walls will be covered with whiteboards to assist teaching and writing, as they are in some institutes of mathematics (ideas always arrive at inconvenient times. There will be audio and visual digital recording equipment computers will be linked, at which writers will work individually or collaboratively. There will be Internet access, and computers with publishing programme software, so that publications can be created from that space. Not only will every city have a room of its own, but it will also be the home of a small press or journal. Universities publish in-house quarterlies of new literature cities should also. Free, pre-scheduled access is given to this room for any local writers who require space and time to work. This is exactly the kind of urban project enjoyed by filmmakers, digital artists, visual artists and photographers. Society needs to make more space for its creative writers, especially writers from nontraditional writing backgrounds, and we need to catch them young. Without resources like this, we risk becoming complicit in the perpetual recreation of what Tillie Olsen called silences the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot . . . the obvious parallels when the seed strikes stone the soil will not sustain the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation the frost comes premature (2003: Writing in the community and academy 241 6). As a discipline, creative writing provides open spaces for re-engagement. In order to explore that engagement, and how academies become such open spaces, I need to talk a little more personally about why I wrote this book. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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