The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
Download 2.89 Mb. View original pdf
|
Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
- Navigate this page:
- The door and the abyss
| Writing Game F I NA LL YA GAIN WHOA RE YOU Why do you write and how do you write Are there pressures in your life that force you into silence Write a statement of no more than 800 words describing your current reasons and methods. What drives and what hinders you How can you improve your writing conditions Use these questions as headings from which to write quickly and without too much deliberation. A I M Compare your answers with those you wrote in the Writing Game on this theme in Chapter Two . If more progress is needed, then make some tough and practical decisions, based on some of the suggestions in this book, to change things so your life allows you greater fluency of practice as a writer. The door and the abyss Rilke wrote, No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write Rilke had rich patrons and safe space in which to write, the Duino castle for one. In many ways, he could afford to change his life, to write for angels. We live in real-time and open space. By all means, go into yourself climb down to the invisible abyss from which your writing rises. But Rilke was wrong about the value of guidance once you get to that abyss. ‘Andiam, ch`e la via lunga ne sospigne’, says Virgil, the poet’s shade leading the living Dante through hell – Let us go, for the long way urges us. Writers are nobody, and they are everybody. The light of writing allows us to find our way through, and recall Lawrence’s ‘Bavarian Gentians from Chapter Eight : let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower / down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness’. We, as students, writers and teachers of writing, work and write within our social and educational communities – we are those communities. We play bit parts mostly or we understudy on those stages. Our lives can be somewhat anarchic, not least because creative writing is a discipline that slides and slices across knowledge, thereby cutting across conformity. Writers are players on a stage they are players in that society, and we do not always have to play the clowns. We do not have to take ourselves too seriously, of course, but we can take our discipline more seriously. Fine writers and freethinkers choose the educational arena. They campaign by their very presence to make it abetter space for creative thought and action. Writers work in education at all levels but, without being precious, writers must do soon their own terms, and not just out of necessity. The tonic effects Writing in the community and academy 255 of poverty on creativity are overrated education offers at least the semblance of integrity, and the possibility of doing some good to someone at some time. What should be your first move? Writers teach because they can, so the first and best thing you can do for yourself, as anew writer, is to apprentice yourself to a mentor who is a practising author, one who understands the fact that writing gets you lost, and who can help you sense the guide ropes that lead through the inferno’s circles to and from your abyss. The personal history of literature is one of writers being taken on by other writers, of being welcomed and guided by somebody slightly further along the long way. As an academic discipline, creative writing encourages these strange but life-changing meetings. Joyce Carol Oates said, by honoring one another’s creation we honor something that deeply connects us all, and goes beyond us. We learn creative writing because we can, remembering that learning, like writing, is also an act of community. Writers carry a community’s story in the voice of their memory. Think of creative writing as an open space, a continent of languages and memory. Too often, we hear and see each other at distance, or not at all. This allows us to ignore each other skim across knowledge, language and understanding and let our attention atrophy. Creative writing – even clear writing – closes these distances between us. It makes us wake up. Creative writing throws open doors to the world, and even to other worlds within us and beyond our own. It lets in the light of language. Without telling us what to think, it makes us see and hear each other. We understand ourselves better by writing with light. Go and open your door. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
|