The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

16
Creative writing
Inventions of creative writing
The modern version of the discipline of creative writing begins in 1940 with the foundation of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, although there were precursors, including George Baker’s ‘47 Workshop at Harvard from 1906 to The discipline can be seen partly as a reinvention of two great grainy wheels:
ancient dramatic teaching and Renaissance rhetorical exercises in composition.
Creative writing’s tale begins in Athens, with Aristotle (384–322 bc). It originates before that because Aristotle’s Poetics is an account of creative practices accepted and used for years, and is no more than a fragment of the knowledge he gathered for study. Aristotle tells his class what to seek and what to shun in the composition of poetic dramas the outcome at which such dramas aim;
how the achievement of that aim governs the form of the drama by what means that aim is realised and by what defects a dramatist may fail to realise it. However, Aristotle’s work goes further, for it has amoral aim, and creative writing teaching inherits this aim to some extent. For example, Carol Bly’s Beyond the
Writers’ Workshop (
2001
) went as far as to include an Ethics Code for creative writing teachers and students.
Reflecting his society, Aristotle is concerned with the effects of human conduct. The playwright Ben Jonson commented on this in Timber or Beliefs as
‘how we ought to judge rightly of others, and what we ought to imitate specially in ourselves. The practice of creative writing is as personal as he says. Aristotle uses the theatre as a means to an end the players are the people, and the playhouse the world in which they live and die. He is anxious to show that the effect of tragedy upon spectators is good for them. It teaches civic and human conduct. Aristotle wants to move people to strong emotion through rhetorical and dramatic strategies. He shows his students the techniques for manipulating an audience – the human body as a reader of the drama of itself.
His former mentor, Plato, thought ill of the enterprise, urging emotional restraint Poetry waters what we ought to let wither There is amoral dimension to creative writing it is one of the reasons it troubles its detractors as well as its advocates. What does poetry water in today’s creative writing classes,
and what might wither otherwise What does the teaching of creative writing do to, or with, its small society when it goes beyond teaching mere technique?
Is creative writing about more than just new writers, streaming into formation behind their teachers like a self-invading squadron?
A pedagogical mega-virus, Aristotle’s teaching transmitted and mutated itself into later centuries by circuitous geographical routes and several translations through language, space and time (the earliest authentic version is in Arabic).
It whispers in quotation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It beaches itself within

Introducing creative writing
17
the body of theory about literature and poetry that formed and informed the
Renaissance. Writers leaned into it for their own philosophy of practice. Time- travelling, the Aristotelian mind made itself felt in the work of many writers and their critics. Speaking and writing were seen as art, and rhetoric (from the
Greek rhetor, public speaker) taught the means to speak and write effectively to persuade an audience and bind a society. The practice is as old as it is new.
Step aboard the time machine of this book, and travel back in time to the
Middle Ages to take part in a class taught in the thirteenth century.

Download 2.89 Mb.

Share with your friends: