The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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| Rhetoric’s play How would you feel if your creative writing teacher asked you to write a story or poem that personified the cross lamenting its captivity under non-Christian rule and urging a crusade This exercise comes from Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova or The New Poetics, published around 1210 ad. It is a manual of writing instruction, a casebook on style. Unlike any contemporary book on composition, Poetria Nova is a metrical composition of 2,000 Latin hexameter lines. An ambitious masterstroke, de Vinsauf teaches by example. But what drives Poetria Nova deep into memory is its playful delight in restrictive and thematic creative writing. A stanza is a room, and a poem a house containing many lit rooms: If a man has a house to build, his hand does not rush, hasty, into the very doing the work is first measured outwith his heart’s inward plumb-line, and the inner man marks out a series of steps beforehand, according to a definite plan his heart’s hand shapes the whole before his body’s hand does so, and his building is a plan before it is an actuality. Imagine yourself a student of creative writing in the thirteenth century. Our teacher instructs his students to write from the point of view of a worn-out tablecloth, or an angry French fortress. He urges us to compose a digression from the subject of two lovers about to be separated to a description of springtime as the sexual union of air and earth; and, for homework, an abbreviated version of the anecdote of the adulterous mother, the vindictive father, and the snow- child. Most demanding of all is to make a poem that is to be a Set Piece using the nineteen figures of thought (with fourteen subcategories) on the Pope’s responsibility with regard to clerical wrongdoing’. I have tried some of these exercises in class. Oddly enough, they work. They represent an inventive pedagogy, daring in their feel for new shapes, forms, themes, even for anti-narrative. Our teacher is an expert on drafting too (read the epigraph of this chapter, with an endearingly human touch and a taste for 18 Creative writing extended metaphor I have given you a comb, with which, if they be combed, your works may gleam . . . My own way to polish words is by sweating I chastise my mind, lest it stagnate by resting in one technique I would love to sign up for his creative writing class, but I am 800 years late. Rhetoricians taught technique, style and rewriting using imitation and exemplification. The most effective teachers of creative writing teach wide, deep reading and the value of trying on voices, strategies and styles. They teach the techniques, forms, measures and metrics of writing, and their associated counter-practices. If time allows, they show the pleasures and imaginative challenges of translation and experiment. I would call this a basic curriculum. If these basics engage and delight the students in class, then the teacher has become a powerful alchemist of thought and practice. During the Renaissance, rhetoric was taught to students when old universities were thereto serve and teach the articulate and deserving poor. It was field-knowledge for the whole curriculum – lessons for survival through manipulation of, and skill with, language: For it happeneth verye sildome, that a man not exercised in writinge, how learned so euer he be, can at any tyme know perfectly the labour and toile of writers, or taste of the sweetnes and excellencye of styles, and those wiser observations that oftentimes are found in them of olde tyme. (From Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby, It was granite knowledge upon which every subject grew by degrees, and by which language lived and played at the time. Drama was a branch of rhetoric, whose pedagogical purpose was to sharpen the skills of the future preacher and statesman by reading, imitation and compositional practice. Rhetoric was the vehicle for what we call now active learning, such as writing exercises; practising verbal gymnastics within incredible linguistic or formal constraints (anticipating the OuLiPo; see Chapter Three ); and creating arguments and compositions in face-to-face competitions (what we would call slams. The poet John Milton taught rhetoric in the school he setup within his own home. If students were good, they were allowed a little original composition at the end of the curriculum. Romantic critics (not Romantic practitioners) teased and blasted this rhetorical tradition. To some of them it seemed artificial, or a petrifaction language could not flourish among such ordered stones. There was something in this, but it was taken to extremity. Many wrought and serious matters were tamed in the process. Aspects of the old teaching went to sleep in Europe one century they woke up in America in the next, in safer hands, in a newer form called Creative Writing. Back in Europe, the sublime came into its thin inheritance ideas of inspiration rose to their feet Introducing creative writing 19 and walked away pocketing notions of deliberation, intelligence and practice. Writing gained an image, it even gained a kind of audience or celebrity, but it lost the ability to hear part of its history with reason and clarity. A tradition of revolution We lost something almost as valuable not just the idea, but also the practical reality, that authors can be made, and that the further business of making (composition, technique, drafting) – what Scots and medievalists call being a ‘makar’ – is as worthy a living as being a maker of sculpture, of paintings, of music, of performance. Who begrudges the art school its students, the music school its composers, or the academies of dramatic art their young actors I do not think anyone would question the necessity for serious painters, composers or actors to teach arising generation, nor do we question their need for designated and secure space, and for qualifications to attach to their achievements before they enter the world to do it on their own. This is tradition a tradition of revolution, of revelation. Most iconoclasts go through mentoring they learn, at the very least, technique. Structures and models must be known intimately if they are to be altered and renewed with precision. The rise of creative writing has reinstated a reality to one aspect of higher education and the writer’s place within it. Now it needs to synthesise the teaching of making with ensuring that we can do so with the respect and understanding – of our fellow teachers and fellow students both inside and outside the academy. How we do that depends on how far we want to go, and on the standards we intend to set. It also depends on the seriousness of that intent, and on how serious the writers and poets are who do the teaching. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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