Introducing creative writing35
Pope’s
Creativity: Theory, History, Practice (Routledge,
2005
) is not only an innovatively
written text in itself, but also provides a beguiling synthesis of thought and practice, crossing disciplinary boundaries and making fascinating links between the critical and creative. Although originally published in, the reprint of Dorothea Brande’s
Becoming a Writer (Tarcher Penguin) presents some of the most realistic ideas still on teaching and learning creative writing. This new edition carries an excellently provocative foreword by John Gardner on some of the root problems of creative writing teaching and its teachers. John Gardner’s own
The Art of Fiction (Vintage Books,
1983
)
and Annie Dillard’s
The Writing Life (HarperCollins,
1989
) bring illumination to the daily practice of writing and the purpose of reading as a writer. Frank
Smith’s beautifully concise
Writing and the Writer (Heinemann,
1982
) contains fascinating material on the writer–reader
contract, and the ways writers control readers. A fine book on the value and method of memorisation and reading aloud is the poet Ted Hughes
By Heart (Faber and Faber,
1997
).
Chapter 2Creative writing in the world
Some form of compulsion
seems to be far more important, in the making of a writer, than innate literary gifts. It is as if one grain of talent – in the right psychological climate – can become a great harvest,
where a load of grains – in the wrong climate – simply goes off. The really unusual thing happens,
no doubt, when the load of grains meets the right climate. Then, maybe, precocious abilities really do prove that they are convertible to real abilities. But the suspicion remains that we are talking about an unhappy not to say disastrous state of affairs, where this immense biological oversupply of precocious ability is almost totally annihilated, before it can mature.
t ed hug hes,
Winter Pollen (
1994
:
An act of criticism is, at best, also an act of creativity they are hemispheres of the same world. Historically, in the West at least, criticism and creative writing are two phases of the same activity, and criticism illuminates most sharply when practical experience of writing is at the bottom of it. The best criticism creates new open spaces for creativity.
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