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
| Group criticism You should regard this process as a symbiosis, and be as willing to read and criticise their work as thoroughly and as sympathetically. This is not like the relationship you have with your creative writing teacher or mentor. Instead, it is a balance of individual ambitions and communal aims. You are pulled together by the desire to publish the best work that you can in order not to let yourself, or your side, down. Moreover, your group will recognise when you have done well (or poorly) because it will reflect on them also to a degree all for one, and one for all. You will find these friends very willing to put your writing through some very tough, and often meticulous, critical reading, because it is in their interest also, and because they like you. However, the motivations of liking and of self-interest are often coterminous. ‘Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed atones luck – Iris Murdoch. In the same way that marriage is culturally larger than the two people bound within that contract, so the group is bigger than you, and has its own life. It can give you luck can make you Creative writing in the world 57 increase your chances for luck in writing and publishing. Therefore, do not be a parasite on such a grouping by exploiting the expertise too often, or too obviously. Douse this process to satisfy and extend your competitive drives, by submitting your very best work. Displays of skill need not necessarily create resentment among your peers. If the group is close, and there is sufficient trust, it will have the effect of making everybody in the group feel, or want to be, abetter writer. By occasionally being dazzling, you up the game of your side, making everybody in it desirous of improvement, of wanting to be the centre of attention. You will find you will take that role in turns, and learn to bask in shared accomplishment while also feeling jealous as hell. Clearly, most of the revising will goon face to face in workshops and meetings, and this is an efficient use of the writers time. However, the prospect of reading, say, a friend’s entire book can be daunting, because it is not being read for pleasure or instruction, but for criticism and reinvention. It is being read from within, from the writer’s point of view, and that requires not only considerable skills of reading but also considerable gifts of imagination, of thinking yourself into the writer’s fingertips. Restrict your use of the group in this way submit to them only what you expect you would be submitting to a publisher. In that way, you set yourself before two high fences rather than one the need to revise in the light of your fellow-writers’ comments, and the need to revise in the light of your editor’s views. Abetter, leaner book, however, will be the result. Etiquette for writers Five practical points about publishing always send your best work know the kind of work that a magazine or publishing house prefers and submit writing that suits that taste do not send the same work to different magazines or publishers at the same time enclose a stamped addressed envelope with sufficient postage to allow the return of your submission and always send out several pieces of work, and keep these circulating, adding new work when you can and correcting old work when it gets returned, so that when one of them returns with a rejection note you can still retain some hope of acceptance. Remember that when apiece of work is rejected, it is the work that is being rejected and not you. Do not take it too personally it happens to every writer. If an editor has given a reason for rejection, then followup this advice and rewrite it. You will come across as a tyro if you write to an editor, agent or publisher with anew version of a poem, or story, or book, which has not yet been accepted or rejected. You will provoke both the editor and yourself by revising work after |