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
| Creative writing it has been taken for publication, although again this depends on the nature of the relationship you have with your editor, and it depends on the nature and sympathies of your editor. Many poets revise their poems ceaselessly good poetry editors recognise this, since many of them began as poets themselves. However, that does not mean they have to put up with it when time is so valuable. Many editors of literary fiction and nonfiction are themselves men and women who not only have a store of experience gained from editing many books, but also from editing in other fields such as the media. Some of them are writers, or people who are on the way to becoming writers. Some have emerged from years of hard, thankless work editing within the small presses and small magazine scene. The graduates of that small press scene are graduates of one of the Universities of Life, of poetry usually. They bring a hard nose to writing and editing gained at cost, where money is tight or invisible. They will be impatient with negligence, and constant revising can look indecisive and negligent. The nose they acquire for choosing good writing is coupled with a knack for knowing when a work is complete, and when a writer is bankable – do not reduce your value by hubris. You must learn not to be naive, or at least to master the pretence of experience. Demonstrate a writerly presence in the way you deal with the world as a personas a serious writer-in-waiting. The editor A good editor is the angel of artistic conclusion and closure. At some point, all that discontinuous, necessarily messy, work on an artistic piece must finish, and the world must be let in. A good literary editor knows, probably as much by professional familiarity as by instinct, when your book is final, something you may never know without a great deal of experience. At some point a book reaches a place beyond which it can be spoiled by further revision, say by over- exacting retrenchment – cutting it too savagely so that its interior logic begins to stutter, or paring the language over-beautifully so that it becomes falsified and etiolated. The editor is the hand on your shoulder, and they have been there before. Although all writing is rewriting, there is a station reached in the writing process when you must be unburdened. Better that it is done to you at first than for you to drop the work too soon or too late. Become friends with an editor and watch their craft carefully and gainfully. Creative writing and the publishing industry Without the author, the literary industry would implode its bustling world publishers, agents, accountants, libel lawyers, departments of literature, Creative writing in the world 59 reviewers – would suffer the equivalent of nuclear winter. Doris Lessing wrote, ‘all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put- down and underpaid person the writer. Most major publishing houses take literary decisions in the marketing and finance departments, making the editor a rare and marginal hero and the author a super-pliant creature. The work of editors falls largely now to the creative writing departments. You might argue that the literary industry has made itself even more dependent on authors. What has happened is that we now perform three jobs – writing, teaching, editing – where once we did one or, at most, two. This is why some publishers and literary agencies help fund creative writing programmes. It offers them access to some of the best, new writers fora small investment. The proffered talk to students on how the industry works is well intentioned and generally useful, but it is also a camouflage under which talent scouts can move. They know that many of these students will have had their work expertly edited by serious writers, which means that much of the labour- intensive work is in the bag. Some of those writer-teachers may belong to the literary agency, or publish with that sponsoring publishing house, and will be able to make close comment on the talent and resilience of the student, and whether their character – watched and nurtured throughout the course of teaching – is that of areal writer who will produce further volumes of work from which the agent and publisher might profit. Creative writing programmes tend to produce novelists and poets whose work can feel self-consciously literary. Some of them do very well for themselves but, for many, it is unlikely their work will sell, however superb their writing. Publishers know that well-written creative nonfiction sells far better than literary fiction or poems (see Chapter Seven ). The foremost magazines and journals publish vastly more creative nonfiction than they do fiction or poems. Even newspapers carry it. Creative nonfiction creates an audience through their curiosity about a subject, and then (so writers hope) carries that audience into other genres through their interest in the writer. Publishers track a commercial scent. They sign up new poets and novelists, capture their promise in one genre, turning it to other more lucrative ends by encouraging them to write creative nonfiction. All this may seem Machiavellian, but it is simply business. It is another circle for survival in a small world. The saints of the small press One of the ways you can learn the skill of what to choose to submit, and when to cease a book is, obviously, by active reading. However, this is probably too long a lesson, despite it being one of the central exhortations of this book. 60 Creative writing A more active and rapid method is to become an editor to choose and to improve the work of other writers. You do not need to apply for an editorship. In fact, such opportunities are few. Instead, many new writers gain pleasure and literary discrimination from setting up their own small presses and magazines, or becoming literary editors. You create a physical or virtual open space for new writing, using print or the internet. Small presses are small worlds, but they are the lifeblood of new literature, and most major writers have participated in them, or even created them. They also create circles for survival, for not only does the instigating writer become their own publisher, they become the publisher of their allies and friends. One of the purposes is to create your audience, and to create the taste by which your own work is recognised, or that of your circle. Virginia and Leonard Woolf ran the Hogarth Press from their home, publishing many of their friends and associates. TS. Eliot edited the journal Criterion to bring the work of fellow Modernists, such as James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, to an audience. Eliot published his own poetry and criticism there, and was acute enough to leaven the avant-garde with mainstream contributors whose work pleased the middlebrow aesthetic of his patron. In the previous decade, his friend the poet Ezra Pound had produced the magazine Blast as a rendezvous-in-print for modern writers shock tactics and reputation blasting were part of its performance. Such magazines are flares sent up before a literary coup d’´etat. There is nothing vain or venal about this process. Publishing does not give much space to the new or difficult. Those ignored must make their own luck. If that requires fireworks and shock tactics, then so be it. Such enterprises become literary movements. With luck, they turnover the literary world. However, writers need not delude themselves. Small presses are necessary, but they area rite of passage and few writers choose to stay with them if they can gain a larger audience or higher profile by publishing elsewhere. Small presses are literature’s virtuous poorhouses. When they become well funded, they risk making their writers complacent or insular – no readers no distribution no problem Art for art’s sake at least my book exists. A world reduced to a perfect indivisibility one writer, one reader both the same person. Running such a small press requires talent, willpower, judgement and a determination to perform thankless work. As Michael Schmidt, the editor of Carcanet Press in the United Kingdom, says in Lives of the Poets, ‘Those [publishers] who specialize are poor and have been poor for centuries. Why? So that poets – a few of them – can prosper. Publishers get written out of the story . . . we are dogsbodies of the art we edit, correct, scribe, typeset or key, print, bind, tout. Are we remembered ( 1999 : 5). Half the trouble Creative writing in the world 61 is that authors will abandon a press if they become commercially successful, even though commercial success is no measure, historically, of literary quality. However, editing can develop into a passion. Improving the work of others is afar more rapid form of writing than writing No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft – HG. Wells. That process will teach you more in a year about writing and writers than staying outside the arena, and hoping against hope that your talent will be recognised and rewarded by those inside it. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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