The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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Creative writing
Interviews, downloadable at the journal’s website, is the best resource for testimonies by writers, especially fiction and literary nonfiction writers, about their working practice and philosophy. There are other rich sources. Walter Allen’s
Writers on Writing (Dent,
1948
) and Sean Burke’s Authorship: From Plato to
the Postmodern (Edinburgh University Press) are thematically organised anthologies of statements on writing made by mainly canonical authors. For statements of poetics as well as insightful accounts of the practice of poetry, read
Clare Brown and Don Paterson’s Don’t Ask Me What I Mean Poets in their Own
Words (Picador,
2003
) and W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis’s Strong Words:
Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe Books. William Harmon’s edition Classic Writings on Poetry (Columbia University Press) ranges in sources from Plato to Laura (Riding) Jackson. James Scully’s Modern Poets on
Modern Poetry (Fontana,
1966
) collects statements about poetry as a making or strategy. John Haffenden’s Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (Faber and
Faber,
1981
) offers useful interviews on praxis with poets such as Paul Muldoon,
Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. The contributors to Anna Leahy’s Power and
Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom (Multilingual Matters) explore with academic vigour the pedagogical debates and challenges in teaching creative writing on both sides of the Atlantic. Lynn Freed’s article Doing Time My
Years in the Creative Writing Gulag in Harper’s Magazine (
July 2005
) is a short but essential field-guide to the hazards of teaching writing. Two essays from
Raymond Carver’s Fires (Picador,
1986
), On Writing and John Gardner The
Writer as Teacher, area generous corrective to those dangers, and a testimony to how creative writing lets in the world. That charity of spirit informs, once more, Frank Smith’s analyses in Writing and the Writer (Heinemann,
1982
) in which he offers a wonderful synthesis of the natural histories of language and writing in the world. The Point Where Teaching and Writing Intersect (Teachers and Writers, collaborative, edited by Nancy Shapiro and Ron Padgett,
presents small and extremely persuasive essays about how a writer’s teaching feeds the making of new work. Creative writing is often stimulated by going outside your experience and outside the arts. Read about the magic of the natural world in Nigel Calder’s Magic Universe (Oxford University Press,
2003
)
and use some of the concepts as starting points for stories, poems or articles of nonfiction. Creative writing and freedom of expression finds its focus and champion in International PEN (www.internationalpen.org), the worldwide association of writers, with 141 centres in 99 countries. PEN exists to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers everywhere, to fight for freedom of expression and represent the conscience of world literature. The situation in publishing is dynamic, but clear guidance can be found in The Writer’s Handbook, which is published in national editions for many

Creative writing in the world
63
countries and updated annually. Another annual, Writer’s Market, will help you decide where and how to submit your writing to appropriate markets in the United States and Canada. For writers of fiction, Carole Blake’s From Pitch
to Publication (Macmillan,
1999
) is a bible on the subject of novel publishing and literary agencies, used as much by literary agents as it is by aspiring authors.

Chapter 3
Challenges of creative writing
But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a soundproof room, was out of the question . . . The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference, but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them,
Write if you choose it makes no difference tome. The world said with a guffaw, Write What’s the good of writing?
v i r gin i a wool f , A Room of One’s Own (NE The major challenge to any writer is the work itself getting the book written;
making characters believable allowing subject and form to work together and creating verisimilitude. In this chapter, we look at some significant challenges and opportunities – that we might be able to bend to the purpose of our writing,
including cultural and social pressures, quality, translation, experiment, design and your own mind’s workings.

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