The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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genetic design of arose, or eye. Form provides a pattern or shape for prose fiction or poems, but is usually most effective when it is the least obvious. So form must seem inevitable. In stories and poems, form must also be near-invisible, a presence in dialogue with the writing. A work of fiction or a poem must not be completely driven into being by its desired form. A self-conscious creative writer can sometimes overemphasise their formal ability so that what the reader sees and hears is all pattern. If you follow this path, you risk becoming a skilful technician whose work suffers through efficiency or technical exhibitionism.
Using form to design fiction or poems is often emancipating for new writers who find it hard to surprise themselves in their writing, but, when faced by the mathematical scaffolding of an exercise in style, or a sestina or pantoum, find themselves in the mental position of problem-solvers rather than what they consider a special mindset that artists possess. They begin to understand that problem-solving and designing language has much more in common with artistic creation than the popular image of the artist suggests. Form is a useful tool of itself, since restriction lends itself to liberating new ways of saying. Form liberates imagination in fiction as much as poetry.
Restriction in poetry and fiction two examples
The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s public image in the twentieth century was that of a mage of inspired art, a bardic image fostered by his admirers and reinforced by the highly rhetorical manner in which he performed his poems. Yet, when
Thomas sat down to write in his boathouse in Laugharne, he soberly lined up a list of rhyming words (with alternatives) along the right-hand side of a page and,
having created the exoskeleton of his poem, he filled the gaps in this design and revised them until they came right. He designed and calculated poems until they sounded like natural songs of the earth, possessing inevitability. The rhymes were usually separated from each other by several intervening lines, so seldom appeared obvious or forced.
Similarly, in the novel X20 by Richard Beard (
1996
), the writer has the protagonist smoke twenty cigarettes in the first chapter nineteen in the next;
and soon until we reach the twentieth and final chapter in which one cigarette is smoked (part of the narrative concerns giving up smoking. Each cigarette is a vertebra making up the spine of the novel. However, like Thomas’s rhyme schemes, the reader does not notice these subtractions and additions, since so much shaped language stands between the mathematics and the reader’s alert eye. The restrictions are woven into the narrative or poem, even though they acted as orders, props and pistons to move the writer forward and upwards while they shaped the superstructure. Inspiration does not exist calculation

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and design bring more reward. Like scaffolding, these restrictions can even be removed at the end once the superstructure of the novel or poem has been built. It is why form has been sweetly termed the necessary nothing (Boisseau and Wallace 27).
Form’s game
Robert Frost remarked, Making little poems encourages a man to see there is shapeliness in the world. A poem is an arrest of disorder The same goes for stories. He also famously wrote that writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down. Form can be seen as a game of shaping. John Redmond suggests that the position is analogous to that of someone who is designing a game, while the reader’s position is analogous to that of someone who is playing or watching the game (
2006
: 9). Not so long ago, people used to play poetic forms while harvesting. To this day, serious and lively competitions of performance based on the command of traditional Welsh metres take place at annual eisteddfods around Wales.
Form provides a creative writer with simulation exercises, giving them a series of objectives and rules, such as rhyme scheme, metre and repetition.
Such game-play can offer practice, but it also readies you for the times when you might write something more apparently immediate. Writing to a restriction coerces you to create ways of saying things that would have not have occurred to you if you were left to your own netless game-plan. It can make you write better than you think you can, make you abetter player at the art, and you will end up by astonishing yourself when you are driven to write something unexpected. Novelists use similar devices, and the Oulipeans provide them with rich resources to plunder.
Form is also elemental it is a wholly human and social invention. For example, poetry’s origin is oral its presence today is still partly oral. Storytelling as an oral form is at the root of fiction. Form came into being in order to make the conduction of a poem or story easier by making it more memorable to the ear.
It is easier to memorise sentences that use repetitive devices and reprises as in storytelling or sentences that are in metre, that have a certain step and dance to them, and rhyme is a means to jog the memory for what line comes next.
Rhyme and rhythm are mnemonic devices. Form has therefore performed a strong function in helping literature’s survival and adaptation within cultural natural selection.
Form is fundamental to the way we grow to perceive the world of language.
The baby in the cot may learn new words by listening to a nursery rhyme, but

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the real delight lies in the way it is said the pattern, the repetition, the rhythm,
the rhymes, the metre – the form. It creates language’s music in their head, a dance of language. Writers are composers many begin writing a poem or story because the music of it occurs to them first, and demands that words be written to fit that noise. This is a wholly natural process, as straightforward as making up songs or even jokes. Jokes, too, have form and music the setup, the punchline, its taut rhythm pulling you in.
Against design
Form has its detractors. Some creative writers, especially those new to writing,
view form as artificial rather than elemental, human and organic. They view the arts of poetry and fiction as fields for uncontrolled expression. They have forgotten their childhood pleasure in the naturalness of rhythm and repetition,
and overlooked the fact that language is a plastic material to be played with.
For example, such writers are drawn like wasps to sugar to the word free in the term free verse without understanding its origin, or that the best free verse gains power from its dialogue with form.
They create poems and stories that areas disordered as they are egotistical,
and think this free spirited behaviour. The idea that such low-wattage prose and poetry might work better were it designed better does not occur to them, or if it did they might find such a notion both traditional and boring. Their work is on the far end of a spectrum from those highly competent versifiers whose work is all patterns. However, their extreme positions and practices have more in common than they might wish to acknowledge. The discipline of creative writing takes this challenge head-on.
Those who reject form sometimes label its advocates as reactionary. However,
the rejectionists’ approach privileges the individualistic and indolent over technique and work. It also tends to promote overbearing emotion (the insistent sobriety of which evinces its insincerity) above human playfulness and inventiveness. A creative writing student’s reaction against formal writing might simply result from an allergy to the word formalin favour of the affirmative antonym ‘informal’.
In the end, the decision to use form is down to you. Think about it carefully:
we tend, as people, to prefer the work of craftspeople and strong designers when we are choosing our furniture, music, cars, films, paintings, clothes, buildings or computers. The challenge to creative writing is no different it needs to be well made to be desirable, even when it is apparently without form.

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