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
| The challenge of quality Perception and reception Some creative writing students find it difficult to know how good or bad their writing is. The dynamics of workshops, whether in the academy or community, are more used to lending themselves to enablement than discouragement. As I have argued, there is no easy answer to this apart from rigour, and making the right kind of structures so that positive versions of creativity can grow, while also being examined through a critical lens. No doubt, the learning process in any discipline is a pathway littered with good intentions. However, there are times when the writing that is produced in these situations is exceptional in quality, but the fact that it has been achieved through the discipline of workshops means that it is not treated, critically, in the same way as it would be had it arisen ex nihilo. This is a challenge to our prejudice as much as it is a challenge to our critical generosity. The media often denigrate fiction that has come about through studying for an MFA or MA degree. Partly, this is because the media promulgate a romanticised view of writing and writers, but also partly because they distrust academia. Journalists prefer writers to be born not made, to be versions of the noble savage rather than the savant. The terms of critical reception are therefore twisted within a double bind of preconceived expectations. The public are asked to share these prejudices, despite the very high quality of some graduates of creative writing. As a result, some writers learn to conceal their qualifications and training, pretending to a different, more streetwise, apprenticeship. Literary reputations glow and fade under public light. Sometimes it is a matter of waiting for your writing to find its time. Your audience will not wait for that time you must create the audience first, and then wait. Some reputations are gained honestly through attentive apprenticeship, and some by ingenious or mendacious marketing. It is difficult for some students of creative writing to read the work by certain critically acclaimed authors through the lens of apprenticeship or time. Often what is praised to the sky seems to them pedestrian, stale or clumsy. This is not because these students are arrogant or too clever by half it is because they have become critically alert by reading as writers. Literary quality, for them, has become the goal of their life, and they are naturally astonished when they find that this goal is not shared by everybody in the profession, and certainly not by the publishing industry, for whom the bottom line is profit. An exercise in perspective is to take the works of renowned contemporary writers, and have the students type some of their works word for word whole Challenges of creative writing 83 stories, poems and creative nonfiction. Typing another writer’s published works is like reading it aloud it is a surefire test of its qualities or lack of them. As John Ruskin said, All books are divisible into two classes the books of the hour, and the books of all time The wonderland worlds of literary reception and perception are important to understand. There are fogs and false lights. A poem or story written in a workshop, and sent to a distinguished literary journal, is more likely to be accepted, however good or clumsy it might be, if it bears the name of a well-known practitioner. Thus it is, thus it has always been. The magazine will sell more copies with a famous name than a nobody from nowhere. One of the ways to lift quality within a creative writing course is to lift the level of expectation in reception. Writing a poem, story or investigative article, and knowing it is being written to be marked as part of a course, is not an intense inducement for writing out of your skin. However, if you attach publication to such a course, the level of expectation increases. If you, in fact, were to offer anew, young writer a contract with a major publishing house, it is possible that they would find themselves writing up to that higher level out of the sheer desire to impress, or a fear to fail at that one shot at fame. Therefore, the creation of publishing opportunities around such courses should be encouraged, so long as they do not subsequently develop into closed shops, whose output is limited solely to creative writing students and their teachers. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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