The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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| Recommended reading Tillie Olsen’s Silences (The Feminist Press) was first published in and revolutionised literary studies. It inspired an explosion of new creative voices, especially women, black authors and working-class writers. Her book identified many of the social and cultural challenges to the writing process and, like Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (NE 2153–2214), is invaluable reading about the circumstances that make writing possible (or impossible). Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise (Penguin, 1961 ) is delightfully of its time in its analysis of the characteristics of the Clever Young Men and their Dirty Deeds’, but it offers a fascinating historical picture of the pressures on some of the major writers of the early twentieth century. All three of the above will prove useful in thinking critically about your own writing. They are also interesting for thinking about standards and quality of writing. How free is a creative writer to make something new out of another writer’s work in another language Issues of translation and imitation area minefield, but one you should be brave about exploring. Reuben Brower’s Mirror on Mirror Translation Imitation Parody (Harvard University Press) is a starting point for some of the theoretical and philosophical issues involved. A further crucible for many creative writers has been John D. Sinclair’s English prose renderings of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (Oxford University Press, with its Italian text and Sinclair’s commentary. Think about ways you might use such a prose gloss as a means to create a formal poetic version of excerpts from the poem, or new poetry or even fiction that imitates or takes the language of the gloss as a starting point. Although out of print, an exemplary text for poetry in translation (with prose gloss and original) is The Poem Itself edited by Stanley Burnshaw (Penguin. If this area of creative writing interests you, then consider learning another language. For those of you beguiled by the possibilities of potential literature and the OuLiPo, read and exploit The OuLiPo Compendium (Atlas, 1998 ), edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie. To gain a bigger picture Challenges of creative writing 87 of the issues and debates concerning literary design and writerly calculation, fiction writers should turn to the excellent Narrative Design A Writer’s Guide to Structure (Norton, 1997 ), which has the benefit of being written from a novelist’s insider point of view by Madison Smartt Bell. Bell uses examples of student writing from his creative writing classes to illustrate key points of narrative design. H. Porter Abbott’s The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge University Press) artfully examines designs of narrative in literature (and usefully in film and drama). Chapter 4 Composition and creative writing Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know I scarcely think it is. But this I know the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent to harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band in the furrow – when it laughs at the multitude of the city, and regards not the crying of the driver when, refusing absolutely to make ropes out of sea-sand any longer, it sets to work on statue-hewing . . . As for you – the nominal artist – your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question – that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame. c harlot t e bro n t e , editorial preface to Emily Bront¨e, Wuthering Heights (1847) We have seen how the composition of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction is mostly a matter of reading and practice. However, there are many ways of building on the open space of writing and working beyond your intelligence. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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