Habits of mind, principles of practice

Composition and creative writing
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Most of these notions emerge through their everyday practice, through feeling and instinct, and by failure.
Parallels of practice
Despite the fact that writers, as a mark of their office, tend to be determinedly
not of the same mind, it is surprising that so many of them agree on a few principles when they are writing about the act of writing, or when they are engaged in criticism of fellow authors. There is an intriguing side to this an artist who writes criticism, about their own practice or someone else’s, ends up telling you more about what they themselves are up to, or what they aspire to achieve in their own art form. It is further intriguing that when we then look for parallels of artistic intention and practice we find them in some quantity.
Practicalities that hold in part for poetry often hold in part for fiction, and poets can learn much from writers of nonfiction as they can from makers of fiction, and vice versa. Of course, those genres make their own precise, creative and technical demands. However, it is important to know the overlaps, not least so you do not typecast yourself prematurely as the practitioner of one genre.
All genres flow into each other – water and water, not oil on water. A luminous poem and a short story share concisions and economies of scale. Many poets goon to write novels and creative nonfiction, and bring precisions to prose.
Some novelists write nonfiction, and bring narrative to fact. There are creative writers who practise several genres.
Writers may espouse legislations on artistic practice only to have the mischievous pleasure of debunking them later through the action of antithetical writing through the creation of anti-narrative; or the making of their own species of anti-literature. The world of painting passes similar laws only to expose them. The rationalism and humanism of D¨urer’s age cultivated detailed rules for the geometry of human proportion. Michelangelo unravelled them with his dictum that an artist must possess compasses in his eyes rather than in his hands. Felicity of execution, not rule, became the new rule. Every age devises its own sheet of law, and has it torn by the next, for writers can be very anxious about the influence of their forebears.
Life makes lawmakers of us all, but invention and reinvention require lawbreakers and law-remakers. For every so-called tenet selected below, I can think of an equally robust anti-tenet. We could name remarkable passages of fiction,
nonfiction and poetry within which economy is not all; for which clarity is a secondary consideration; and where adjectives, cliches, adverbs, archaisms,
abstractions and inversions achieve harmonic virtue. My point would be that such writers were not guilty of malpractice. They knew what they were choosing to ignore, and they composed with such panache of style that they defied their

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Creative writing
own inherited legislations, evaded their own mental secret police and censors.
However, you have to know what you are doing first. You earn panache you learn style. You can only break laws by knowing them. As John Gardner argues,
‘Every true work of art . . . must be judged primarily, though not exclusively,
by its own laws. If it has no laws, or its laws are incoherent, it fails – usually on that basis (
1983
: 3). An artistic legislation is to some degree an oxymoron.
They are very much of their time, as was the poet Shelley’s legislative reliance on inspiration in his A Defence of Poetry.
So, my hand is not on my heart in gathering, nor should your heart be in your mouth, since there are few surprises. Ezra Pound said of literary rules in his ABC of Reading (1960), the ignorant of one generation set out to make laws, and gullible children next try to obey them. By repeating this, I am not shooting down these flags before raising them. I am asking you to keep an open mind. You will begin to see quickly, however, just how many of these statements are about how not to write, or they concern habits of mind or of practice that you might wish to acquire in order to accelerate your apprenticeship.
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In the Writing Game, we are all beginners.
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For new writers, making it work might be more revolutionary an objective than making it new.
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Clarity is hard-won, and of first importance.
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Economy is all.
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Style, above all else, is your aim, and it should show no sign of effort.
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Energy, in language, is eternal delight.
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All writing is rewriting.
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The best writing is honest.
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The best writing conveys truth, although it may not be the truth.
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Like a second chance at life, a writer writes to improve on the truth, or upon
their truth.
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Defamiliarise the world, to make us see things afresh, as if for the first time.
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Only by writing for yourself can you hope to please an audience beyond yourself.
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Inspiration does not exist calculation and design bring more reward.
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An early interest in language is a mark that a person might have a talent for writing.
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Writing must appear inevitable, as easily as leaves to a tree. Even if those leaves took years to grow or to make, art conceals Art.
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Reading will make you abetter writer, but reading-as-a-writer will make you even more fluent in style, teaching you technique and building your vocabulary.

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