Composition and creative writing111
poems open up as well as the one that must be written the inevitable final piece.
How do you keep the lid on language Sometimes you can and sometimes you cannot, and it is a good idea to let it blow or unravel. Students should try this.
It is not about writing badly it is about unravelling possibility.
It is even about making apparent mistakes in language. You might yield two or three lines or sentences that, by sheer chance,
are part of the poem 112
Creative writingor story you were seeking to write (but did not consciously know, or some entirely uninvited poem or story that, by its sudden presence, raises your game.
Even a misspelling or a misreading on rewriting can yield surprisingly fresh possibilities. Later on, those chances – like the chances created by a rhyme scheme in poetry –
look like choices, and seem inevitable. The novelist William
Burroughs allowed this chance-process full rein with his cutup technique,
pulling paragraphs together out of random readings – something you can try for yourself.
Have in the back of your mind that concrete language usually has more resonance for the general reader than abstract language, and editing usually takes care of this. As George Orwell writes in his
essay Politics and the EnglishLanguage’ (NE When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined
to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
One of the main purposes of writing workshops is to clear away verbiage and false language. George Orwell offered six rules for nonfiction, the purpose of which was to keep your
language alive for the reader, and which are useful for self-editing or editing in poetry and fiction workshops:
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Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
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Never use along word where a short one will do.
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If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
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Never use the passive where you can use the active.
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Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
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Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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