The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Composition and creative writing
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of work, and that can be fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, performance or drama. This is usually an act of simulation, although it can end up producing
‘the real thing. Actors use improvisation to feel their way into role, and generative workshops do the same. Improvising writing on the spot is an exercise indiscipline but also in practising a certain degree of wildness. You learn to apply the improvisatory and wilder modes to your own writing when you are alone.
The trigger for generating new writing is often a sample of exemplary writing by a published author, whose style or subject you imitate. It may also be a thought-experiment: your tutor or fellow student talks you through a scenario out of which you write. Physical objects or actual incidents maybe used to stimulate a response, as in an art or film school. Sometimes tutors use items of visual art, or samples of music, to prompt writing. Restrictions on your writing maybe introduced, such as a form, or a verbal or mathematical pattern in which certain words or patterns are imposed or excluded (Chapter
Three introduced restrictive writing and form).
The simplest, and often very fruitful, trigger is the challenge to write a story,
article or poem on a subject or theme and to compete to write the one that provokes most reaction. One of the most famous generative workshops (although its participants would be aghast to hear it called such) was that between the poets Byron and Shelley, the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley, and Dr Polidori in the Villa Diodati, Geneva, in mid-June 1816. Their evening entertainment was reading ghost stories aloud from the Fantasmagoriana, reading which prompted
Byron to challenge everybody and himself to produce a ghost story. Fiona Mac-
Carthy describes how:
The tale that Mary . . . published two years later as Frankenstein, or The
Modern Prometheus, was the fruit of that competitive gathering . . . she had lain awake at night . . . evolving a narrative which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror Many fine stories begin by such happy accident and healthy rivalry. Many generative workshops benefit by beginning with freewriting, the very practice of which helps create as much happy accident as it does gobbledegook. There are thousands of generative workshop exercises, enough to fill this book many times over. In the list of Recommended reading, I list other books containing the most interesting or intriguing writing exercises I have read, or seen used in class. Their accent on play is at first quite inhibiting for some writers, but is ultimately liberating.

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Creative writing
Tutor and students should not repeat the same exercise incessantly. Some creative writing teachers devise a series of recipes for writing which have worked for them, and they stick with those. The problem arises if the students of their workshops send their work to publishers or journals. The subjects,
and the strategy for unfolding the subject, are identical. The weather within their writing reads as if it was the same, and not of their making. In effect, the lead-writer has written anew piece of work, or rewritten an old piece of work,
through an act of mass ventriloquism.
Some workshops fuse the two approaches of generation and criticism, and some workshops also engage in collaborative writing, in which students work towards apiece that has been written and devised by the whole group or by smaller groups within the class. Fiction writers work on different parts of a novel together, or poets work on collective forms that accrete from their individual contributions, such as the Japanese form the Renga, or a crown of sonnets.

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