The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

126
Creative writing
Ask yourself two questions What am I preparing for and How shall I do this?
Then, instead of answering them immediately, stare back along the sightlines of the work you have already completed in your life, and think about ways you might push your next project well beyond anything you have ever reached. Some writers and teachers feel that preparation is a setting of attainable objectives and the acquiring of little methods. It is, but it is also the setting of your own character’s switch for the next few months.
You are going to become this project, and live within it for sometime. You may as well make the experience as intriguing as possible, and sometimes to make something intriguing means to make it exacting or even impossible. If you embrace the possibility of tipping yourself into anew world, then set yourself targets that appear to be well beyond the sweep and scope of your current intelligence or ability.
The processes by which you reach them will be much more intuitive and less reasoned, and you are more likely to write out of your skin, from your heart, and within your own open space. If you choose this path, you must allow more time for incubation of the project, and for rewriting afterwards. However, thinking and working this way actually alters your character it improves your capacity for endurance as a writer and it throws open the door to artistic breakthroughs and evolution of talent.
Another question Which genres do you want to adopt for your project?
It might be the genre that you think suits you best that you have practised already or a genre that openly challenges you to change your style, voice or over-familiar frameworks for thinking. When fiction writers take a course in poetry, they do not necessarily wish to become poets. Some novelists regard poetry as a kind of calculus to their own long divisions in prose of character and scene. Drafting poems is a kind of training for their inner ear and for writing without verbal padding. They enter those lit cages of form, metrics and patterns, in order to hone the language of prose, or to invite new ways of saying, or of approaching their subject.
On the other handsome poets turn to prose fiction and creative nonfiction,
not only for the money (a chimerical objective, but also because their poetic voice may inhibit choice and exploration of subject inverse. Indeed, for some,
prose offers a holiday from poetry’s exactions, and they find they write prose rapidly. In addition, a poet or short story writer may elect to write creative nonfiction to take the concisions of expression into a genre that more people read these miniaturists of style seek a larger audience out of a desire, say,
to share some important issue. All of them begin their preparation through reading, and some degree of conscious planning.

Processes of creative writing
127
Planning
Planning of this type can include research, but can also include other factors,
especially acts of premeditation. For example, a poet may choose to produce a collection of poems that possesses a governing architecture, mentally structuring a whole book of, say, connected confessions or a book with one or two leitmotifs running through every poem or a poetic sequence. A creative nonfiction writer usually begins with subject, not structure, and makes a choice;
they research the subject, and carryout interviews and archive and internet searches. They may also use brainstorming games to cluster ideas and images for later use.
With fiction writers, it is almost as if its practitioners were groups of twins divided at birth, and whose upbringings were quite different. On the one hand,
there are short story writers and novelists who forge ahead with their work with little planning. Their books are an exploration, a journey without maps,
or one in which the map of events is a secret held by its characters, as Elizabeth
Bowen explained:
The novelist’s perception of his characters takes place in the course of the

Download 2.89 Mb.

Share with your friends: