The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| actual writing of the novel. To an extent, the novelist is in the same position as the reader. But his perceptions should be always just in advance. The ideal way of presenting character is to invite perception. In what do the characters preexist I should say, in the mass of matter that had accumulated before the inception of the novel. (Allen, 1948 : Characters arrive unannounced on page thirty-eight, plot-turns happen, and both must be dealt with as the journey unfolds. These fiction writers invite self-surprise, and it often shows in their writing. On the other hand, there are novelists who plan every page minutely who scribe flow diagrams and maps of action as if they were storyboarding a movie. They leave little to chance, except chance itself. Even they must leave open space in their blueprints for serendipity. Incubation Planning and preparation overlap with the incubation stage, which can seem a contradiction a languishing action. In this sense, a writer is always at work. In his novel Old School Tobias Wolff describes how: The life that produces writing can’t be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business 128 Creative writing and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way and when a few survivors breakthrough to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee We have already examined the importance of dreams, daydreams, unconsciousness, and writing badly these are aspects of a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer. Incubation creates an incoming wave of the subconscious that washes over the pages you will write. Let this happen wallow in it even, even when it feels like a form of depressive stagnation. This is a time for disciplined idleness, and not reading. Importantly, it is not a time for talking about your project, but for listening to it growing. Beginning A final work begins, as it were, in media res, literally in the middle. Do not begin with the intended first sentence of prose or first line of poetry. Get black on white used to be Maupassant’s advice, and that is what you should do. Writers agree that getting started on anew piece of writing is the most difficult of all the writing processes. Write any sort of rubbish that covers the outlines of what you intend the plot outline character sketches description a hackneyed sestina. Begin by freewriting and free-associating sentences until some patterns emerge that begin to intrigue you solely for the sound they make, their rustle of possibility. There is no forward march begin rewriting some of these into sentences or lines of meaning, and begin the forward stagger into writing. In writing, ‘beginning’ is a false notion, as is finishing. You start writing by diving straight into its deeper ends, searching for structure. You will discover, later, that the true beginning for any artistic process occurs someway into its composition; all the rest was a kind of drumming of your fingers on the desk, a process that overlapped with incubation. This is the reason some creative writing tutors, when looking for the living words within a student’s draft, experiment with the student-author’s intention by striking out the first few paragraphs or stanzas. You have now begun to walk within the open space of the page. The journey becomes an elaborate series of gambles, and there is no sense of forward progression as such there is shaping and reconfiguring, stepping back, inking in and beginning over. The process of creative writing is analogous to the process of blocking out a painting before shaping the details of the picture, allowing details to become clear within the murk of written material. Processes of creative writing 129 Flowing If you keep to the discipline and habit of daily writing, then continuing will not present many difficulties, not least because you will begin to enjoy the exploration and actively look forward to seeing what happens next. This applies as much to poems and creative nonfiction as to prose fiction. Plot and character can hold you in a spell of anticipation. Within a poem, the adventure is more to do with language, sound and the depth-charge surprise of word combinations or images. This is where writing is the most fun you can have, and still call it work. At best, it feels like conducting an orchestra made of your senses and of language. The audience for writing is invisible to you while you are working; a conductor shows their back to an audience in order to give the best of their work. I have suggested you maintain a steady flow of work, even a mechanical word count, putting in the hours, and writing quickly and uninhibitedly. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing down on paper. Never corrector rewrite until the whole thing is down – John Steinbeck. If you are finding this difficult, please turn to the Writing Game Improvisations. Pickup your pen and take it fora walk. Creative flow has been described by psychologists as a state of total absorption, a superfine focus in which the writer has clear goals but is writing at a stretch at the limits of their intelligence, in fact. The act of writing becomes an end in itself. Flow can lead to a skewed sense of time distractions and worries shift into a mental background. This is possibly why writing can become addictive, and also be perceived as therapeutic. However, it takes practice to reach that zone, and it is unwise to stay too long in it. As Joyce Carol Oates states, ‘The practising writer . . . immersed in his or her project, is not an entity at all, let alone a person, but a curious melange of wildly varying states of mind, clustered toward . . . the darker end of the spectrum indecision, frustration, pain, dismay, despair, remorse, impatience, outright failure.’ Fluency is rapture, Virginia Woolf claimed. Momentum in writing is like a perpetual-motion machine, issuing words on words. Without impulsion, the enterprise becomes trudge surprises grow rare or prefabricated. This pushing forward, even when your writing pushes three steps forward and two steps back, is the writer’s natural rhythm and momentum, and you must find your own. Remember you will rewrite everything. The best thing is to dash it down, and cover the pages, getting black on white. By doing so you will achieve afresh fluency which only arises through practice. Authors often say that books write themselves, and that invented characters have their own lives. As Seamus Heaney puts it: 130 Creative writing Getting started, keeping going, getting started again – in art and in life, it seems tome this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as others. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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