The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Processes of creative writing
131
The average word count for each day should be about 500 words. Try to reach this number as best you can by writing fast.
A
I M This game lasts a whole month, and requires you write everyday for thirty minutes on subject headings, some of which will make you write what you know (such as Adolescence) or write what you don’t know (such as How to tame a wild tongue. Improvisation is good practice, especially when you feel blocked, and provokes happy accidents. The point is not to create the free associations of free-writing, but to encourage concentration and improvisation on one subject, and to engender the habit of fluency, a little like practising scales before improvising your own melodies. Once you have completed this game, try making up your own subject headings and titles from the Norton anthologies,
and improvise from them regularly. You may wish to play a guessing game of the origins of the titles given.
The silence reservoir
The writing process is not unidirectional, but a total, an organic process. It is unwise to imagine that incubation wakes one evening beginning rises with the moon and continuing follows like sunrise. Each phase smashes, or melds, into the other. The process maybe rapture, but sometimes feels like a sequence of ruptures, or even a series of running battles with language. For example, incubation is part of fluency and flow. You will often find your fluency naturally slowing in order to allow the reservoir of language and ideas within your unconscious mind to replenish. Leave the field. Stop writing. Finish for the day, and go fora walk. Give yourself the time to recover your eloquence through silence. Silence is itself a type of eloquence, for thinking about writing
is writing. Idleness itself is also conducive, but less easy to getaway with. You will find, as you do so, that the reservoir fills quickly, and words and phrases rise through it in shoals.
Breakthroughs and finish lines
One of the matters you will begin to apprehend is not progress, as such, but a feeling of completion, when form and structure click together sweetly in your mind. You will also begin to be able to gauge where your work has reached in relation to the target you set in the first place for this project. Writers operate on the same artistic plane fora time, working through several pieces of writing,
or even several books. However, given sufficient fluency through practice, they make artistic breakthroughs and leaps while writing one particular piece – a poem or short story, say. One analogy comes from evolutionary theory.

132
Creative writing
In early studies of natural selection, palaeontologists could not understand the progression of fossil evidence for the evolution of a species, such as a horse. Instead of evolving in small and gradual stages (and leaving the useful remains in the mud like a chain of evidence, species seemed to jump from one significant stage to another. This was called stochastic evolution, as if the species aimed at a mark. Observed from outside, writers evolve their voices and styles stochastically, making occasional quantum leaps in the quality and authenticity of their writing.
However, once a writer has jumped a stage, and made a breakthrough, they very rarely fallback to their former quality or practices. The whole landscape of their game has altered forever. Be aware of this as you are writing, and watch for such jumps and steps in the evolution of your talent. At these times, it will be hard for you to comprehend just how you wrote the piece. It will seem the work of another person entirely, and you may think it the work of some mysterious other (as you will read in the final section of this chapter. Like a string of powerful love affairs, every book (as Joyce Carol Oates has written)
will feel like The Book while you are writing it.
You will get used to all of this after awhile the apparent mystery of process will become clearer, and you will then want to set your objectives even further away from your new level. You will have the feeling of having completed a stage of development, although that does not mean you have finished. To finish is a sadness to a writer – a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done.
But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done – John Steinbeck. For most writers, nothing is finished it is abandoned, for nothing is perfectible in language without killing it. A novel is finished many times. A poetry collection is sorted and resorted, ordered and reordered, until it finds some provisional shape. Many writers revise their work even after publication. Sometimes the thorniest issue to finalise is the title.
On titles
What does a title perform What does it do, sitting thereon its own like a little crown prince of your continent of writing The title offers a first impression to readers. Like it or not, it may tip the balance between your work being read or not, and it might form part of what is graded within a writing course. You must make your title work as hard as all the words in your piece – harder, in fact, for the title is a door for the reader to open, or a little window through which they peep at the interior, an intrigue making them question whether they should enter or take part. A lazy or imprecise title can damn an entire book.
This applies to poems, stories, novels and creative nonfiction. Spend a great deal of conscious time on your titles, and produce many maquettes of it:

Processes of creative writing
133
several versions and variations that you can trial on your fellow writers in your workshops, or your tutors. Use a working title to begin with, even if you dispense with it later, since evasions like Untitled, Story or Poem carry no charge. You might borrow a phrase from a well-known literary work, but make sure there is a precise resonance between the phrase and your own work or go through your own piece and locate a phrase that either summarises it or captures its spirit. It maybe that one of the character’s names, the setting, or the time, contains that spirit too, as might your theme, or some overriding idea,
or trick of structure. Titles require a reader’s eye, and many titles come to their authors along time after composing, when writers can become a reader of them- selves again. Choose wisely and, if you do not have that leisure, at least choose precisely.

Download 2.89 Mb.

Share with your friends: