The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

176
Creative writing
exemplary as a species of creative nonfiction, a novel-length reflective essay on his aims and processes. Ailsa Cox’s succinct Writing Short Stories (Routledge,
2005
) focuses on an important form for writing students, and does its reader a further service by also looking beyond literary fiction towards genre fiction,
science fiction and cyberpunk. Fiction writers will also find a highly useful demonstration of formal craft in Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway (Long- man, Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft (Eighth Mountain Press,
1998
)
and David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction (Penguin,
1992
). Milan Kundera’s The Art
of the Novel (FirstHarperPerennial,
2000
) is useful on suggesting fresh possibilities of theme and idea for novels. While travelling the world’s creative writing departments, the most common book I have observed is a well-thumbed copy of What If Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers (Quill,
1991
) by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter. The Seven Basic Plots (Continuum,
2004
) by Christopher
Booker is a fascinating introduction to the templates of universal plots, useful to the writer in that they can copy or confound them. The modes of flash fiction are introduced in the anthologies edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas:
Sudden Fiction American Short-Short Stories (Norton,
1986
) and Sudden Fic-
tion International (Norton,
1989
). No creative writing classroom or new writer should go without two great anthologies of modern short stories The Penguin
Book of Modern British Short Stories, edited by Malcolm Bradbury (Penguin, and The Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford
(Granta,
1992
).

Chapter 7
Creative nonfiction the permanent importance . . . lies in its being the meeting point of an impersonal art and a very personal life story . . . Obviously Nabokov’s method would lose all sense unless the material were as true an account of personal experience as memory could possibly make it. The selective apparatus pertains to art but the parts selected belong to unadulterated life.
v lad i mi r nab o kov , Speak, Memory An Autobiography
Revisited (
2000
: A story grows from real and imagined experience. Creative nonfiction usually takes reality as its origin, but that does not mean we dispense with the mind’s natural skill for story. Creative nonfiction deals with realities truthfully – experiences, events, facts – yet the drive of the writing is the author’s involvement in the story, and writers use every literary device in the book to tell that story well.
Carol Bly offers a precis in Beyond the Writers Workshop: All you have to do is be truthful, tell things in your personal voice, and have your modus operandi be revealing your own life circumstances through anecdote or narrative and revealing the meanings you attach to those circumstances, rather than arguing the point (2001: xvii. Readers are drawn in by this personal engagement, the author’s literary style and passion for the telling. This chapter introduces some of the introductory elements of creative nonfiction, and some basic literary tools. We then look at some of the more common projects that new writers and creative writing students can carryout to get them started in this fascinating supergenre.

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