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
| Reality’s literature Time makes stories of us all history rewrites us. Creative writing explores the narrative of humanity moving through time, and creative nonfiction makes those realities readable. In his work in this field, the writer Barry Lopez sees 177 178 Creative writing his mission as bringing the observed together with the imagined, to achieve a steady state of consciousness in writing, a state in which one has absorbed that very darkness which before was the perpetual sign of defeat ( 1986 : With such vigilant aims, you can see that creative nonfiction shares many of the perceptual and philosophical possibilities of poetry and fiction, but it reaches out even further to readers it teaches to some extent it has a purpose beyond entertainment or art for art’s sake. Earlier models Try to think of creative nonfiction as simply an evolved term for something that has been with us for sometime, but that we called by other names such as belles lettres’, journals, memoirs and essays. In order to seethe variety and possibility of creative nonfiction, read earlier models such as Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Journals’ (excerpts in NE 385); Charles Lamb’s essay Old China (NE William Hazlitt’s On Gusto (NE 510); Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (NA1: 1807) and Walking (NA 1993); Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (NA1: 2032); John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (excerpt in NE 1432); Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (NE 2153), Professions for Women’ (NE2: 2214), and the excerpt from her autobiographical essay Moments of Being called A Sketch of the Past (NE 2218); George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant’ (NE 2457); and the excerpt from Keith Douglas’s vivid account of a battle in Alamein to Zem Zem (NE2: 2538). The truth is that well-written literary journalism, biographies, autobiographies and histories have always found audiences, alongside stylish investigations, profiles and travelogues. However, when the author Tom Wolfe in the s named afresh wave of fact-based literary writing the new journalism, he largely kick-started what we now write, read, teach and learn as creative nonfiction but which, until that point, traded under many titles. Accuracy and art If you think about the normal nonfiction you have read, you will probably be picturing books that place and explore the apparently solid world of facts. Such books speak to you and at you, and this can produce an arid, and even a distancing, experience in some readers. Writers of creative nonfiction try to close that distance between reader and writer while also dealing in the factual. They are not creating fiction, poems or journalism, even though the writers may also be novelists, poets or journalists. Creative nonfiction 179 Creative nonfiction draws general readers with the twined attractions of accuracy and art. Consider journalism. You maybe thinking about journalism in terms of factual reportage, balance of opinion and informational impact. For creative nonfiction, subjectivity of approach is fine the writing does not have to be structured for maximum information in minimum space and balance is not required. Indeed, journalists may sometimes recast their reportage as creative nonfiction. Writing on nonfiction as literature, William Zinsser contends that he has no patience with the snobbery that says nonfiction is only journalism by another name and that journalism by any name is a dirty word . . . good journalism becomes good literature ( 2005 : 99). You should hold that ideal in your mind, not so much when you write, but when you redraft and revise your work. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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