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
| Writing Game W R IT ING ABOUT YOURSELF WHAT YOU DO At the end of Chapter One , we wrote about what we know about ourselves, using real-life details taken from our present day. Use the same technique, only this time think about an aspect of your life that involves action and activity, such as physical work. It should be something you know thoroughly, something you could do with your eyes closed. Make rapid notes about this, especially any routines, concrete details, coworkers, working conditions, the boss, etc. When you write, do not introduce your own emotions or value-judgments at any point; stick with real-life description and dialogue. Write about 2,000 words using the first-person point of view. You do not need to have a story within this piece the narrative will be carried by the very physicality of your description. A I M This writing reveals itself in telling detail. You will also astonish yourself by how much more you know about something you thought you knew backwards, and how observant we are even when we are working. In your second draft, try switching this to third-person point of view and redraft accordingly. This will provide practice for writing about subjects you do not know and which require observation and research. You area story I said at the beginning of this chapter that time makes stories of us all. But we also make stories of ourselves. We are our own fictions even if most of the time Creative nonfiction 185 we do not wish to understand ourselves in this way. Nevertheless, we allow ourselves to be read in this way, and we guide our readers – whether they be our friends, employers or lovers – with no small amount of care, even when we are telling the truth, possibly even more so. Aspects of our lives are stories waiting to be told, and we already have some idea of how to tell them. Margaret Atwood believes that Our memories are much more constructed by us than we often admit to ourselves and they are certainly much more edited by us. I think every individual is his or her own novelist in away. You will recall the neuroscientific notion from Chapter One that story is a basic principle of the way the mind organises the information you take in. Memory is dynamic and selective it can delete whole days, or magnify everyday happenings so that they become mythic. Toby Litt says, We shape our memories in the same way as a writer shapes their stories, leaving out the parts they do not care for and embellishing whenever the occasion calls for it These shaping processes should suit creative nonfiction, since stories and memoirs are themselves dynamic and selective. As the epigraph to this chapter by Nabokov reminds us, The selective apparatus pertains to art but the parts selected belong to unadulterated life.’ Memoir and memory So: felicity to reality can make for good art but only because, to some extent, our reality is partly an art. When Nabokov was writing the first version of his autobiography Speak, Memory, he claims he was handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history, and, consequently, by the impossibility of checking my memory when I felt it might beat fault ( 2000 : You need to collect the data of your own life before you begin playing with it, or subverting it, artistically. However, the truth is always stranger than fiction. For many readers who do not care overmuch about art, the truth is always stronger than any fiction, too – dangerous, even. Begin by writing down what you consider the first memories of your own life. These might include rites of passage, such as birthdays. This will be written as a scene. Try to remember details, such as your clothes, ornaments in your house, the weather, sensations, landscape, and any speech. Try to recall images from that time. Then interview somebody – a family member, for example and ask them to remember the same occasions. Examine photographs from that time. Weigh all this evidence, and test to what degree you already makeup your pasts. Your next step should be to compose an account of some moment of your recent life in which some conflict occurred. Write this as a series of scenes. We have seen in Chapter Six how conflict and action serve to engender and shape 186 Creative writing fiction. Just as fiction tends to deal with the exceptional rather than normal, so your memoir should trade on real life but with the boring scenes excised. Does this misrepresent your story Not in the least. As you will begin to see, honesty and self-knowledge are crafts. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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