The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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world to acting. As anew writer, you need to find a place where people other than yourself, your tutor and your workshop think of you as a writer. This magic anthill of writing, performing and publishing is as much about permission and self-belief as it is about the validation given to your work by fellow writers,
readers and audience. You must engage with performance if you are going to find an open space for your voice.
A new writer must create an audience, and reading aloud to audiences is an ancient practice worldwide. Like the world of writing, the world of literature in performance seethes with workers, drones and guards. As we discussed previously, teaching writing can also be performative, but the best teaching in writing workshops is more centred on students writing than on the teacher’s performance, although being effective in performance may prove useful to the writer in the classroom.
Of course, published creative writers return to their published work to promote it. An author takes their page-bound creation, and reads aloud to an audience, transforming a closed space into open performance. However, the radar of an audience is tuned differently to that of readers, even though some of them are your readers, curious to see what you look like and sound like.
Publication is not everything, and book promotion is only a small part of creative writing in performance. You do not have to be a well-known writer to do public performances of your work, although you are obviously less likely to be paid for it.
Audience as reader
A book or portfolio of writing signals finality for its writer and potentiality for its reader. Live performance renders your writing into something provisional.
The spoken performance of your language escapes books by this means and audiences read you as the messenger, not the message, of your writing. In that sense, you are being read as you stand before an audience.
Only twelve percent of what an audience receives and understands is made up of the words they hear. The rest is made up of the performer’s body language,
dress sense, mood and tone of voice. This invites us to make fools of ourselves;
but it also creates the potential for using performance as a further open space,
in which acts of creativity fledge and fly. So although live readings can be merely promotions, they are also entertainments, or an art form in themselves.
They may also be one means for holding together a community or social group through the codes of performance, as in a Mushairas or slam.
In a concert, the music comes first in a performance of writing, the words always come first. We can prepare as carefully fora reading as a musician

Performing writing
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prepares fora concert. We should aim, first, at clarity (as in our writing, then aim at bringing the listener into the work (as we would a reader, by sleight of style. Having worked so hard on creating work that carries the natural qualities and inevitability of speech, we need to give care to ensure these qualities can be heard as much as read. Practice is also essential if we have made aural or musical innovations within the language of new fiction or poems, or our work needs voices to come across explicitly dialogue is the simplest example. All these elements need to be practised, but not over-practised: a writer reading their own work is not the same creature as an actor reading it.
Live performance is about placing trust in the truth of language. Even fine actors have been known to overemphasise the dramatic nature of a literary piece, delivering it tremblingly or urgently, as if an important message might otherwise get lost. The audience is a reader and, like the reader of a book,
the audience is active. If you leave them nothing to do, they grow bored or embarrassed.
It is almost as though some actors cannot trust a poem or story to be spoken.
It is as though they do not realise the language of a good poem or story already contains a number of buried charges, each of them timed to detonate when spoken aloud. Maybe it is because they know that (as we noted in Chapter
Four
)
a persuasive performance can elevate the quality of substandard work. Yet, an affected reading can make our work seem dishonest dishonest not so much in intent and content, but dishonest in its language. This can of course be funny,
but also awful the poem or story is itself what gets lost in this translation.
Actors must learn to trust writing and realise it is not some sorry-faced relation of drama. New writers might do the same. For poets, Mary Kinzie alerts us to the two chronic errors in the audible reading of verse, singsong and reading as if verse were prose (1999: 486).
Creating an audience
We must allow the fact that books do not feature in some people’s lives. That does not mean we cold-shoulder these people. If they choose not to go to creative writing, then we should do everything in our power to open creative writing to them. Some creative writers and promoters have written and argued the art form into a closed room where it is not permitted to entertain. It self-censors laughter and the ordinary pleasures of response, and takes vainglorious pride in the fact that audiences for live literature are tiny elites. They allow that writing may educate – it can even innovate – but it cannot clown, or simply create rapture in alive audience. Who was it invented the rule that good literature cannot be a branch of entertainment Would Dickens or Shakespeare have

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been sympathetic New creative writers need to reinvent the world where fine literature drew its audience to it, and did not look down on them.
Part of the problem with literature promotion is that we may have the imagination to create material, but not the imagination to transform it in performance, and part of this comes down to being too comfortable in certain surroundings. Many literary events take place in venues more suited to lectures, or in self-consciously avant-garde or cultural venues. There is nothing wrong with these, but consider this your work might well be extending the territory of writing, but the territory may prove, culturally, a small pond aswim with other new writers. You maybe preaching to the converted, even to the narrow extent of your audience being your fellow students and tutors. Take lessons from street theatre – give an apparently spontaneous literary performance in unorthodox venues such as a public park or shopping mall. Be sure to stay the light side of the law (use humour, and most people will take it in good part. Your action will be remembered you will have made your mark on them with your work. Who can predict where such an action might lead them next If writing in performance seems like a direction for you, then the next section shows you some of the basic things you can do to help you make the best of yourself.

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