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
| Electronic performance As creative writers, the Internet is another open space for the creation and performance of our writing, or the digital or kinetic performances of poems and stories that are first written for the page. There are several kinds of digital writing including weblogs, hypertext fiction and poetry, kinetic poetry, code poetry, and writing that takes advantage of the programmable nature of the computer to create works that are interactive (see Recommended reading’). Some programmes also generate text, or involve sound, or use email and other forms of network communication to build communities whose purpose is collaborative writing and publication. 230 Creative writing Transaesthetics Electronic performance allows huge room for experiment, especially in the technological melding with writing in live performance of other art forms, such as film, visual art or music, a phenomenon Margot Lovejoy explores as transaesthetics ( 2004 : 270). The result can sometimes be seen as anew genre of creative writing, inasmuch as writing and the spoken word are at its roots. When these performances take place directly in cyberspace, such works are better thought of as electronic literature, somewhat like the OuLiPo’s idea of potential literature. For example, in hypertext fiction the reader actively selects links to shift from one node of text to the next. The reader becomes a writer, arranging the story from a deeper pool of potential stories. An author’s creative use of nodes, the self-contained units of meaning in a hypertextual narrative, can play with the reader’s orientation and add meaning and play to the text. Collaborative performance In the virtual continent of electronic literature, the literary concept as a performance is often interactive and even collaborative. Creative writing students might begin with something as simple as an email list for the class to which they all contribute new work and criticism, before developing a website that performs the same function more publicly. Using computers to produce your first anthology of writing using a desktop publishing programme is an outcome at which most classes should aim, but you should also publish it online. The next natural step is a website that performs the role of an online journal of your new writing, and that of other writers. To publish is to make publicly known, and computers and the Internet have changed publishing, lowering the cost, and allowing more people to publish, through desktop publishing, publishing on demand and Internet publishing. Writing collaboratively using email and the Web produces new, multi- authored poems and stories in a virtual generative workshop. Each contributor has the democratic right to add, alter and delete text. Writing becomes recursive each change prompts other writers to make alterations. The process is accelerated if the group has a specific target. A strategy for discussion and communication is necessary for when disagreements arise. So, an editor or teacher should oversee these projects, and moderate their development, but many of them should be allowed to grow without being overseen once they are up and running. Blogs: wide open spaces Many writers and students maintain a regular weblog or blog an online journal. I believe this form of writing is a huge ally to creative writing, and a massive Performing writing 231 open space for creativity and cross-art-form practice. Writing a blog provides excellent discipline, like keeping a diary or notebook. The difference is that this diary of experience, imagination and observation is online and public, and it alters the way you write, even though the audience is invisible, as when writing a book. Other positive aspects of blogs are that they need to be written concisely and entertainingly – they require the inevitable spices of art and ecomony to become very good – and they assist fluency and variation of expression, since they are in effect highly visible performances of writing. You can also rapidly incorporate photos, video clips and audio files, or send images straight from your mobile phone to a blog, adding text while you are on the move. Blogs are changing the face of international journalism. They are beginning to alter the face of literature – especially creative nonfiction – and the speed at which we write, read and respond to what we are reading, for many blogs allow for written interaction from and with the reader. Blogs may even begin to change the nature of global politics as the network of political and social thought grows locally, but spreads globally. All students of creative writing should maintain blogs teachers of writing may consider setting up a blog for any course in writing to which tutor and students contribute. Distance learning Many universities, such as the Open University in Britain, teach creative writing through distance learning. Drafts of stories, poems and nonfiction receive online comments from all students as well as the tutor. This is a continual responsive workshop with common objectives for all its writers, and the performance of the process of writing is open to all its participants regardless of country or timezone. It allows students to set their own pace, and to login when convenient. In these situations, the writing process itself is performative, an open space into which you step before an audience of your fellow students, but one in which you find them stepping up beside you, all bearing virtual pages. Obviously, you could use your own blogs to setup a virtual writing course or workshop for yourself and your fellow writers. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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