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
| Community as open space As Joyce Carol Oates declares in The Faith of a Writer, Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born. The individual voice is the communal voice. The regional voice is the universal voice (2004: 3). Chapter Two showed ways in which writers absorb lives and stories, how they are readers of the world and of people. In Chapter Five we discussed the many selves a writer might access, sometimes through imitation, the taking of personae, the creation of an Other, or even direct appropriation of lives and experience. The South American novelist Carlos Fuentes reminds us that The Book tells us that the Other exists, that others exist as well, that our persona does not exist in and of itself but has a compelling moral obligation to pay attention to others, who are never superfluous to our lives (Fuentes 221). In essence, a writer is a community whose story is told through their books. Writing is solitary work some of the time, but even writing can be asocial process through the living of regular life, discussions and workshops. Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community – Tobias Wolff. What might Wolff mean by this? Lights in the dark Writing can bean act of community even if the writer does not stir from their room at all, even if they choose never to meet a reader or give a performance of their work. It creates an unexpected intimacy. Books, if they are made well, are communal – energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it. Communication engenders community and a creative communication implies a heightened regard for community, however unknown (or unknowing) that community maybe. Creative writers might even prey and spy on a community for material, but they carry its message forwards even if the writer is underhand or duplicitous with them. The critic Harold Bloom argues that there are no ethics of reading, that it is a selfish pleasure. We could argue by extension (and as provocatively) that there are few, or no, ethics to writing. After all, isn’t one of the principles of creative writing that writers write for themselves, and that only by writing for themselves can writers hope to please an audience beyond their own writing room Some creative writers write for audience, but many do not. Instead, they set out to create an audience, to challenge one into 236 Creative writing existence, and you cannot create or challenge a community through inaction or silence. This may all seem contradictory, but the very contradictoriness is symptomatic of the world of creative writing as we saw in Chapter One . It is why I call the discipline of creative writing an open space, and asked you to think of literature as a continent that contains many countries, languages and countless points of view. What we can agree is that it is impossible to deny that writing and speaking are forms of binding together. To do so would be to defy biology and even religion. As Barry Lopez writes, Each story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can harm or help the community of which he or she is apart. Many people look to writers for their own voice and story fora choice of conduct and even fora way of thinking about our interpenetrating cultures. ‘Literature must be our anthropology, argues the novelist Ian McEwan in The Literary Animal, who goes onto claim, That which binds us, our common nature, is what literature has always, knowingly and helplessly, given voice to’ (Gottschall and Wilson Think about it this way. How many times have you read books of fiction for answers about your own life, or found yourself and your dilemmas reflected in the mirror of a novel How often have you seen people in grief turn to poetry as a form of consolation Why, during crisis, do many people seek answers in nonfiction They seek guidance from creative writing, even though what they find is art and artifice, symbols and patterns. Guidance may even take the form of escapism or fantasy a book offers a reader, and its writer, a second chance at reality. Writing is away of saying you and the world have a chance – Richard Hugo ( 1979 : 72). Even if that chanced reality is a fiction, it may hold the presence of life, in its language or story, more luminously than might be found in an actual life. For many people, books are lights in their dark, and creative writing is a means by which to see, hear and stay in touch. People sign up for creative writing courses to learn literary style, but many also sign up because they are seeking a quality of perception that we used to call truth. They have found it through reading, and they wish to discover it again through writing. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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