The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
Creating writing in the creative academy
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Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| Creating writing in the creative academy I began my working life as a scientist, one who also wrote creatively, and I would say that if what you do requires you at best to write clearly, then we are all writers. The Two Cultures, the division of knowledge systems into Arts and Science, was a splintering of the processes by which knowledge and language move and grow. There are no Two Cultures, and there never were. The debate between Science and Arts was based largely on prejudice, fear, and a kind of snobbery – a class war between disciplines, their teachers and their students. We might as well say there area Million Cultures for all the illumination such a debate brings. Creative writing as a discipline may help to shift the debate into a more constructive set of engagements. This topic offers you a few genies escaping their lamps. Creative writing across disciplines As I said under Why we read in Chapter One , reading nonfiction is as vital as reading fiction or poetry. Popular science provides you with research material for creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry. Reading science, or biographies of scientists, will present you with ideas, characters and situations. It will also give you new language the terminology of science is gravid with metaphor, and is constantly inventing new usages. In my own university, undergraduate students take a three-year honours degree in Creative Writing, balancing the study of literature with its practice. In their second and third year, students tend to specialise in a genre, such as poetry, fiction, drama or creative nonfiction. Specialisation is a necessary prison, given the structures of the academy, but it is a falsification of how writers work in the world it prizes focus above experience. This open prison needs to become open space. Therefore, these students are also encouraged to take or audit courses outside humanities and creative writing – for example, in philosophy or psychology, but also in medicine, physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry or information technology. Obviously, they need to have some interest and experience of these subjects first, but what they are doing is ploughing a subject for language and material they might use later in creative writing. They are also developing a more rounded profile of qualifications that they can take usefully into the real 242 Creative writing world. And they are acting as ambassadors for creative thought and practice among students of science and social science they gain experience of people and ideas they otherwise may not encounter. There is two-way traffic. Some of the most enthusiastic students of creative writing at my own university come from physics, computing and mathematics. They borrow the concision and play of poetic technique to understand and communicate the concision and play of the languages of their own subjects. They use narrative fiction to tell science-based stories. Are these practitioners writers Some of them become part-time writers while carrying out research in their disciplines. Most goon to become teachers of physics, computing and mathematics. They use creative Writing Games as a means to teach their subject. Entrepreneurial students from our business school have done the same. They understand that the industry of business games as icebreakers, creativity exercises and meeting energisers is close in approach to that of the generative writing workshop or Writing Game. They parachute into our courses steal ideas and parachute out. Just like writers. Creative writing with science It is a fair, if flawed, perception that, somehow, the hypothesis-making part of the scientific process is creative, and the testing and experimental stage draws away from art. The act of drawing away is not entirely the case for those of us who have lived by science. Repeated experimentation and the process of scientific dissemination are precisely analogous to the processes of rewriting, publication and criticism. Some litterateurs like to live their lives in terminology scientists leave it behind them in the lab good writers leave it to the theorists. What writers call workshops, scientists call coffee-break discussions. Furthermore, it is not enough now fora talented scientist to be content with publication in an internationally refereed journal. Popular science writing requires the same creative and technical skill as the writing of creative nonfiction. In fact, it is creative nonfiction, and the skill with which it is composed has been responsible for melting many of the falsehoods that have iced up between the arts and sciences, not least the idea that scientists cannot write. Scientists, such as the popular science writers Margaret Boden, Max Perutz, Steven Rose, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, are creative writers. They learned technique, and found a voice. They prize imagination, energy of expression, style, and understand their own process of creativity. They show how the same processes underlie the ways in which science proceeds. An example – writing on the discoverers of DNA, Max Perutz observed: Writing in the community and academy 243 Like Leonardo, Crick and Watson . . . achieved most when they seemed to be working least . . . engaged in argument and apparently idle . . attacking a problem that could be solved only by a tremendous leap of the imagination . . . Imagination comes first in both artistic and scientific creations Can the study and practice of creative writing make you abetter scientist? Courses in creative writing may encompass writing popular science courses in science may encompass writing creative nonfiction. Popular science is, after all, the art of creative nonfiction. Just as many writing students do not become serious writers, so not all students who sign up for science degrees become scientists, but many could become clearer and more energetic communicators of their disciplines, as journalists, or as mediators between the public sphere and scientific endeavour. In the same way that many of our best creative writers have also been among the more insightful critics, many of our best scientists are its best communicators and critical exponents of science. The use of creative writing in science courses might contribute to a greater public understanding of science and technology. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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