The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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the language of the play and its use of the terminology of business and real estate. Your theme might be the downfall of a major corporation, or fraud issues such as insider dealing. Improvise and act out a play that dramatises this crisis.
Use the improvised drama as the platform fora short story of your own, or tell the story of this workshop and the personalities with whom you worked.
A
I M Although we like to reduce economics to numbers and market forces, every action in business is made up of people, and their adventures, personalities and human errors. A play can offer immediate insights into what goes wrong and what goes right at such moments of crisis. In this way, drama is a very insightful educational and social tool.
Chimeras
Academies are excellent patrons for us but may also be precarious territory.
They are seductive and always have been for artists. They offer community not solitude audience not neglect money not privation power not vulnerability;
structures not chaos publication not obscurity assessment not opinion. There are chimeras. Some academies are like clubs and class systems institutions with rules and concealed social codes. If some creative writers are in, then it follows that some are out. The continent of writing suddenly acquires its own petty class system. That goes for students and staff. Degrees in writing become passports to publication or teaching jobs. No qualification no career. Closed space. Yet,
if all colleges of writing vanished, we would not find ourselves suddenly short of writers.
Institutions protect themselves, and protect their captured icons. Writers can be paraded as cultural ornaments, used to justify, or paper over, less respectable activity. As we discussed in Chapter
Two
, sometimes teaching and writing feed negatively into each other, falsifying natural, intuitive practice and a programmatic philosophy develops, ossifying into assertion or ideology, rather than inquiry and demonstration. The writer becomes ivory-towered, a tenured libertarian. Writers based in academies risk being insulated against the very milieu,
the living and working communities, out of which they write. If the writer is insecure or depressive, the security and success of an institution can bring out their worst qualities. The writer swells into a fat fish in that small pond unaware the pond is a fish farm. They risk getting lost in corridors of power, or are too much at ease in the status-greedy structures of education, more toxic to creative thought and action because they are phantasmal. The risk is that they end up colluding too closely with those for whom literature is less important than their job title suggests it to be. As the novelist Russell Celyn Jones has written,
some writer-teachers protect themselves from becoming institutionalised by
‘developing a wilful amnesia towards the dreary language of administration,

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never writing about campuses . . . and maintaining associations with the gaol house, as a counterpoint to the asylum of the gifted that pays your salary. Not everybody is as resourceful. Writing can be a desperate business. The seduction of a salary can lead to collusion.
The worst thing that can happen to the writers is their teaching begins to mess with their own writing. As Lynn Freed argued, their work sounds like a teacher writing – low risk or theory-driven or forced. It gets worse. The creative writing industry can also begin to look like a conspiracy of worthiness and mere competence. William Packard quotes the editor of the New York
Quarterly remarking:
most of the poets out there want to have their cake and eat it too – their cover letters boast of prestigious grants, cushy academic jobs, numerous publications in trendy mags . . . You can’t live bunny lives and write tiger poetry, simultaneously. If anyone out there wants to write with originality and honesty and recklessness, then he or she may have to change a lot of things about the life they’re living 27)

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That reminds us again of Rilke – ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night must I write . . . then build your life in accordance with this necessity. Packard continues, Our present era has been characterized by William
Jay Smith as filled with a lot of creative writing writing – competent, passionless stuff learned in workshop and seminars and published in Mickey Mouse magazines In the literary pages of newspapers, contemporary fiction writers who have attended courses suffer the same caricaturing and censure as poets, for there are those for whom the creative writing industry is a cartoon world, a cloud-cuckoo-land of fantasy accomplishment and vacuum-sealed reputation.
It is evidently much more open-ended. At best, the teaching of creative writing provides a moving edge for literary evolutions and language’s revelations.
The more we practise attending to language in our reading and writing, and the more we practise attending to the world in which language lives, the more experienced we become at translating our individual senses and our perceptions into writing, and being believed by readers who, it is worth remembering,
live in this world, and whose attention we have to earn. However, if we do not continue to create and recreate our space, we stand accused of insularity and decadence. An open book of possibility, the creative academy is an open space,
but it sometimes needs rewriting. Maybe, just sometimes, we need rewriting.
As is the gardener, so is the garden.

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Ideas
Most writers in education know these dangers. They acknowledge and combat them, or they confound them. Many writers seize the opportunities to build bridges across the disciplines and into local communities. Most educational institutions are more liberal and humanist than any of their governments, and do remarkable work both inside and outside their constituencies and communities they area front line of tolerance, outreach and inquiry. My view is that we must never get above ourselves – we are makers of language, of stories and poems, not makers or repackagers of hierarchy. However, we must never get below ourselves, either. Fora writer, self-understanding takes priority over career and status. Self-understanding makes you want to do something,
rather than just be something. What shall we do?
First, we can embrace the various origins, histories and contradictions of this discipline. Second, we can accept a parity of seriousness with other taught art forms. Third, we can work on equal terms within other fields of creative endeavour, including science, by raising public awareness of other knowledge systems through popular science and creative nonfiction. Fourth, we can cease having to justify our work as some pedagogical adjunct to literary studies or social work. It embraces those areas, of course, but is a discipline all of its own, and as ancient in its origins and purposes as the teaching of rhetoric and Greek drama. Finally, students and teachers can stop apologising for the academic discipline of creative writing. There is every reason to celebrate the pursuit and practice of creativity. If nothing else, I hope this book demonstrates that creative writing is above all a natural human activity.
Creative writing can be taught. Once upon a time it was taught through the writing and speaking exercises embedded in rhetoric and the dramatic arts. We lost this, but we have created a second chance. I possess this positive view of creative writing because of moving along distance from a position of scepticism about it. I originally chose to be a scientist and, as somebody who veered from literary matters, I have felt a starvation for creative permission, as though I was standing outside a lit house with no permission to enter. Various writers let me through the door they taught me to read as a writer, to write as an apprentice. I am pleased for writers we are living in a time in which creativity is valued. Let us explore anew level for writing in education that investigates any false borders between community and academy. We seek to extend creative writing’s franchise in education, and also extend our work into the communities, workplaces and schools outside the academy – to write with our door open on the world.

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