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
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- The school of wildness
| Writing Game R E CREATING THE SNOW -CHI L D Write a very short poem from the point of view of a worn-out tablecloth, or an angry French fortress. Then compose a playful short story about two lovers about to be separated in which you incorporate a description of springtime as the sexual union of air and earth. Write a longer and darker story in which you include the following characters (without naming their qualities an adulterous mother, a vindictive father and the snow-child. Call the story The Snow-Child’. A I M These are very early examples of compositional exercises. Their very strangeness allows you a great deal of freedom of interpretation and expression. You may wish later to use these examples to create a story set in the Middle Ages, in which such a writing class took place. 20 Creative writing The school of wildness Creative writing has been looked upon with intellectual suspicion, or dismissed as a school for amateurism and wildness. Yet, the relation of university-based criticism and scholarship to contemporary writing and poetry has been affected by the redevelopment of creative writing, and always has been. The past few decades have seen a rapid flourishing of the subject, not only in number but also in the diversity of approach towards its teaching, and the use of such techniques in so-called academic courses, including those outside humanities. The school of wildness is on the prowl it has new purposes and territories and a motto of its own If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me – Shakespeare. Courses in which creative writing is part of learning need not have the purpose of only turning out better writers of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction and children’s literature. They may have the purpose of creating better readers of these genres, more informed and sensitive scholars of these genres and keener teachers of the literary arts. Since the literary mind may prove to be the natural mind, such courses may even create better communicators of other disciplines, such as the sciences or business. However, one of our main purposes is the one we never talk of openly except in the company of other wolves our role in helping the strange come to life through language. Necessary wildness Coleridge wrote that there is no great art without strangeness. Einstein believed that a sense for the mysterious was the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Harold Bloom names one of the characteristics of great literature as its downright weirdness. In On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner claims, Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked its presence in writing reveals the very roots of the creative process (1985: 57). I am not saying we can legislate for wildness, nor draw up a curriculum in which we teach weirdness on one day and strangeness on another. However, we can create conditions in which these qualities will not be immediately cornered and killed. A good writer can scent creative wildness and will know, from their own experience, how best to develop and direct it toward a constructive target, without taming. Writers make for sympathetic teachers of writing because they are familiar with the weird and wayward process of making literature. They know the differing cages of form that allow anew writer to draw closer to the creature inside them. Writers areas diverse as things are various. The teaching of writing is an ancient discipline but there cannot be a narrow ‘modernising-standardising’ Introducing creative writing 21 of its pedagogies. Creative writing will not lend itself to systemisation or to blase compositional step-by-steps. Systems curb experiments in teaching in the evolution of the discipline. They tame the possibility of learning through failure and risk. Creative writing schools provide an open spatial structure in which learning basic principles goes hand in hand with a certain amount of wildness and invention. They foster a habit of mind that John Keats called negative capability, when a writer is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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