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
| What wildness is shaping The redevelopment of creative writing has now changed the composition of some Literature faculties. This provides a powerful dimension for creative writing, and for the art form’s development. Serious writers are employed to teach writing. They work alongside literary critics and scholars, sometimes comfortably, sometimes at an angle. Many combine critical and creative work in away that presents a distinctive opportunity for research, linking a writer’s knowledge of literature, gained through practice, with perspectives developed by criticism, theory and scholarship. This is having a profound effect on the development of literary study within universities. It appears to be creating – I would say, recreating – a synthesis between work in universities and the nonacademic professions of writing. There have been mistakes made along the way, not least our allowing the perception that creative writing is some adjunct or educational tool to literary studies. There will always be theoreticians who patrol the approach roads to creative writing, setting up signs and limit-markers in their own unintelligible jargons. They need their epiphanies to live by, just like everybody. It is also a significant error to suppose that creative writing needs to take place in higher education when it already has a strong life outside it, in schools, libraries, literary festivals and communities. Neither does it matter greatly if some imaginative writers create a parallax view of writing within the academy a view judged by intuitive laws and standards of literary achievement and craft, rather than one informed by an academic’s antennae for the lattices of power and history that the new work’s language is ‘performing’. Students are sharp enough to recognise a difference in depth, one that works both ways sometimes, depending on the talents of the teachers. Ignorant men of genius are constantly rediscovering laws of art which the academics had mislaid or hidden – Ezra Pound ( 1960 : 14). Let it lie nobody expects perfection either way. The very finest practices in creative writing deliver strong literary achievement and incisive critical reflection on the social and historical context of the new work our best writers are our most incisive critics and self-critics. 22 Creative writing A total process Creative writing rightly has its doubters among practising authors. In the words of the novelist Flannery O’Connor (an Iowa graduate, I am often asked if universities stifle writers. My view is that they don’t stifle enough of them.’ She had a point. It is important to learn what we cannot do. A writing course will usefully teach a would-be writer that they cannot, and do not want to, write creatively. Not everything we learn is the means for self-progress. We do not always win through knowledge sometimes it is better and wiser to lose. Creativity is not compulsory, nor is it a human right to create and publish imaginative literature. In fact, it is difficult, even terrifying, because it is a total and a totalling process. To paraphrase Ben Jonson, language most shows a person. Writing requires nerve, stamina and long listening – as well as talent, and editorial discrimination. As Donald Hall lamented, writing workshops sometimes trivialise the art by minimising that terror of total process. Although learning to write creatively can be fun, becoming and being a writer is afar more ruthless, wilder game, and creative writing teachers should make no secret of this or try to disguise the true nature of this endeavour. A course might indeed teach people to do something else, find some other focus for their latent creativity, equally life-affirming. None of us wants to make a counterfeit self-dedication, committing the rest of our time to what will amount to, at best frustration, at worst bitterness and falsified vocation. Writing teachers try to be the opposite of deceivers, even when it hurts the student or even when it hurts the tutor to tell the truth. That level of trust requires very good teachers, but it also requires rigour. Rigorous teaching methods for writing courses and degrees fuse reading and critical discussion with concentrated practical work in away that creates progression. We must be honest about our own development as writers and teachers we must acknowledge that progression does not necessarily mean progress. As with the teaching of other art forms, this honesty about development and progress is the main reason that literary practitioners should teach creative writing, and not be teachers of technique or theoreticians of pedagogy. The presence of writers can lead to other outcomes just as valuable, such as creative communities. Creative communities Rigour wins respect, widens and deepens the knowledge base of writers, and helps create cultural centres of excellence in which new writers apprentice themselves yearly to more experienced writers. The initial group grows every Introducing creative writing 23 year in number and diversity. One of the practical benefits of creative writing is that new and supportive communities and constituencies of writers are created and nurtured – real rooms with real writers in them. Teachers and students then begin to learn from each other, look after each other, setup enterprises such as magazines, presses and web journals, and receive help for these enterprises from that slightly apologetic patron of new writing the university. An impartial, supportive patron is worth more than the money that might flow from that relationship. It is more to do with creating opened spaces in which writers can work, in which literature is discussed, read and made. This applies as much to emerging writers as it does to professionals. It is worth my stating here that many communities of people in Britain perceive a connection with a university as something culturally and socially valuable, something tangible, which validates their efforts. For example, women from Asian communities in the Midlands, and children from inner-city schools in our region, are given free space in the Humanities Building of the University of Warwick and Warwick Arts Centre in England to develop their creative work. For some, this is an opportunity beyond price. They enjoy, quoting most of the schoolchildren, a wonderful time, too. Some of them have become writers and publishers. All are better readers and thinkers, better solely by their own idea of what that word means. Some have used their experience to travel into other subjects, even into work areas not usually associated with creative writing, such as science, technology and business. Taught with ambition (and risking both hubris and envy, creative writing can teach us how to travel into our own potentialities it can create Renaissance people. As I suggest in Chapter Ten , the discipline of creative writing is not the reserve of humanities but can be multidisciplinary. It is our job to stress the importance of practice, reading, criticism, drafting, as well as the poet-scientist Miroslav Holub’s liberating notions of serious play, and the OuLiPo school’s conception and creation of potential literature that cuts across mathematics, the sciences and writing in the same way as rhetoric. We should be bolder and say that all writing, when well made, is creative. We are all wilder than we pretend. The sister arts We do not burden other taught art forms with the first name creative. We do not talk of going to classes in Creative Music, Creative Painting, Creative Dance, Creative Film or Creative Acting. We think it implicit. We would feel that teachers were selling their students short if they were not teaching elements and 24 Creative writing techniques of creativity specific to those art forms during classes or workshops. We have no problem that these taught art forms carry examinations that test the acquisition and application of these elements and techniques. It is helpful if the students of these art forms have an interest in which talent might flicker, or be breathed into flame by a teacher – always a practitioner of that art form. The talent that students bring might simply bean inclination for practice, to try things out day after day. As the theatre director Peter Brook comments (scales don’t make a pianist nor does fingerwork help a painter’s brush: yet a great pianist practises finger exercises for many hours a day, and Japanese painters spend their lives practising to draw a perfect circle . . without constant schooling, the actor will stop halfway. Like tennis players or athletes, singers and dancers often keep their teachers with them throughout their working life. Once writers are pushed into the world, they are, like actors, left to fend for themselves. Writers must keep their hands in, as regularly as practitioners of other art forms must. Creative writing provides a period of constant schooling, and the space and time to practise in language and form, for writers also stand in danger of stopping halfway. Constant schooling is a habit of mind that the teaching of creative writing can inculcate. To come fresh at knowledge, despite our learning, and to goon our nerve occasionally, is to acknowledge that we are constantly beginners. It is what opens the mind to illuminations in research, and in the imaginative ability and growing fluency of the actor, the painter or even the surgeon. As writers, our actions are to take and make the parts of speech. In Chapter Nine , I will demonstrate someways in which creative writing works with other art forms such as performance, music and the visual arts. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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