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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- Reading and the individual writer
| Writing Game R E SP ON DING TO ART As a group, visit a museum or art gallery, and spend at least half a day responding in writing to several paintings or photographs. Work these responses into stories and poems. OR handout postcards of art and paintings in class, and respond directly to them in writing. A I M Responding to art in this way is called ecphrasis, and is a stimulating tradition in creative writing. You write something in homage to apiece of visual art, or use visual art, sculpture or film as stimuli for writing. Introducing creative writing 25 Reading and the individual writer Reading is a kind of rewriting but by many hands and eyes. Writing is only a more exacting form of reading, individual in its action and exactions. To become, and to remain, an original creative writer you must first become, and be, as original a reader, and pursue your individual taste with restlessness, competitiveness and trust in your intuition. Most writers agree that the best way to write well creatively is to write for yourself. It follows that the best way to read as a writer is to read for yourself. In How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom claims, Ultimately we read . . . in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests . . . The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social ( 2000 : 22). It is taken as read that you enjoy reading and that you are interested in language in words, sentences and paragraphs, and by the sounds words make when they collude and collide. It is one of the greatest of human pleasures. If you are not interested in reading the work of other authors, ask yourself this hard question Why should anybody be interested in reading you? Why we read Novels and poems are usually the first causes of wanting to be a writer, and you must start and stay with them. Reading poems, stories and novels is of the first importance to every individual writer at whatever stage they have reached, for it offers you models, helps you find a style, teaches you technique and builds your vocabulary. Reading nonfiction, creative and otherwise, is as vital. Nonfiction is a vault of information, opinion and experience. It is useful for research, obviously, but is not only about research, for nonfiction will supply you with ideas for the subject of poems, for characters and situations in stories and for the creation of further nonfictional writing on subjects that excite you. If you ever feel blocked as a writer, reading popular science, history and biography will be certain to force you out of the corner in which you have placed yourself. Nonfiction is also a good space to relax, or to hide from the gravitational pull of other creative writers voices while you are working on your own stories and poems. Reading literary criticism and theory is less likely to lend itself to creative writing, but can be a good way of lying fallow when, and if, you do not wish to write in the open. In all these ways, writers are perpetual students of their pursuit. What you need to do now is move outside the small playhouse of this book. If you want to be a writer, at least one hundred books of original creative writing for every book about writing seems a minimum ratio – and public libraries will be your havens. |