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
| Writing Game A D VENTURES IN READING Go to your nearest library, but make your way adventurously to a subject or genre area that you have never previously visited. Select two books, the titles of which, by their language alone, interest or intrigue you. (Many people find poetry is a good place to start) Take these books home and read them through as quickly as you can, even if you find the process difficult. Make notes on parts of the book you continue to find interesting these are your findings. Then write a story or a poem that fuses both sets of findings, even if the poem or story feels somewhat forced or artificial. Repeat this process until the reading begins to become a habit, and/or the writing begins to feel easier or more natural. A I M Creative reading does not come easily to everybody sometimes you have to compel yourself to read work that is not familiar or useful. Yet some of a writer’s best ideas arise from serendipity, and you have to make space for that serendipity to happen Reading widely, even randomly – picking books out for qualities that many non-writers find slightly wayward – is away to surprise you into making creative connections that have not existed before. This is one path to creating originality of perception and of voice. As some birds weave their nests from objects that offer them visual stimulation, so a writer weaves ideas and books from many sources which are often unconnected but which excite them at the time. It is also vital to force yourself to read beyond what you know, to open up new ways of writing but also of perception to begin to write what you do not know. This kind of reading strategy, coupled with reading the books you like, makes reading first a habit, then a hunger almost like an addiction. Writers are compulsive, even wayward, readers and misreaders. We are nest-weavers, pillaging other writers for material. Language’s music Reading is also a form of listening and the tunes of language trigger new writing. You may feel wordless, but your mind bristles with language it is constantly alert to the tones and coloratura of speech. To translate itself from silence, and into your mind and voice, your wordlessness looks fora form, for shape. Habit, practice and receptivity all assist in this neural process. Nadezhda Mandelstam, writing in Hope Against Hope, describes the effect on her poet-husband: I imagine that fora poet auditory hallucinations are something in the nature of an occupational disease . . . a poem begins with a musical phrase ringing insistently in the ears at first inchoate, it later takes on a precise form, though still without words. I sometimes saw Mandelstam trying to get rid of this kind of hum, to brush it off and escape from it. Introducing creative writing 27 He would toss his head as though it could be shaken out like a drop of water that gets into your ear while bathing. But it was always louder than any noise, radio or conversation in the same room It is not just a question of the mind’s eye it is also a question of the mind’s ear. We learn to attend to the aural qualities of the language in which we write and speak, or – as Joseph Brodsky named it – to the sound of its tide. It is important to stay fresh as a reader, and keep your senses alert to the noise of language, whether on the page or off the page. Learning to attend to language’s music will make fora more nuanced writer, as well as a more sensitive reader and critic. You can put most authors to the test by reading their work aloud, and some writers read their own work aloud as they are drafting it. The author Bruce Chatwin used to read aloud the entirety of his pre-final manuscripts to his publishing editor. Testing the music and precision of language on the ear is why you should always read your own work aloud, and why we do so in workshops. Reading, say, a poem aloud is probably the measure of its success as a self-standing entity, something with its own life. It returns the poem to its roots in speech, and in the sharing of that speech with others in your audience. You must apply this test to your work at whatever stage of your career. As language is polymorphic, so the sound of language is polyphonic and taken over a distance such as a novel or long poem – even symphonic. There is pace and timbre in the delivery of speech, as there is cadence and rhyme in poetry. And there is any permutation of these, with infinite cross-pollinations across genres, language’s soundscapes, and the mutating languages in the dictionaries, in the idioms, slang, jargons and dialects of our world. There are many frequencies, and you learn to tune your ear to receive, replicate and combine as many of them as you can. One of the best ways to train your ear is to memorise stories, as storytellers do, and learn poems by heart, not by rote. A complementary method is to listen to music more actively, and learn to appreciate and emulate the various colours mapped within a composer’s sound as well as the counterpoints and the deviations from expectation. This training will become more natural, and you might begin to hear your own voice among all this noise. You may even begin to hear your own writing, the soundscapes of your own poems and prose as auditory hallucinations, or a musical phrase that then takes on a more clear- cut shape in your mind, even though it is lacking words. Later, it will begin to find the words and you can then help wrestle them into place while writing and drafting. |