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 L I STE NI N GA ND READING ALOUD As a class, make a list of stories and poems that you value, and make an anthology of these pieces. Ask each student to read their choice out aloud to the rest of the class, with a preliminary statement about why they chose it. After each reading, the other students should tell the reader how they felt about the sound of the writing, and which qualities of sound they found attractive. In addition to this, each student should memorise either a short poem or part of a short story every week. If they do not wish to do this, they should try to memorise some work of their own or of a fellow student. Every few weeks, students might meet informally, say in a cafe, fora performance of memorised work. Another good game is to parody the sound of a writer’s voice. This game, borrowed from musical composition, involves memorising apiece of work by yourself or somebody else, and performing it aloud in a style belonging to another writer. The audience has to guess the identity of the other writer from the aural parody of their language. It is the equivalent of playing Bach in the style of Duke Ellington. A I M Not only is reading aloud a good test of style but it is also a good way to think aloud about writing and writers. Memorisation provides the new writer with a repertoire of voices on which the unconscious can work, searching for models and musical phrases. Memorising your own work is good training for later, should you take part in performances of literature or promote your own work on reading tours. It is also an impressive party trick. Playing the tune of your own work through the tunes of another writer allows one to test its originality to some degree. Does the association swamp the work or does it stand up for itself All these games are highly effective ways of establishing a small community of new writers with shared interests, meeting outside the times of their formal workshop. Creative reading Creative reading is the kindest favour students can do for themselves if they aspire to be a creative writer. Serious writers allow themselves to be open to influence. Writing is a form of knowledge creation, and imitation is an honourable and ancient tradition in writing, and the arts, as it is in science and other forms of knowledge. As Socrates said, Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have laboured hard for Mary Kinzie describes an active reading process for poets, but her explanation holds for other genres: Reading is like writing in beginning in uncertainty and driving towards speculation and experiment. The reader follows . . . the many paths that were not taken by the author, but whose possibility leaves a shadow like a crosshatching on the paths that remain. To read this way keeps a poem Introducing creative writing 29 always provisional and still in the making, which is how the process of reading absorbs the act of writing to their mutual improvement in terms of skill and understanding. Eventually writer and reader see their present way more clearly than the paths not taken Fora writer, all reading is useful and dynamic. For the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam reading was an activity, not osmosis. He checked his reading against his own experience, testing it in the light of his own ideas for writing, as you must learn to do. As his wife and biographer, Nadezhda Mandelstam said, ‘reading of the passive type . . . has always made it possible to propagate predigested ideas, to instill into the popular mind slick, commonplace notions. Reading of this kind . . . has an effect similar to hypnosis ( 1971 : Writers use reading as a type of caffeine, rather than a lotus blossom. It is a form of waking up and paying attention. Writing is a type of unriddling and reading can help you solve local difficulties in your own writing while you are writing (it is a good idea to keep several books about you during your writing sessions. As the novelist Cynthia Ozick says, I read in order to write . . . to find out what I need to know to illuminate the riddle (Plimpton, 1989 : Bear in mind that no reading is ever wasted – nothing – even reading the signs as you speed through a city, although you do not stop there. The best way is to follow a curriculum of reading, a task to which the study and practice of creative writing lends itself constructively. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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