The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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| Appetites and abilities Who tells the best stories wins the crowd. There is a strong history, and mythology, of the weak defending their lives by their power to weave a story. Many children, if lonely at home or school, recognise implicitly the power of fantasy, and of projected narrative, and the power these exert over their family, teachers and peers. A lie can save you and others around you from harm. We, all of us, create narratives out of the particular that we then apply to the general. Storytelling is no different. If those narratives are honest in their precision and winningly paced, then new readers embrace those particulars as their own. Scale that effect to a child lost in a book. A fantasy, for example, fitted to everyday reality, might lead a reader to playact their lives through imagined roles, as a hero with destiny. Faced by their everyday, the reader not only rides through or above their own world’s limits by borrowing the imagination of the original writer they grow to aspire to create such worlds for themselves, no longer by playacting and self-fantasy, but by the act of writing and making. Creative reading is the engine for influence and imitation – and for masking. The appetite to become, and be, a great storyteller can arise simply from the wish to become, and be, admired or even to protect oneself from mockery or harm. Students and new writers also come to creative writing out of an appetite to impress or pose creatively. They accept the received image of the writer 32 Creative writing as the enigmatic ingenue or even fl ˆaneur, but they reject the apprenticeship necessary to become, and remain, a writer-as-reader. Annie Dillard explains in The Writing Life how Hemingway studied Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev . . . Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce EM. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, ‘Nobody’s’ . . . he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat How can you make claims to originality unless you know what is already out there Ignorance will find you out as writer, hat or not. Thus, writers are competitive and ruthless readers. Writers can often be profoundly motivated by feelings of competition with other authors, living or dead. It is not solely a question of contest you need models from which to work. If you do not read, if you do not enjoy reading poetry and fiction, then your time might be better spent doing something more productive in another arena, for you will get nowhere in that competition if you do not read as competitively and as creatively as writers. You should allow yourself to be influenced, and you should use reading to imitate other writers in order to find your voice. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that – Stephen King. It is a hard lesson that we do not know how to read. Were we not taught at school Our alphabets are simply our first passports into knowledge. There is far more to language than verbal skills. We know enough to get by we read books to please our favoured teachers we might even equip ourselves with reading some authors in translation in order to impress. But when we decide to write, we feel our fingers freeze in the effort, as our minds are rinsed by our ignorance of language, form, structure, strategy. We have wasted time, and now time wastes us, for we find we know our alphabet but cannot speak, let alone play with, our language. We have arrived at the place where we will make things, and we have neither the tools nor the materials even to begin the task. In fact, we feel we have not been to school. We have been carefully truanting from knowledge, and from our own potential, for many years out of the fear of being seen to be different. We have lost our individuality through alack of interest. Or we might wish to prolong our childhood into adulthood by adopting inertia as a means forgetting by – a kind of extended adolescence of the talents. Those of you who Introducing creative writing 33 really wish to write might truant from your abilities out of the fear you might actually succeed, that you may have something to say. Success, however minor, brings responsibility, even if it is only the responsibility of expectation. We must relearn how to read and write. Instead of accepting our position with humility, and turning instead to educative reading, we press forward to produce what we believe is original. What stirred us as young readers is something we recall episodically and impressionistically; we then replicate it as our own. We all take pleasure, says Aristotle, in any imitation or representation . . . because our knowledge is naturally agreeable to us Then we become frustrated and resentful on discovering that what we have produced is second-rate, or worse, second-hand. A new maze To make our way as readers – to begin to break at last through the snow of pages around us – we should set ourselves a distinctive reading list, which is itself a pathway, and is itself anew maze. However, at least it is our path, and our maze. Better still (and this is one of the best reasons for the discipline of creative writing in education, ask a teacher or mentor to create a reading list that fits the way you, as an individual, write at this time. Have them change and extend this reading list as your writing changes and extends its borders. Have them set work that begins, unhurriedly, to challenge your individual style and its precepts of composition. Then, request that they set you reading that opposes your way of writing entirely. You should watch carefully which choices are made learn to do this for yourself, and later do this for others. You will learn to read against yourself, and against your whim and tastes and, in that way, you will begin the slow escape from the hypnosis of passive reading, and from the apprentice’s art of imitation. By having your reading tailored to your needs in this way, you can both plough the canon of literature and cultivate its margins. After all, you are not studying literature you are turning it over, harvesting what you require and hopefully reseeding it. In the same way that creative writing must teach you to write on your own, and beyond your own intelligence, so the lessons of creative reading must teach you how to read on your own, and to read against your nurture and nature. When we find our voice, when our voice exerts its gravitational pull on our reading, pulling to it everything that is of use, it stimulates our progress as a writer. Then, and only then, we must go about unlearning how to read, and begin striving for simplicity not allusion for clarity not echo for finding ourselves in our writing, seeing that those others we wanted to be, whose voices we were echoing, were ourselves already. |