The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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Creative writing
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How do I write what I know?
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Where does my knowledge take my writing?
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Is freedom from form a freedom from art?
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How does a writer ensure that their work is truly their own, instead of merely a replica of ideas absorbed and reissued from the world?
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Where and who is our audience?
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How have contemporary writers dealt with cultural hybridisation in the face of racial stereotyping?
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How do writers find and develop ideas?
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Finding a style r
An examination of truth in fiction and poetry r
Does the novelist depend upon a sense of place in order to create a good story?
Does this sense of place have to be a physical landscape?
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I M Titles like this setup small literary mazes you can explore with some end in view. They help you to plan the essay and focus your attention on only a few important issues. In answering, you reflect on the aims of your writing and the process by which it arrived at its final form and you give critical attention to your own writing, for example the affinities you may feel it has with the work of other authors.
Notional subjectivity
Your experience counts, and the foreknowledge that you do not place yourself into the work you write, but that you discover yourself there. Yet, you say, if that is the case, then how can one rationalise an aim out of something that was not (apparently) deliberated How can one be objective about processes that are subjective First, I would suggest that notions of subjectivity and objectivity in art have long proved unhelpful, but also unattainable, and even science has a problem with them (which is why nothing is ever certain in science and why its practitioners rely on degrees of mathematical significance and on practical falsifiability). Second, I would argue that experience informs and inhabits the most honest and enriching statements of poetics, as it does the most successful essays on the aims and processes of creative writing.
It is vexing to trade with the labels of subjectivity and objectivity when dealing with a writer’s experience. While such vexations have led to some remarkable developments in philosophy, they do not tend to influence creative writing directly. Indirectly, of course, creative writers and artists pillage, use and parody such ideas and their hermetic jargons at will. However, some writers find the kind of language used in these discourses at best diverting and at worst inhibiting.

Creative writing in the world
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Why do you write How do you write A creative writer’s deepening knowledge of learning through practice frames their own answers to these questions.
They also show an awareness that the answers that hold firm and clear now will no doubt change and grow more intricate as they progress in their art.
The experience of other writers also informs truly effective arguments. Self- interrogation will become another part of your way of life, as necessary as your interrogation of the world around you.
We remain students a writer is a student of their discipline all their lives,
both in practice and in effect. Criticism, like creative writing, is another open space for engaging an audience, and engaging with the world. Leading critics and interpreters of literature have themselves had substantial experience of imaginative writing at the deepest level. Many of our best writers have also been among the more insightful critics, among others Sir Philip Sidney, Ben
Jonson, ST. Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Keats (from his letters, Matthew
Arnold, TS. Eliot, Ezra Pound, George Orwell, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell,
Virginia Woolf, William Empson, Saul Bellow, VS. Pritchett, Geoffrey Hill,
Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Thom Gunn, Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney,
Eavan Boland, Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Les Murray,
Margaret Atwood and Paul Muldoon. Take comfort from Harold Bloom that
‘criticism . . . is either part of literature or nothing at all (
1997
: xix and take heed of John Gardner that Nothing is harder on the true writer’s sense of security than an age of bad criticism, and in one way or another, sad to say,
almost every age qualifies (
1985
: 36).

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