The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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have to pass through an academy to be a writer. As I said, a writer is a student of their discipline all their lives. Being taught or being shown how to write;
being taught technique being given time to work – all these can help the right people at the right time. However, at some point the course ends and you are on your own, fledged, pushed out of the nest into your own voice. There is a world elsewhere in which you have to learn to teach yourself. It is best to start preparing for this now.
Capturing ideas for writing
William Faulkner said, A writer needs three things, experience, observation and imagination, any two of which, at times anyone of which, can supply the lack of others Experience heads the list. Experience is not all about action and your physical reality, although it can be. It is also about your psychological reality even your imagination and dreams. It is about your fears, uncertainties, failures, terrors, losses. Experience, fora writer, is an art of losing. Even in a triumph, there is cost. The cost of experience is currency for creative work.
Even dreams are part of experience, and you should start keeping an account of your dreams in a notebook. Dreams area means for reflection, and a preparation for situations we might yet face, so the imagination can work as a teacher and maker. Many good writers create characters and situations without undergoing a real-life experience as that character or of that situation. They use a sympathetic imagination to reach and explore they make it up. Imagination and dreams are parts of your reality.
Choose to keep notes on anything that stimulates you in the news. Do not copy from life exactly, since its very reality tends not to make for an effective fiction. By questioning events and by thinking your way into them, you begin to tear at that reality and make it your own. Taking other people’s stories has the same effect. Listen to older people – encourage them to talk about their lives, and practise listening to your friends and family. You might even choose to eavesdrop in public spaces, such as caf´es.
What we know and what we do not know
Stories and poems are transformations of reality, but you are halfway to making them so by collecting examples from reality: your personal reality, other people’s reality and the natural realities that surround you. Writers are often told to write what they know, but the problem is we do not usually know enough about what
‘we know, because we do not know ourselves. Most of what we meditate upon

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is external to us, and we have probably all been taught at sometime that we are not particularly important, and that self-knowledge can be only another word for narcissism or the public display of self-pity.
We need to get to know ourselves better and, in that way, reconnect with what we know our selfless knowledge. Writing assists this self- and selfless
knowledge, to a point. However, writing what you do not know contains possibilities too – those of the imagination. In an interview, Cynthia Ozick commented on this aspect of creative writing teaching:
The point is that the self is limiting. The self – subjectivity – is narrow and bound to be repetitive. We are, after all, a species. When you write about what you don’t know, this means you begin to think about the world at large. You begin to think beyond the home-thoughts. You enter dream and imagination.
(Plimpton,
1989
: You might choose to explore this process by seizing stories, characters and ideas from myths, lore and old tales, and using them as templates fora reality in your writing. The ultimate exercise in writing what you do not know is to try to write a poem or story on the subject of nothing. For example, in ‘Tailpiece’,
Beckett writes who may tell the tale / of the old man . . . // the sum assess of the world’s woes / nothingness / in words enclose How might we ‘enclose’
nothingness in words?
The thing is that fiction (and by this I mean plays, poems and fictional prose)
has the mysterious property of carrying the quality of truth more effectively than what we think of as our reality. This is a quality which creative nonfiction adopts and exploits, as you will read in Chapter
Seven
. In Poetry in the Making,
the poet Ted Hughes delves into this mystery further. Writing on his poem
‘The Thought Fox (see NP 1810), Hughes talks of capturing ideas for creative writing as being like capturing animals – a process of hunting and fishing for poems using language:
If I had not caught the real fox therein the words I would never have saved the poem. I would have thrown it into the wastepaper basket as I
have thrown so many other hunts that did not get what I was after. As it is, every time I read the poem the fox comes up again out of the darkness and steps into my head . . . all through imagining it clearly enough and finding the living words Our reality includes the world of work. Sometimes we see daily work as time wasted to writing, but it need not be if you read it as a writer. There are arguments in favour of learning outside the academy, not least the need to gain physical experience of other worlds, other people, and the work we do to get by in those worlds. These provide material in plenty. Some creative

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writing courses incorporate work experience, but this provides a temporary and possibly illusory experience. You need it to be personal. Daily life and work are unavoidable become used to them and start using them and losing them. They will start to surprise you.
The personal work of life is another rich source for ideas. Pain will teach you lessons at firsthand that some books cannot. Love will astound you into thoughts you cannot understand until you have gained, lost it, betrayed or misplaced it. Loss can shape you into a clearer writer, by giving you the sharpest of human perspectives on grief. As Elizabeth Bishop wrote in One Art (NP,
1528
):
the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Writing against your experience
Let us focus on one world experience we all probably share humiliation. Humiliation is a position from which many writers work it is the private face of the art of losing. The demands of working and shaping language lend themselves to humiliation as well as humility. The world of work can be a great humil- iator and destroyer of the soul. However, personal humiliations also provide energy, material and purpose. One example writing is widely seen as not being a proper job, or inferior in value to other forms of study, or work. Whether inside or outside the academy, you risk being looked down upon. You can accept this as a challenge and, by your action, defy it.
Feelings of humiliation may already be familiar to you. We feel it, for example,
when a boss or teacher puts us down for making a useful suggestion, or an intellectual corrects the pronunciation of a word back to us by including it in their reply, sneeringly italicised. The act of correction is a burst of contempt:
they are showing us our place, for we have crossed some invisible border into a country whose language and ideas we should not be allowed to speak – let alone write.
At times like this, it is a good idea to remember that you have probably purchased your ability at a greater price, through your birth, hardships of background, and the lottery of education. A lot of successful people spring from inauspicious backgrounds. You are blighted by disadvantage but this makes you fight harder. Remind yourself, at such moments, that the dictionary of your experience is worth much more than any dictionary of privileged language,
status and received ideas. Moments like this should fire you up for writing for writing back and against those who have colonised your language. Humiliation,
like humility, creates articulate energy anger and a sense of injustice can help you find your voice and your subject.

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