The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
Download 2.89 Mb. View original pdf
|
Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| Writing Game W O R KING AGAINST LANGUAGE ON BEHALF OF LANGUAGE Read some of the past week’s newspapers and magazines in your library. Make detailed notes on, or photocopy, any articles about a current conflict or war in which politicians or military officers are interviewed. Note the terminology they use, and ensure you understand what they mean in basic English. Now read both sections of Henry Reed’s 1946 poem Lessons of the War (NP 1564) set in an army training camp in World War II, or Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Write a poem or story that uses, and possibly subverts or parodies, the vocabulary for military conflict. Knowingly substitute everyday words with your own neutralising or far-fetched neologisms and acronyms. Do not be too earnest intone alight approach will gain greater effect. A I M We need to keep a check on where language is being led – by its nose. Make use of such language, subverting it into fiction, poetry or nonfiction. Use it for comic effect, parody, or as a form of witness, or turn the weapon on language’s assailants. The best writing of this type does all of these things. Serious play The action of writing, as the poet and scientist Miroslav Holub put it, is an action of serious play, of wilful and sometimes wild experiment. The pleasure 50 Creative writing principle walks out in the world wearing serious clothes, set off by a clown’s cap and bells. Boisseau and Wallace, speaking of poetry students, make a strong generic point when they argue for the play of experiment in a writing class: A course called Creative Writing might better be called ‘Experimental Writing’. Faced with the daunting specter of a blank page, the poet may feel intimidated by the injunction to be creative create. But, being told to experiment, to try something out can be more attractive Play is still a challenge, even if less daunting than the frown of High Art. In Charles Dickens Great Expectations, Miss Havisham instructs the child Pip ‘I have a sick fancy that I want to see some play. There, therewith an impatient movement of the fingers of her right hand play, play, play This is like a writing tutor who has shutout the world and experience as influences and sometimes his or her Pips find it intimidating to play to order. Yet, as writers, we must sometimes obey the Miss Havisham inside us. We challenge ourselves to reach a word count of fiction by a route defined by character or by that situation or by this point of view. We conduct investigations into nonfiction driven by the desire to poke fun, or out of a rage of injustice. We push ourselves to grasp a cracked crown of sonnets. What can we do but laugh (or else we cry) at the elegant (entirely useless) brick piles of language when we are finished? Sometimes the play becomes irksome, the elbowroom reductive. Therefore, we pushover those brick towers of form and language, and free-write, free- associate, make free verse or on-the-road prose. Then we realise that all this freedom gets us no nearer the truth, especially the truth of our abilities as writers. We turn back to playful restrictions and experiments and, by stealth, approach that place of balance between imagination and form where good art gets made. Play, however, can be deliciously dangerous. Serious difficulty We find we are on a tightrope we recognise where the tipping-points are within ourselves, and try to stay on it for the rest of our lives, writing and balancing all the grand binaries imagination and rationality, doubt and confidence, achievement and failure. We give a performance of ourselves along such spectra, within a small or invisible circus of our readers. Yet all our difficulty (and that includes both thinking and feeling) must seem – must be made to seem – inevitable. ‘A good style should show no sign of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident – Somerset Maugham. The difficulty and the opportunity lies in the word ‘seem’. |