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
| Challenges to writers The phrase enemies of promise entered the language as the title of Cyril Connolly’s ( 1961 ) compendium of circumstances that inhibit writing, and is very much of its time self-centred, brimming with masculine concerns, and obeisant to elite literature. However, the book is thoughtful, even cunning a white, upper-class forerunner of Silences ( 2003 ), Tillie Olsen’s feminist study of the frozen opportunities for women writers, working-class and black authors. Although we can now give notice to Connolly’s aversion to the pram in the hall’ as an enemy to the sensitive male novelist, there are moments of illumination concerning the impacts on writers and writing of politics, conversation, drink, journalism and worldly success. Those moments have more to do with Connolly s real purpose his precision and style rather than the subjects he assays. Enemies of Promise is biography in disguise – creative nonfiction. Olsen’s Silences 64 Challenges of creative writing 65 possesses similar self-purpose and resonance. Writing these books allowed their authors to send plumb lines into their own posterity and those of their friends and allies. Olsen’s aim is to articulate liberation Connolly trades inarticulate desperation. Ina sense, both works are reflective dissertations. As we discussed in Chapter Two , writing such prose might seem self-regarding, but it is often necessary as a means to define one’s self-purpose and practice to think yourself forwards into the kind of writer you want to become (or to cease to be the writer you have come to dislike. Like creative reading, this is one way to find allies to your own promise in yourself. You then find other allies, such as mentors, teachers of writing who are practising authors, your fellow student writers in workshops, and the circles for survival that grow around you as you edit and publish. Indifference The world’s indifference to your writing is remedied by the corrective action of producing and publishing only your best writing, and even then nothing is guaranteed. Change the scale of what you expect it is self-corrosive to play to such a big (unknowable) audience. Think locally in the hope of being prized so: small worlds link, making greater worlds. Your creative class is world enough to begin with. Try to answer their indifference for new writing. Trust to the notion that life is short and art is long, and then just keep practising. Rival media Some of the social and cultural constraints described by Virginia Woolf (see epigraph) may have loosened, but others have arisen to take their place, not least a popular view of literary writing as an art form that offers far less than film or digital media, in social and political terms, and even in imaginative experience and technical daring. To what extent do you, as anew writer, accept this as a challenge rather than a threat Make anally of film and digital media, by either creating fiction that becomes (but challenges) film, or writing that exploits and expands new technologies for its transmission. Seethe section ‘Electronic performance in Chapter Nine Sentimentality, or kitsch The poet and critic Mary Kinzie has pointed out that it is difficult for new writers to recognise cliches of feeling in their writing such as: 66 Creative writing the idea that spontaneous reactions are the most trustworthy that problems should be shared that trying is more important than succeeding that everyone is a winner that the old regret not being young that the outward reflects the inward that beauty is somehow ‘correct’; that appetite is finally natural or healthy, and so forth 376–377) Kinzie labels these lame notions as kitsch suffused with sentimentality and linked to moral corruption. She cites Nabokov’s suggestion that such cliches of feeling are the basis for advertising. We could argue that they are also the bread and butter of Hollywood and Bollywood that sentimentality is a risk worth taking sometimes. However, many writers pull against sentimentality and cliches of emotion, knowing that they lead to platitudinous expression. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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