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
| Displacement activity You provide the chief alibi for inaction displacement activity. You do a thousand things to avoid writing tidying up, rearranging the files on your computer. Think of it this way only you can write your novels, poems and creative nonfiction. Hemingway believed, tough-mindedly, there are no alibis . . . You have to make it good and a man is a fool if he adds or takes hindrance after hindrance after hindrance to being a writer when that is what he cares about (quoted in Phillips, 1984 : 59). Even the gentle-minded Thoreau advocated focus Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience An annual literary prize in North America is given to a nominated writer to make them stop writing; to say, for God’s sake – enough. If you have distractions, they are usually of your making. By allowing and even encouraging distraction, you award yourself your own prize for quitting. Talking it away New writers prevaricate when they should act and, worse, new writers develop a bad habit of talking away their work, instead of writing it down. The creative reservoir inside you will dip as you talk about your ideas for stories, poems and articles. I have lost stories and many starts of novels . . . Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you’re not doing it’ – Cynthia Ozick (Plimpton, 1989 : 296). Writers can fail on the rocks of their own volubility and sociability. Conversation is expensive oxygen. Do not talk about your work beforehand write it, do it. You will find you have many opportunities to talk Challenges of creative writing 67 about it afterwards say, with your tutor during the revising processor should it become successful. Criticism and journalism There are dozens of displacement activities talking and self-distraction are simply the most obvious. More insidious are those activities that simulate the act of creative writing but are actually its surrogates, such as writing criticism and reviews. These are fine for when you are fallow, or between projects, but they are disastrous forms of displacement when you are writing at full pitch. On the other hand, maintaining a daily weblog or diary are excellent exercises in concision and discipline, and provide a more enduring means for warming up your writing mind for the day. Take the craft and precision of creative writing to criticism and journalism and remake them as creative nonfiction. Fantasy and perfectionism Some writers do not fulfil their promise fora number of reasons, such as their addiction to a fantasy idea of themselves, spinning daydreams of success, while not comprehending that creative life involves exceptional levels of attention. A parallel enemy is perfectionism. Many creative writers strive for perfection in their work and working practice, but not enough of them achieve it. That is because they are striving rather than practising, and because perfect writing does not exist, only provisional versions that you revise until they have their own life. If your writing reached perfection, it would read as if it were dead. ‘The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection – George Orwell. Politics ‘Politics is the enemy of the imagination – Ian McEwan. Or is it Politicians campaign in bad poetry and govern in worse prose. Writing is a campaign with no election and an invisible constituency. Party politics may traduce a writer’s judgement, and clarity of language, although they make good material. Many writers are aspirant but unengaged politicians, whose political views are held together by a defensive solidarity and sentiment, uncomfortable with authority, power or management. Politics outside of an official party is a different animal: writing engages with politics by default. A writer’s imaginative freedom can be a cause of envy or marginalisation (commercial success relieves them of that freedom. However, as Auden said, poetry makes nothing happen, and naive |