The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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| Creative writing politics generally make for etiolated writing, or writing that has, as Keats said, ‘a palpable design on the reader. Literary politics, however, are like academic politics. They generate heat because the stakes are low and opportunities few. They also make for good copy. Pagefright and word-blindedness There are moments when new writers think they have writer’s block. Part of this is a kind of pagefright, aversion to the empty stage of the page, incomprehension of their role infilling it and performing to an invisible audience. Try to overcome pagefright using some of the techniques in Chapters Four and Five ; use the translation ideas in this chapter or try the Writing Games in this book. Your allies are experience, practice, levity and bluff. Take the enterprise less seriously, or take the mask of a fluent author. A writer may also become word-blind. This happens when a fluent apprentice has produced a great deal of work in a short time and cannot read themselves as a writer they are blind to that perspective. The way to recover is to stop writing, to print the manuscript and not look at it again for at least three weeks. After this period, it will seem sufficiently distant from your creative mental processes, as if it were the work of somebody else. Out of depth Feeling out of your depth is a common state of mind for many writers while writing, one of the reasons many of them find apparent certainties intolerable. Writing beyond your skill or experience is frightening and can make the creative process slow or even static. Either you may feel that you do not know enough about what you are writing, or the means for expression seem beyond your grasp. Research and playful invention will cure the first of these, while familiarity with difficulty is something to which you will gravitate. Working within the level of your skill or experience is a frictionless option, and you will end up riding in circles. Writing out of your depth allows you to locate and occupy further levels in your own character and your writing, making you keen for further advances into that abyss. The graphic novelist Alan Moore argues that you should risk everything by setting the level of every story higher than your last, throwing your talent, as it were, off a cliff with your stories Apparent recklessness . . . will lend them an energy and unpredictability inaccessible by other means He likens the challenge of writing yourself out of the inevitable Splat to knitting oneself a helicopter while in freefall (Moore, 2005 : 46). Challenges of creative writing 69 Self-doubt As Stephen King puts it, Writing fiction, especially along work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt’ (2000: 249). Self-doubt functions like self-censorship. What the poet Ted Hughes termed as our mental secret policemen sometimes get the upper hand they prevent us from proceeding or even believing in our ability. Writers who do not feel self-doubt occasionally are lying to themselves. It comes with the job, like perpetual dissatisfaction. You grow used to the sensation of freezing up when writing, of proceeding in fits of stops, starts, ease and block. You find times when it is not only the words that will not come the arc of the entire piece disappears in your mind. When self-doubt strikes, you must proceed by nerve alone, and by stealth. This is a moment that is defined inaction and boldness by your character, not only as a writer but as a person. No guts no glory. Your only response, if you wish to continue, is to get used to its distress signal. You are not being held hostage by your work this is your work; you command the situation. Choose to write with a colder eye, as if the task did not matter. The feelings of self-doubt will pass: it is an intense but small wave of panic, and does little harm if you do not let it. Self-Doubt’s fiendish opposite, Overconfidence, should also be shown the door. As Annie Dillard says in The Writing Life, The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged ( 1989 : 15). Work–life balance Perfection of the life or the art is not possible because, as EM. Forster put it, life is a muddle. Writing out of the muddle may supply us with material – for autobiographical creative nonfiction, for example. Blaming life for shortfalls in our work is like blaming everybody we know for shortfalls in ourselves: irresponsible, morally indefensible. Yet many failed writers comfort themselves this way. What you do and what you say are your responsibility. Only you can write your poems and stories. Discipline in your working practice has to be reflected indiscipline in your life, but without being autocratic about this with other people. Make the work–life balance work and live. One way is to be honest with yourself and those around you about what you want to do. Explain the demands on your time and your hopes for writing, then discuss and decide what is possible and achievable rather than what is impossible or idealistic. By setting yourself realistic (and even short-haul) objectives in writing, you stand a chance of carrying out many of them, without carving 70 Creative writing yourself a double disappointment of life and literature. You may even achieve some impossibility without knowing it. However, you must do what you have said, even if you do not succeed otherwise you are not only letting yourself down but also tarnishing the goodwill of those around you. Youth-envy Too many new writers are transfixed by the matter of age versus achievement in literature, even to the point where it freezes their progress because they feel they have fallen behind their peers, or writers whom they revere. Publishers exploit youth as a selling point, but this has little connection with quality or achievement. This disabling condition arises partly from a cliche of feeling that writing is a young person’s game and the brilliant among us perish early. It also arises partly from competitiveness. Sometimes, creative writing students study the birth date of their favourite authors, calculate their age at first publication, and then vie to match them. This is destructive, not least because you open yet another route to failure, and one that has nothing to do with finding your natural rhythms for writing. Naturally, you should tap your creative energy as early as you can, but this might be during your forties or fifties. It is never too late to begin writing seriously, and there is no virtue in being published young, or before you or (more importantly) your work are ready. Age As it is, some writers grow freer as they get older. No pagefright for them no time for it. Edward Said believes the late style of creative artists is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality ( 2006 : 9). Writing of the final poems of Cavafy, Said commends the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile (2006: 148). Mellowing even literary mellowing – is thought of by some as virtuous, as is the damnation of geniality. Both are manipulative legislations foisted by new writers on their elders to seize the game off them. For some writers, in fact, the incubation and gestation times for writing speedup with age, several books running through the cognitive assembly lines simultaneously. The apprenticeship is long over, yet they write with the ease of beginners. As Beckett wrote, Death has not required us to keep a day free Like form, awareness of mortality is no prison to creation. You write against it its restriction. Challenges of creative writing 71 Children Nurturing your children is one of the deepest, toughest joys in life, but can feel at odds with writerly discipline – both are justifiably needy. While some of the workplaces of the real world have begun to look more closely and compassionately at the work–life balance, a writer is often constrained by the vagaries of being freelance. Women writers suffer in this respect particularly. There is only one way around this, and that is to evolve a routine of writing around childcare, exhausting though this will beat first and to ensure that you take up, or demand, as much support for your writing time as is reasonable. Be meticulous and structured in creating a schedule. Ensure and assert that everybody understands that writing is your job, and that it is to be treated with the same respect as any other form of work. With this pressure, it is not the amount of time, but the kind of time how you use it. As Seamus Heaney once said, The thing about writing is that, if you have the impulse, you will find the time Remember, too, that writers who choose not to be parents often find child-surrogates to explode their schedules – all things can tempt them. They may even view their books as if they were children, without realising the exactions of shelf life. Many writers with children write for them, and make them the first audience for linguistic play or stories. As children get older, be sure to help them to understand that writing is your work and that it might be fun (and even educational) for them to try some of your tricks, too. Some writers, when they grow older, miss the regime of discipline created by their presence, questions and needs. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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