The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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(4) Write the letter B on the back of this new page. Pages A and Bare passed to the person on their right. (5) Time disposes of the archival scholars, and replaces them with the personae of minor writers, working in the present day. Members of the group take on this persona, and have in front of them apiece of writing they have discovered within the archives of their local library. The minor writer decides to take this interesting artefact and write an imitation of it in his or her own contemporary tongue. (6) With this information, each student rewrites the piece completely, adding and subtracting at will, even reversing the piece. Please try any trick in this book to make this piece of writing your own. (7) Write the letter Con the back of this new work. Each piece of writing (AB and C) is passed to the person on their right. (8) The workshop leader receives a phone call from a major newspaper, and passes the following news to the group. They have all been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and must travel to Stockholm to receive it tomorrow. The newspaper wishes to print anew short piece of writing.
They want to print what they are writing today. (9) Time disposes of the minor writers, and replaces them with the personae of Nobel Laureates, working in twenty years time. Members of the group take on this persona, and have in front of them apiece of writing, by a minor writer, which they are going to pass off as their own for the sake of the newspaper’s deadline. Obviously, it must be rewritten skilfully in order to cover the Laureate’s tracks. (10) The students rewrite the piece to the best of their powers, writing up to the expectation of a Nobel
Prize and a major newspaper publication. (11) Write Don the reverse of this sheet. (12) Time disposes of the Laureates, and you are now yourselves again,
whoever they are. This piece of writing is the final product, and is your own.
A
I M This game works on three levels simultaneously raising the quality of writing because of an increase in expectations altering the terms of reception so that writing is seen as a cultural object sliding through the dynamics of time and getting to grips with the spectrum that includes translation, imitation, variation and literary theft. (1) If you raise the level of self-expectation and audience-expectation, it is possible that new writers find themselves writing up to anew higher level of quality. The psychological confidence this playacting brings is often enough to help you make breakthroughs, and locate more voices in yourself. (2) Look at the whole process in terms of the perception and reception of literary work. The way in which we view somebody’s writing can be affected by our view of the author, and this viewpoint may include all manner of matters,
such as the circumstances in which they wrote, how old they were, and any details we know about their lives. (3) All writing is an act of translation, between authors, across time, and between author and readers. You might use the lessons embedded in this game to carryout exercises in imitation, the aim of which is to produce new work of your own. I have carried out another version of this game that has a twist at the end the original author is discovered alive and well, and visits the Nobel Laureate. The students rewrite the piece better to reflect its origin as an adaptation, and script a short story describing the fictional meeting.

Challenges of creative writing
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Assessing creative writing
Creative writing students as well as academic staff often ask the question as to how to assess creative writing, and how assessors arrive at a grade. After all, what grade would one give to The Divine Comedy or Middlemarch? Most teachers of writing would attest that it is a matter of experience and wide reading, and that we – as students, readers, writers and critics – grade creative writing everyday in the act of reading and the acts of criticism or writing reviews. Even as we talk about books and authors in our classes and in our daily lives, we place a metaphorical score against our experience of reading, comparing it with the writer’s previous work or with the works of other authors.
Grades are metaphors for the progress a writer has made both of themselves, and in comparison to the others in the class. Usually, two or three tutors,
who look at the work independently, carryout this grading. Context is important, and the context of a classroom is the people inside it, a group of student writers – not a group of student writers plus, say, the ghost of Goethe. As we discussed in the section Reflective criticism in Chapter
Two
, many writing courses are assessed by a portfolio of creative writing and an essay or commentary on the aims and processes involved in writing. Some modules also carry examination. Essays and examination materials tend to be assessed using the same criteria as for an expository essay. When designing a course, the tutor usually starts with the parameters of assessment, and then works backwards to the syllabus of the course the exercises that will beset and the texts that will be read. Assessment is so important that it takes first place in the process of course-creation. If a course does not carry formal assessment, you can be sure there will bean eagerness in the group to find some other way of measuring progress, and validating effort, such as publications or readings.
The writer Celia Hunt argues thoughtfully that if students work through difficult, emotionally sensitive matters in their writing, then assessment should consider this personal dimension. She contends that creative writing is judged mostly by literary criteria, and these criteria may fit the critical mind but are not always sympathetic to emotional and personal matters (Hunt. She opts, in the early stages of the programme of study, to assess only reflective papers and learning diaries, and not the creative work. It is true that creative writing has traditionally been seen as individual and subjective. The academic world has been happy to teach methods of critical approach to established works and to assess the student’s critical responses. The trained critic has been reluctant to judge creative works in process and reluctant to define the criteria by which student performance in learning to write maybe judged. However,
wide varieties of assessment methods are used now within creative writing modules.

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These include the setting and assessment of creative writing exercises, reflective critiques, logbooks, diaries, journals, community and work placements and performances. More emphasis is placed on the importance of drafting original writing, and student logbooks and records of how and why they have changed their creative work are regarded as important aspects of the learning process.
In the end, the answer to how creative writing is graded is it is graded out of a hundred, but how that grade is arrived at may also depend on the context in which it was written.

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