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
| Composition and creative writing 91 r Imitation and influence are not anxieties they are your early allies. Be open to influence and ready even to steal from other writers. r The more you practise writing, the more likely you are to improve and find new possibilities. r Write often write when you can by any means necessary and conduct this practice with as much ruthlessness and tenacity as your circumstances and character will permit. r Writers are born and made. r Natural talents, and your ability to learn, play a strong role, but your own character and stamina will determine whether you endure as a writer. r Showing is more effective than telling, certainly among newer writers. r ‘Writing what you know is a necessary step. r ‘Writing what you don’t know might later hold as much potential as writing what you know’. r ‘Finding your voice might be only one stage on the way to finding your voices, or finding your style. r Your writing voice must be distinctive it must be differentiated from its precursors or your reader will stop listening. r Form is a useful tool of itself, since restriction lends itself to liberating new ways of saying. r Form is a useful tool insofar as it can teach you how to break with it, or bend it, once you have mastered it, but you must master it first. r Striking phrases contaminate with their beauty you should excise them. r Adjectives and adverbs are the first to feel the spotlight of redrafting. r Clich´es, archaisms and inversions must earn their place or be burned off the page. r Any word or phrase that distracts the attention of the reader from the book is redundant. r Concrete language usually has more resonance for the general reader than abstract language. r Audiences do not wait you must create them. r Know your audience bore an audience and you will lose it. r Whom you know, can help you – but not forever. r Writing is one of the most joyful and playful activities for the human mind and body. It is as physical as it is psychological, and the real rewards of writing lie within the process of writing, not in publishing. r You will learn more about writing if you give yourself the permission sometimes – to write badly. r There are no rules, except those you set for yourself, and they will be many and complex. 92 Creative writing As Stravinsky said of music, ‘Academism results when the reasons for the rule change, but not the rule For any writer, rules are for testing and for challenging rarely are they for obeying. There are no magic formulae or secret tricks. A passion, an enthusiasm, for writing provides some early motivation. Obsessiveness helps, but endurance works even more effectively, in the same way that genius is identified as a combination of talent, concentrated focus and years of hard work, and wrongly self-identified as the exhibition of apparently intense passion. This book is testing these principles in permutation, and so will you through your writing, rewriting and the Writing Games within each chapter. Your job is eventually to create your own principles, and to test yourself against accepted ones. Your job, if you like, is to turn the earth of language over and create afresh approach to making literature. That is literary tradition it is read and reread. And it is red in tooth and claw. It is always open space. It changes as each generation surprises itself into defining itself by the action of reaction. This is the moment when there is no longer consent, as Charlotte Bront¨e writes of her sister’s practice in her editorial preface to Wuthering Heights (see the epigraph to this chapter). You will surprise yourself and, in your turn, you will be turned over and replaced, because your surprise has become the orthodoxy, the standard by which others measure, and are measured. Or you may choose to give your place, and share the territories, rather like a teacher does. Like King Lear, how gracefully you allow yourself to be overturned will say a lot about your character and quality. Think of it this way knowing some of the principles we have listed might save you sometime, although writing against such principles could teach you something. Mistakes are worth making, and are even a necessary part of a process (as they are in scientific research, and writing clumsily is a necessary steppingstone to writing well. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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