The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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for only two weeks, and return to it once you have read the rest of the book.
Rewrite the piece without recourse to your original rules of engagement. In six months, I would like you to repeat this entire exercise again, again without reading your original set of rules.
A
I M Rewriting is as important as writing, but our frames of reference alter with time and practice. As original writers, we areas hampered by what we know, or think we know, and what we do not know. We must do a lot of learning, but most of all we have to do a lot of unlearning, for our preconceptions of writing are usually based on received opinion, our experience of teaching, or on what
Nadezhda Mandelstam called the hypnosis induced by passive reading. As we write and read more actively, not only does our writing mutate and become newer to ourselves (and so easier to revise, but our frames of reference become more complex and dynamic. We grow less inhibited by our own experience, or the mores of others. We have clicked our fingers and woken up.
Writing badly and over-writing
It is important to give yourself the permission to write badly, and learn through rewriting. Far better to write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all – Katherine Mansfield. Bad is the road to good. It is imperative to recognise what works and what does notwork, and teach yourself to appreciate when you are being a writer, and when you are being a poseur or fake. Many are called few are chosen – Anon. This has the same quality of sneer as poets are born, not made and those who cant, teach. Who calls Who chooses Defy such expectations. Instead, try calling on yourself try choosing yourself. In the end, you must simply do it yourself you must do it as you can’.
As somebody at the beginning of a writing career, you need to give yourself other permissions, too. You are sometimes asked to write to order. Workshop games and Writing Games ask this of you and, in the professional world, such
‘commission’ is commonplace. Clear writing can be made in this conscious way, but good style is tricky to write to order. Style is more of an unconscious process. It needs to be worked into your piece after the first draft. Therefore,
do not seek to create astounding sentences the first time round otherwise, you will spend an hour on one sentence rather than producing one hundred, and that one sentence may end up being self-consciously literary, or over-written.
Better to cover pages with words, then later to cut them back to their essence,
than to write one sentence only to cut it back to one word.
Over-writing, too, is a cardinal symptom, not a sin, of creative writing classes.
We are trying to impress our audience, but we are also trying to impress ourselves, by elaborating, rather than making, sentences. This style evinces insecu-

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Creative writing
rity and insincerity, an absence of style actually, or one heavily borrowed from a few favourite authors, rather than absorbed from reading so many authors that the reader is secure and natural in their relative anonymity of voice. Overwriting does not feel or sound natural. Read aloud, it will strike listeners as artificial or dense with allusion. The new writer is trying very hard leaning into what they consider an accepted mode of expression. They should lean back into
themselves and write plainly and quickly. Slap the plaster on the page’s walls;
planing and rococo can come later.
Forces of language
Creative writing is a craft that requires continual learning it is along game.
You may feel, as a student of creative writing, that at some point you will
‘graduate’ into being a writer. Be clear from the outset there is, there will be,
no metaphorical graduation, although publication will at first feel like an award of sorts. But the feeling is temporary. As I have said, in writing we participate as beginners. Every new piece of work has to begin again from nothing. Every time a poet sits down to write anew poem, as Paul Muldoon is on record assaying, they must relearn how to write a poem. Novelists, if they want their work to resist oblivion, must force themselves towards tougher targets and keep shifting their perspectives there is no break time. As the novelist VS. Pritchett noted,
The fewer novels or poems you write, the fewer you will have the ability to write. The law ruling the arts is that they must be pursued to excess.
Excess is not favoured by our conditions a book which has taken two years to write dies in a few weeks.
(Treglown,
2004
: The world slows for no one. Dissatisfaction with what has been written, and what has been published, is the common and perpetual state of mind of many creative writers. I would go as far assaying that this is one of the marks of being areal writer. You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work – William Gibson. We all write badly, even when we write well (unless our vanity is unrestrained. The fact that you understand this already may prove two things. Either you are disillusioned to the point of cynicism, or you possess avocation, and should make a friend of stoicism, the best friend of the rewriter.
Some guidebooks on writing offer various writing strategies and games;
writers write the best of these. These guidebooks are, with very few exceptions,
genuinely helpful, as steppingstones are helpful as a means to avoid, but also to evade, the difficulty of certain realities, and the nature of vocation. The

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experience of making your own way through the river is likely to teach you more about endeavour about error about language’s nature about your own character how to understand and balance all of these and how to reconcile the difficulty of moving within the flow, the entirely natural forces, of language.
No maps
Certain how-to-write books (which I have not listed or cited, but have read)
offer a series of ABC methods that, if practised, have the effect of taking the writer on an excursion of technique. The effect is highly useful it is uninterrupted and unidirectional, like a course in learning the basics of inorganic chemistry in order to be a pharmacist. However, what writers actually do when they write, and how they keep reforming themselves as writers, is not unidirectional or systematic at all. Language is not a series of symptoms shouting for prescriptions.
The process of writing is far more chaotic, a mapless place, a zone for experiments, and for the constant interruption of failures. Schaefer and Diamond in The Creative Writing Guide acknowledge, As any writer knows – or will discover – writing is often a confusing, organic, unorganized process of exploration x. Writing is a more unforgiving experience than it can be made out to be. I have tried to reflect this unaffected aspect of the writing apprenticeship throughout this book. However much this troubled me, I had to reflect what writers say about their experience.
Consider, for example, the importance writers place on developing their own distinctive habits of composition of discipline and even a personal philosophy which, messy and provisional though this will beat least throws a little light on why they are writing in the first place. Another example concerns the romanticising of the writing process, and how anybody who wishes to be a writer must learn to live within the disparity between how writers and the writing process are perceived – say, by readers, filmmakers and, surprisingly, academics – and the unglamorous, serendipitous life creative writing actually offers.

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