The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
Download 2.89 Mb. View original pdf
|
Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| Writing Game M U SI CM O V EM EN TAN DB RAIN BLOCKING This game has three parts. (1) Play some music while you are writing, and change the musical style entirely every half an hour, but keep writing the same piece. (Take a walk right now, taking with you your notebook, and return to writing immediately after one hour. (3) Pickup a pen and begin writing anything. Now begin counting aloud from one hundred to zero, but keep writing all the time. A I M Writing is as physical as it is psychological. (1) Music alters the manner in which your brain creates language it affects the rhythm obviously, but it also acts as a stimulus to memory and association. Use music as an informal prompt for the unconscious, but use it less when you need to concentrate. (2) Exercise assists creativity in many ways, not least because it encourages creative dialogue between unconscious and conscious states of mind. One of the cures for writer’s block is exercise. (3) This exercise can produce some surprising writing. Its purpose is to make different parts of your mind grind, metaphorically, against each other, and to block your conscious self-censor. A mental switch There is writing and there is not writing, and writing is a zone. At some point, the readings and rehearsals are complete, and the stage is set. Action defines a writer, not the pose for action or the possession of the means by which to perform. We will look at the various processes of this action in Chapter Five What most writers agree is that getting on with it, just placing down words, is the best advice for most new writers. How does one transmute the desire to write into the will to write Many people talk about having books in themselves’. Martin Amis believes that much of the time you are writing the fiction that other people have in them ( 2001 : 6). The chance of people writing these books inside them is slender. Margaret Atwood says that it is not just the nature of the activity, it is also because writing carries a symbolic role: Composition and creative writing 105 everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger. The latter takes a good deal more stamina and persistence . . . You represent mortality . . . And so it is with any public role, including that of the Writer, capital W Writing is also an act of abnormal concentration and we tend to dislike such high-intensity action. There area thousand other forms of action just as available to us, only more pleasant and more immediately rewarding. However, you have to learn to throw the mental switch to writing. As with the highest levels in sport or carrying out surgery, for example, the switch requires highly intense concentration coupled with action. In these counterexamples, society grants their practitioners status and financial gain. Initially, writing does not offer such rewards. There is even uncertainty that they may materialise at all. To take action in such a vacuum is challenging. We looked at some of these challenges to writers in Chapter Three . We need to assume that we are capable of meeting these challenges, and can answer the silence around us with action. Freewriting Try to focus on your writing as often as possible. The quickest and least frictional method for beginning to know the zone of writing is to practise freewriting everyday. It is less useful for full-time writers for whom a deadline is incentive enough (see Chapter Five ). Freewriting requires that you write fast you do not even stop to think. We shall try aversion of this now. Do you recall when you were a child and you first realised that you could think? Often this moment occurs when you were having difficulty going to sleep. You comprehended that you were thinking, and this kept you awake. So, you tried to cheat your thought by not thinking. ‘I shall think white, you thought, or ‘I shall think grey And you thought white and you thought grey, but then you realised that both white and grey were still types of thinking. You can never stop thinking, but you can stop thinking you are thinking, and freewriting helps you do this. Open a book – any book – at random. Place the fingers of one hand on a page. Write down the phrase covered by the width of your fingers. Close the book forget about it. Pick another book do the same thing again. Collect thirty phrases in one session. Place each of these phrases on separate strips of paper into a cup or hat, and leave them fora day. The following morning, pick one of these phrases at random, and write it down and immediately begin writing anything that comes into your mind. Throw the strip of paper away, then write 106 Creative writing as though you were flying. You are not producing a work of art, nor will you be asked to read this out to others. You can write what you like, but you must continue writing without stopping writing and without thinking. You will do this for five minutes everyday. Each day of every month, you will select anew strip of paper from your cache of little phrases. You will renew this cache every calendar month. Freewriting can produce some very interesting phrases and directions, and has been known to lead to some very fine work. However, it is most important in getting you used to the habit and action of writing. It helps you mimic fluency. Even though it may feel strange or artificial at first, this action can produce dramatic results. Recovering in a clinic from opium addiction, Jean Cocteau wrote his novel Les Enfants terribles in an act of extremely fast writing, about which he commented to Andre Gide The real benefit of my treatment: work has laid hands on me. Les Enfants Terribles is emerging without a struggle. It gives me its orders . . . I’ll have done several months work in nineteen days’ (Steegmuller, 1970 : 396; my italics). Negative capability Many writers find that, if they follow a routine of writing, or if they practice freewriting often enough, they achieve various degrees of fluency in their expression (even though the words will need chopping and planing later during rewriting. This makes the creative writing process sound conscious and deliberate. In fact, when you have an idea for writing, it asks very little of your conscious attention. You do not know it. It is an aspect of your mind John Keats called negative capability’: several things dovetailed in my mind and at once it struck me, what quality went to form . . . Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. (NE2: Here is another quotation about composition by Keats If it does not come as easily as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all The point is delectable, but too strongly spiced. It represents a false ideal. At best, that is what writing feels like. The creative process can be rather like going into a trance, in which the unconscious and unconscious minds talk to each fluidly if not eloquently, and much writing is achieved in a short time: It’s wonderful, there’s nothing else like it, you write in a trance. And the trance is completely addictive, you love it, you want more of it . . . It’s an Composition and creative writing 107 integration of the body-mind and the dreaming-mind and the daylight-conscious-mind. All three are firing at once, they’re all in concert. You can be sitting there but inwardly dancing, and the breath and the weight and everything else are involved, you’re fully alive. It takes awhile to get into it. You have to have some key, like say a phrase or a few phrases or a subject matter or maybe even a tune to get you started going towards it, and it starts to accumulate. Sometimes it starts without your knowing that you’re getting there, and it builds in your mind like a pressure. I once described it as being like a painless headache, and you know there’s a poem in there, but you have to wait until the words form. (Les Murray in interview, BBC Radio 4, 1998) 108 Creative writing Writing produced in this state will often surprise because it seems better than you know that is, it is beyond your conscious intelligence. You could not have written it had you sat down with that end in mind. Read back what Les Murray says above and, by freewriting, try to induce the painless headache in yourselves. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
|