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
| Writing Game I N DU CI N GT HEP AI N LESS HEADACHE Light a candle, and focus your entire attention on the point at which the flame meets the air. Shut your eyes and hold that image in your head. Open your eyes and refocus on the flame’s edge. Close your eyes again and hold onto that image. Keep doing this until you feel comfortable and relaxed. Begin writing a story or a poem while in this state of relaxation, and repeat this exercise regularly if it induces writing with which you are content. A I M Active dreaming of this type, like freewriting, is one of the more rapid ways to access creative ideas and associations, and to induce a state of trance. Inspiration and duende New writers mistake the state of trance with inspiration. When a writer or writing student says that they have missed a deadline because they were not feeling inspired enough to write, they make a simple error. Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk – Anon. The angel of inspiration tends to sail on the slow and steady tortoise, obeying the cherished Renaissance maxim to make haste slowly. Write something now and, having written, ask yourself what lies beneath what you have written. What is the nature of your iceberg beneath the visible tip Finding what lies below your words is away to find the physical and psychological drives of what we used to call inspiration. Sometimes writers (in the main, poets) claim that they avoid writing in order to precipitate inspiration, as if apparently conscious writing were something as forbidden to them as sex to a priest. They argue that the power of writing then grows through abstention, so, when its moment arrives, it strikes with greater force in shorter time. This seems precious and repressive. It leads to a writer getting out of practice, allowing the construction of excuses and blocks. This book contains many ways around writer’s block, although writer’s block, like alack of inspiration, tends to be a metaphor for deliberated inaction or a kind of panicky inertia. Sometimes calculation works better than inspiration, and even humdrum daily practice can make a more conductive rod for creative Composition and creative writing 109 lightning. The calculated uses of literary design and form were discussed in Chapter Three Writing proceeds forwards slowly, like a sand dune moving through night and day, simultaneously accreting and eroding. Much is lost or invisible, millions of grains of sand, millions of grains of language. Workshops formalise this natural process, this need to move against something solid, against and with somebody. Our writing requires not only analysis, intelligence as well as intuition – it requires discussion evaluations and feedback from our peers and mentors. All these acts are parallels of inspiration. Keats looks to Shakespeare as a father figure, a mentor. Shakespeare sometimes collaborated too, and consulted his peers, and actors, as he drafted and wrought. Writing plays is, after all, one of the most collaborative of the written art forms. If you are not used to writing regularly, you are unlikely to be attracted to your desk by the sheer habit of writing, a habit that gives pleasure even when difficult. Sometimes anew writer finds that planning and practice finally come together, and they write at speed, as if their mind were flying. This feels like inspiration, but it is really the symptom of developing a habit of mind. It has nothing to do with a divine wind blowing through you, or the Muse using you 110 Creative writing as a medium. At times like this, as Emily Dickinson wrote, your life feels like ‘a Loaded Gun waiting for someone to fire it (Eshleman, 2001 : Writing is addictive and that is inspiration enough In hospital with tuberculosis, George Orwell could not stop writing. His doctors took his typewriter away. He wrote freehand. His doctors put his arm in plaster to stop him. If you do not write, the result is restlessness and unhappiness. When you are driven to write in this way, your work will seem to take on its own life and momentum, as we see with Emily Bronte in the epigraph to this chapter. Writing will seem physical in its insistence, like someone demanding his or her own birth. This colours the language in your work, as though it had its own life and inspired its own breath. Lorca called this quality duende, a term borrowed from flamenco, and more useful than a notion of inspiration because it represents your own blood and metabolic rhythms. Duende is rooted in your own metabolism your power of expression changes the metabolism of your own writing on the page, making it more alive and urgent to a reader. Wuthering Heights exemplifies the duende of its author and enacts the duende of the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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