The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Composition and creative writing
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I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill but time and chance happeneth to them all.
This is Orwell’s translation:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that successor failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably betaken into account.
Your task is to parody this second type of language. First, take a short excerpt of creative nonfiction from one of the Norton anthologies (see Preface) and translate it into modern abstract or pompous language. Second, write a story in which one of the characters talks in pompous abstract speech. Third, take an example of abstract language from modern life (literary theory and particle physics are excellent sources) and translate it into a short poem, the language of which is concrete to its core.
A
I M Concrete language has more resonance than abstract language. One of the main purposes of writing workshops is to clear away verbiage. Practise both forms of writing and you will find it easier to identify and eliminate verbiage in your own work and that of others.
Influence and imitation
The writers who influence us are like heroic teachers. Fora time, they are everything to our writing, a passion. Developed out of an acute, and sometimes touching, trust in a previous writer’s workings, this process is a series of severe,
short one-sided marriages, but one where the newer writer keeps the house as it were. The novice grows beyond one influence only to be captured by another, and weathered into a further knowledge of artistic practice, and even prejudice. Imitation as sheer emulation pushes them to seethe original, and their own work, more clearly, sometimes beating the original at its game, an assimilation, of one writer becoming another or another person passing for another.
Writers pass through one another, cannibalising, synthesising, metabolising making everything their own (see Challenges of translation in Chapter
Three
). This is imitation as appropriation, dispossession of our elders as one part of the law, but it is also homage from follower to leader. Imitation is always in mutation. It is in mutation between both the generations of writers as they

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Creative writing
work within their time, and in mutation within the writing as it travels through time and before their readers.
It is often a good idea to choose models of writing that are plain in style, that have few nervous tics they allow you to play variations upon a fairly open space before moving on. If you imitate a writer with a denser or extreme style, it can close down possibility if you do not possess the articulate energy to move on from their force-field. For imitation can be limitation imitation that disables invention. This is when we mimic a writer’s voiceprint slavishly, an error of the writing process that derives often from the character of the apprentice afraid of challenging beyond an existing writer’s linguistic territory, or unaware that they have remade a perfectly designed wheel.
One point of creative writing, as Derek Walcott has said, is to find out what we mean and to find out what we mean, we must first find out who we are.
When writers imitate too cosily, they risk yielding their identity their work becomes antimatter to the matter of the original. The stories and poems do not even have their own metabolism they require the oxygen tent of the original to get by. Imitation is a literary tradition. It is as natural as natural selection, and as ruthless about what works and what does not. Most good writers move out of the shadow of their forerunner, and in that moving have imitated the lead-writer’s behaviour. In Paul Muldoon’s phrase, they have found new weather.

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