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 117 of these workshops was not theoretical but practical, and that remains the case with writing workshops. Writing workshops emphasise the practical in technique, in the methods and devices forgetting the desired ends, and in reading what best can exemplify those methods and devices. Writing workshops often use writing, good and even bad, as starting points for discussion of technique, or for imitation, or for redrafting. There is no particular category of workshop every workshop runs to its own rhythm. In the same way that the audience in a theatre creates the atmosphere for an actor, so the characters and enthusiasm of the student- writers create the working weather of a workshop. Every workshop is like a first night. Dynamics The more engaged and responsive the students are, the more engaged and eventful the performance of a tutor. It is usually a good idea, therefore, to approach a workshop with a combination of an open mind and enthusiasm, and with a sense of communal purpose rather than self-interest. Communal self-interest, however, is a different animal. You will find that if you work hard for another person’s writing, they will work as hard or harder for yours. Workshops are places of cultural symbiosis, even for the tutor who will test out their own ideas, and pickup one or two new ideas. Bear this in mind, for when you first encounter a workshop the feeling can be more akin to terror. There is no escaping this fear, and there is no point downplaying it anxiety about new situations is human. Presenting your work to a group of strangers is terrifying, even mortifying one forgets that it is about the work and not the writer. At the time of initiation, the process feels extremely personal, especially if the writer is presenting a completely new work, or has no previous experience of working within a group. Like anew school, you will get used to it, or learn to live with it. Eventually, you will value it or even learn to love it. Some new writers grow addicted to the process, to the point where they almost seem to stop thinking critically for themselves, relying instead on the collective critical mind of a group. They then move from group to group like migrant artists, not allowing sufficient time for artistic growth in one space, and sometimes presenting the same work to these different audiences. Their development tends to be static and their achievement sketchy they try to please everybody. It is best to stick with one hard audience until you have outgrown it, at which point a writer must move onto where it is even tougher. The best workshop groups ought to have a strict lifespan, lest their participants grow 118 Creative writing too familiar with each other’s critical and creative practice. It is one reason why workshops in university courses often achieve a healthy dynamic the population of their workshops changes every year. They represent a compacted version of reality time wipes out a generation of writers and replenishes from the next. Generally a workshop takes one of two tracks or, if there is time, both tracks. There is the generative workshop, the purpose of which is to catalyse and create new writing, sometimes by creative writing exercises, and often by reading examples for imitation or rewriting. There is the responsive workshop, the purpose of which is to assist with a critical understanding of new writing. In these latter workshops, scripts of writing are distributed, read aloud and discussed. Student-writers collectively assist their peers in redrafting their work so that it reaches some kind of optimum state. This optimum state might not be exactly what the writer originally intended It might not even be the state that most in the group can agree upon, for that would lead to homogeneous writing. Homogeneity One of the wintry criticisms of writing workshops is that they produce such homogeneity within a false democracy of tender critical standards, notions of worthiness of subject and tone in writing, and backslapping. As poetry is what gets lost in translation, there is an argument that variety, ingenuity, individuality and originality are what get lost in workshops. That need not be the case. As with our discussion of teaching in Chapter One , rigour is again the answer. To foster variation and originality, the workshop leader must set the temperature of the event very carefully and maintain a close watch on proceedings like the director of a play. And, like an impartial referee, one of the tasks is to keep play flowing within the workshop, to ensure that everyone is involved and that nobody monopolises the time too greedily. The communal aim of a responsive or generative workshop is to make sure that every writer knows what every individual in that group must do to their own work to improve it or finish it. In that way, we learn for ourselves, and we learn from other models in the group. This is the most generous aspect of communal self-interest. You become many writers while remaining true to your individual aims. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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