The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
The writer post-performance
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
| The writer post-performance Rewriting Actually, the performance has yet to begin. Writing it down is just the overture. All of what we write needs planing and pruning and, as all writing is rewriting, so all rewriting is another form of writing. The most essential gift fora good writer is a builtin, shockproof lie detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it – Ernest Hemingway. Or so you hope. Many of us are wedded to our work even when we know it is under-performing, and that goes for other art forms. Writing of musical composition, Johannes Brahms declared, It is not hard to compose, but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table.’ Rewriting your work requires a quite different state of mind from creating it from nothing. We work so hard on some sentences that we find it impossible to part with them. Or we find something inappropriate in one part of our writing, but it glistens too beguilingly. However, we must become self-editors, remembering that striking phrases contaminate with their beauty and we should excise them. Various qualifying words and phrases do not tug the momentum of the book forwards. They are easily identified, and adjectives and adverbs are the first to feel the spotlight of redrafting. Any word or phrase that distracts the attention of the reader from the book is redundant. Any word or phrase that diverts the reader by its exoticism or literariness is also in peril cliches, archaisms and inversions must earn their place or suffer deletion. There are certain simple procedures that all writers can try for themselves. I have already stressed the importance of reading your work aloud. It exposes the 134 Creative writing errors or niggles of sound and sense it shows up where your language is forced, flaccid or affected. You may also benefit by asking someone else (for example in your workshop) to read your work aloud to you. This offers even greater distance. You should imagine that you are not the author and listen carefully for where the reader stumbles over words, and make note to rewrite them. A ruthless but useful technique, suggested by Ursula Le Guin in Steering the Craft, is to cut one of your narrative exercises by half Severe cutting intensifies your style, forcing you both to crowd and leap (1998: 147). Begin by cutting every adjective, then the adverbs. Another procedure is to watch out for where apiece of work begins. You will find the first paragraph or even paragraphs of apiece of nonfiction or fiction redundant. Attempt to mutate your work through various versions. For example, with poetry, try reading the draft from the second line onwards, then the third line, then the fourth, and soon until the thing rings right. Try reading a poem backwards, line byline, or stanza by stanza. Mix the stanzas about indifferent orders. Practise this with something of a cold eye, until you begin to feel the work has some recognisable life. Keep copies of all these mutant versions of the original. Who knows More than one maybe right, or even some conflation of two mutant versions. Keep copies of everything maintain an organised paper trail from first to final draft should you need to salvage something. Writers rewrite endlessly, endlessly, endlessly . . . even after it’s published Frank O’Connor. You look at the writing again. Some of it holds up. You sense your words have their own life and music, and it would be dangerous to tinker. The part that holds up is the board and bind of the natural-language pressures meeting the artificial, mathematical human choices you took in turning and transforming the words. In rewriting, you create new, knottier pressures, holding the superstructure of your story or poem in place. However, there may still be some uselessness stuck in your work, undermining it as more and more readers are exposed to it. This is a very dangerous moment, with little of the excitement of fluent composition. Take stronger words away – you would watch the thing crumble. It would unpick itself – your story or poem would actually unmake itself before your own eyes. There is a feeling of inability and even panic Can I walkaway from this one Can I leave it as it is There is shamelessness, too Does my name carry enough weight that I can getaway with this half-made work? Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
|