The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Processes of creative writing
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it over. Put the work away for three weeks, then revise it, or give it to a trusted member of your circle. Indifference allows savagery. Tobias Woolf likens the process to learning how to keep gnawing the same bone until it cracked (
2005
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156). Cut and compress. Rearrange and rewrite, adding and subtracting as you go. Condensing apiece of prose requires one of two approaches. You could plan the entire content in detail, allocate a given number of words and then try to keep to those limits as you draft, or work without regard for length and then slash and burn. While poets tend to tinker word byword (and sound by sound),
many prose writers adopt the slash-and-burn approach, in which they draft without thinking too much about length, and then hack back as necessary. Slash and burn has a cut-your-losses logic all of its own. Never forget the possibility that your writing does notwork. Say the unsayable: it has failed. You will try again. There is merit in abandoning a mediocre piece, and starting again with a blank sheet and a savage sense of accomplishment gained by decisiveness by learning from error rather than rewriting versions of the same mistake. Samuel
Beckett nailed it Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
Deadlines as lifelines
One huge aid to the writing–rewriting dynamic is the deadline. It forces savage action. Like form or design, the deadline is not a prison to creation. It offers a promised release from the self-created prison of indolence, of not writing. It is as liberating as form, despite the sensation that it makes time weigh upon the act of writing. But that weight is not just the weight of expectation it is also the weight of anticipation. Deadlines are good for us, stern though they may seem.
A deadline is like a supervisor who tells you impolitely to get on with it.
The deadline pays heed to your writing it does not pay heed to your life. The deadline set for the submission of a student’s portfolio of writing pays little heed to the different ways that students write, learn and live. The date is the same for everybody, and only illness or accident can provide excuses. The deadline is a necessary falsification of time. What’s more, somebody else has usually placed it in your calendar, which can make it feel almost like a physical threat.
The threat is that some reward will not come your way should you fail to meet it. Those rewards can include the score your work receives or an advance of money. It may include promotion, sales, or the praise of a tutor, editor, critic or reader.
In the writing business, deadlines area fact. Writers working in the media,
especially, write against them daily, even hourly, and the practice of journalism provides outstanding training not only in punctuality and brinkmanship, but

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Creative writing
also in economy and clarity. Hemingway received his training on the Kansas
City Star: On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time (Phillips Deadlines demand concision and conclusion at some point, apiece of writing is as complete as it can be. The threat and the reward hanging over that final process are usually external factors. Academic years trot their tidy schedules;
newspapers net their copy publishers pump out books on schedule, in tandem with the schedules of their marketing and sales departments. In the middle of these demands, the writer sits with their stalled or stilted creations, with both eyes on the clock. I suggest you seize back the initiative, and use the power of time as a motivation to write. By setting your own deadline (it must be earlier than the official deadline, you take control of the process psychologically. You will also learn to appreciate how your deadline then gives form to the way you write and even to how you conduct your life around that, as we explored in the section on discipline.
Your challenger
Drafting requires objectivity of a sort, so you may choose to disembody yourself;
become impersonal or even play somebody else, some other writer that is used to overcoming this moment and pressing on with the next draft. You might even view the creative act of drafting as a journalist turning in their copy. Having areal deadline imposed by somebody else is useful here. Writing then becomes a job, not a chore, not yet an art – which is liberating. The reward is completion combined with a fee or, in a student’s case, what you hope will be a good grade. It is tough, in the beginning, to motivate yourself by inventing some reward for completing your work by a deadline. In which case, have someone external to yourself devise and set that deadline in order to have the reward of their approbation. Writers often use their partners for this role, but these relationships must be demonstrably robust to survive such role play, especially if the stakes are high. I know many writers who are unremittingly cruel in this regard. How you do this will depend, therefore, upon the trust between you and your challenger (abetter word and the level of obsession you are able to bring to the table, and the level your challenger is willing to put up with.

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