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 S H AK ESP EAR ES FIELD TRIP Rise before dawn one day. Make your way to the nearest green and open space, or woodland. Carefully observe the process of the dawn through its natural consequences on animals, and on the way trees and flowers react to the light, and the action of the different declensions of light on water. I also want you to observe the surface of a stonewall or a rock very closely, making notes on everything that you see. Make nothing up. Do not impose your own aesthetic judgement, emotions or mood on what you are writing. Your task is to build a poem or story out of what you observe or, more precisely, to let the observations, the things, the life, make a poem or story from you. When you have finished, go 138 Creative writing back to the place with your writing, and place it somewhere where it can be seen by other visitors or hang it from the branch of a tree. A I M Try being entirely self-effacing in this writing, as the best poets, naturalists and scientists are, but also playful in how you perform your work. By placing your poem or story in the publication of a natural space, you are echoing a moment in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, when a lover hangs sonnets from the trees of the Forest of Arden: these trees shall be my books, And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character That every eye which in this forest looks Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere (For your interest, this workshop was pioneered in a remnant of the ancient Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, England.) Raiding the languages of elsewhere Names have great power, and here we encompass not only the names of people, places and countries, but also the scientific and local names for fauna and flora. We might learn the terms for natural phenomena created by geography, geology, astronomy and oceanography, and the terminologies of the synthetic world from fields of architecture, information technology and engineering. Moreover, we need not stop at names and terms by entering into an engagement with traditionally nonliterary fields of knowledge, we open their languages (and even their sometimes-opaque jargon) for our use as writers. By doing so, we release fresh themes and subjects for our imagination to scrutinise, turnover and play with. The American poet Marianne Moore wrote poems the design of which depended mostly on syllabic count and intricate judgements concerning space and line breaks. The language and subject of her poetry almost seemed to spring from the language and subject of a clear scientific paper. As William Logan puts it, Moore found the poetry lying asleep within prose, in manuals and monographs, advertisements and government reports ( 2005 : 89). Here is the opening of The Icosasphere’ (Moore In Buckinghamshire hedgerows the birds nesting in the merged green density, weave little bits of string and moths and feathers and thistledown in parabolic concentric curves and working for concavity, leave spherical feats of rare efficiency . . . Processes of creative writing 139 A reading of Moore’s Notes to her poems reveals a scrupulous regard for recording the source of her creations. They illuminate the extent of her library, the compendiousness and open-mindedness of her reading, her voracity for knowledge, the polyvalence of which appeals to a writer. With regard to the poem above, the sources throw light not only on the subject of the poem but also on the geometrical design of her work. Try writing a story or poem that contains her finding that a steel globe of twenty equilateral triangles – the greatest number of regular sides geometrically possible – could be grouped into five parallelograms and cut from rectangular sheets with negligible scrap loss (Moore You can discover precise, clear language of this type easily, and a good creative exercise is to find such material and transform it into something of your own. Take any good field-guide you have to hand and open it at random. You will find precise, and sometimes magically incisive, description, and names that seem to fall from fairy tales, and a language as precise as it is strange to the ear. In the following example, I have broken some prose verbatim into counted syllabic lines I have placed episodes of linked description into stanzas, and indented lines in away which forces the eye to move around the page to find connections and answers. Nevertheless, it could also stand as prose given the right context little has been changed (the italics are in the original text): Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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