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
| Self’s voices Suspensions of belief are not always possible. Sometimes a writer’s brain dries, inexactly the same way in which an actor’s voice dries onstage, and the confidence to say, or write, vanishes. It feels a lot worse than it is because it feels like a loss of ability, a loss of voice. It shouts, You will never again write well It feels almost as if we have forgotten our speech, and that we have caught ourselves out in an embarrassing self-deception. Or our body gets in the way of the practice of writing with illness, depressions and mood swings. Or the price of precision can be perfectionism, an attitude that can result in freezing before the headlights of your own expectations. At this point in a writer’s career, the resilience of the personality has a great say in whether artistic progress is made or not. You either freeze or thaw. Everything experienced so far, everything written and read, decides that outcome. This happens repeatedly, at every stage, especially at the beginning. The consequence is ultimately decisive and life-changing. Moments like this can precipitate artistic crisis writing careers can fall apart, the language becoming clinical or unravelled and worn-out. All the tricks show, and show the writer up. This is not writing block it is disaster. This is the time to employ a metaphorical ghostwriter, to become your own ghostwriter in the employ of your writing self. It is time to discover your other writing selves. Voice Do you require crisis to make discoveries Since writers lurch about in language, yes, you probably do. Knowing this is going to happen does not mean you can evade it, but it does mean you can use various guises of the self’s voice to get by and take risk. Finding your voice might be only one stage on the way to finding your voices, or finding your style. Your style, above all else, is your aim, and it should show no sign of effort. But your writing voice must be distinctive it must be differentiated from its precursors or your reader will stop listening. 144 Creative writing Voice may seem mysterious not least because, in creative writing, it begins as a metaphor. To quote Novakovich, Novice writers go around looking for their voices just as people used to go around looking for themselves ( 1995 : Voice is a three-way metaphor for writing as you speak for writing as you speak at your best and for writing with rigour, stripping away all the unnecessary apparatus from language that stop you from speaking clearly, that stop you being phoney. Say what you mean, and say it without pose, equivocation or elaboration, and, believe me, you will find your voice. This makes it sound easy, whereas what has happened is that I have been pithy and plain. Try writing as directly and actively as you can. The reader will always be able to tell when you are not writing in your voice, since your syntax will sound inauthentic. Although writing is often thereto make a fiction of the world, and to convey fiction’s greater truth, the voice makes the writing honest and authentic, truer than any relative truth. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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