The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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| Writing Game P O RT RA ITS OFT HEART IS T This is a class exercise. Make pairs. Each person draws or paints the other while simultaneously being drawn or painted. Draw what you see invent nothing. Do not show the subject what you have drawn until they have also finished. Then exchange drawings, and write a poem often lines or a flash fiction (see Chapter Six ) of two paragraphs as a direct and immediate response to (a) what you see as you look at this drawing of yourself, orb) how it felt being scrutinised. Rewrite this piece and then fix it to the drawing. Now, sit down separately and draw a picture of yourself, without using a mirror. You can feel free to make things up about your appearance this can be a realistic or fantastic representation, or one that combines both approaches. Pass this drawing to the other writer, who writes (as above) on the subject of this drawing. Fix this writing to this picture. Display both pictures, with their writing, in some public space. A I M Where is the truth of the self Is it located in the observer or the observed, or in the act of observation or the act of observing The self we see in the mirror, and the selves we explore in the mirrors of our writing, are always different. The self is mutable, and writing is a performance of one’s self and selves. The self in the mirror is also quite different from how we are seen, for everybody’s perception of us depends on the time of day, their view, and their skill at recording us visually. When we draw our own face, we also falsify truth we offer a partial snapshot of a mirror. When we write, we sometimes write out of a discomfort with that parallax between the self and world, and self and selves. However, we write to improve on truth, not to tell the truth. This game objectifies that procedure. Processes of creative writing 145 146 Creative writing Placebo selves As I wrote, finding your voice maybe one step to finding several voices, even to the point of losing your voice. Writers work using different states of their own mind, and voices become a plural. The taste of your own self’s medicine might beat times, unnecessary or inhibiting to your development or you might even find your voice boring. In the way that a placebo-medicine can have the effect of real medicine, so the selves with whom you are communing may write as well as you, and sometimes better. All these selves lead to different personalities of voice, but they are not personae. They are placebos. What I term placebo writing often produces interesting work by people who have struggled to write anything with ease, energy or imagination. A ‘placebo voice takes them outside themselves, like a literary translation by the writer, but of themselves. Of course, the fastest way to slip on another’s skin is literary translation, as we discovered in Chapter Three . What a placebo voice does, however, is reduce self-expectation, simultaneously earthing the negative charges of artistic and linguistic inhibition. Yet this is no performance. These ‘placebo selves and voices already exist in you. As you carried out the Writing Games in this book, especially as you free-wrote, you began to realise that the self you know is not necessarily the self who writes, or the one who writes well. How many selves are therewith which to play? The Other The idea of the Other is only a metaphor fora state of mind while writing. One of the troubles is that the notion of the Other has been as theorised to death as the Author, leaving not only the author dead, but their famous Others stalking the earth like zombies. It is best to keep it simple, and say that many creative writers experience the sensation that somebody other in them is at work while writing. A depressive person may well rely on this form of the Other in order to get by in everyday life. As the poet Edward Thomas puts it: I wait his flight. He goes I follow no release Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease. ‘The Other This is not a mystical notion, although it was once interpreted as amuse for whom the writer was a medium. Partly it is a leap of the imagination into the open space of somebody else, or even something else. Keats would write about taking part in the life of a sparrow or knowing what it must feel like to be a billiard ball Like negative capability, the Other is a psychological notion, a |