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
| Processes of creative writing 147 disassociation within the sensibility of the self a controlled bipolar sense, one that allowed the poet Arthur Rimbaud to speak of an I that is another Je est un autre. Sometimes that Other feels disassociated to the degree that it is outside of you in this case a creative daemon, a creature or person that stalks you, is tracked by you, but is part of you, a little like the figure of the Devil in James Hogg’s novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The author lives with their autre as best they can, for who is brave enough to say which is which, and who is who? Playing dead A ghostwriter or, in this case, the persona of an other taken to extremes, has several advantages, one of which is they do not need to endure directly any of the experiences or passions that go towards the making of a book other than to take the dictation of the author. This is not a schizophrenic exercise, but liberation of the self from the self the art of losing your self. You do not write as l’autre; you write as though you were entirely absent, as though you were dead, as though you had no responsibility left to life, and no audience to please or pander to. This, like many other exercises in this book, is a simple thought-experiment, one that proceeds by metaphorising the process of the self at work. You do need to believe in it, at least while writing or beginning to write. However, do not take this role outside your writing room. This is not atone of voice so much as atone of mind the mind engages its own mortality in a porcelain language, language that is firm, but does not conceal the inherent breakability in its making. In late life, great poets and novelists can achieve that cold and clarifying self-obliteration: experience and ceaseless practice demand it of the voice. The effect of such self- characterisation is not self-dramatisation; it is a forensic, merciless honesty. The character and performance of the writer becomes posthumous, a colder and clearer way of expression, and one that requires a little less worrying about the temporal. So, how can you, as anew writer, achieve what it takes a lifetime to know? Well, you can learn to careless about the whole received idea of writing as something mystical. Do it and, if you cannot do it, then act it. The point of this thought-experiment is to achieve a coldness and frankness of expression that is largely unavailable to either the writer who lives in the moment and in their appetites or one who cannot help thinking too much. What I am urging is that you do not wait forage to confer such an attitude, nor long experience to clothe you with wisdom or material, but that you create a cognitive short circuit within yourself by playing both the attitude and the 148 Creative writing wisdom. You will risk sounding presumptuous, but risk is in everything you try. Play dead. Write as though a dead line lay so near to you that what you are writing is the final thing you will write. By doing so many times, it will become one of the habits of writing, and one of many self-roles of the dramatic personae within you. Remember it is atone of mind. Playing others You will begin to recognise that there is some heartlessness at the core of writing, despite its assertion and celebration of human values. The mother of the French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote that her famous son’s mania for creating sentences had dried up his heart. Writing can be as faceless and as masked a business as drama. The novelist Jorge Luis Borges diagnoses the talent in Shakespeare There was no one in him behind his face . . . and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him.’ Have you ever had the experience of thinking that all people are like you By observing, remembering and imagining, you absorbed these others, as selves. They are sometimes masks behind which you write personae. Borges can also think of himself as two people, as Borges and I, in which the other Borges is the one things happen to . . . I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor . . . I do not know which of us has written this page. (quoted in Burke Borges claims that he lets the first self goon living, so that the other self can create literature, and that this writing justifies the existence of the first self my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him’. To paraphrase Margaret Atwood, in her book of essays on writing Negotiating With the Dead ( 2002 ), a writer also consists of individuals whom they may never see or know. The person and the writer are invisible to each other or they might move between selves, characters of themselves, while they are writing. Indeed, this facility is one of the engines for development of characters in fiction and creative nonfiction, or of voice (and voices) in writing more generally. As Samuel Beckett said, I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.’ If this disposition is extreme, it can be perceived as extrovert, a mild schizophrenia even. When in the flow of writing, it is almost as if the writer Processes of creative writing 149 has gone native with their created personae or characters, like an actor staying in role to explore their stage or movie character to its fingertips. Once upon a time, this faculty might have come within the realm of sensibility sympathy for the other, or others. It did so with Charles Dickens, a veritable sponge of selves, through his facility to transport into the mind, body and history of 150 Creative writing observed people and lookout from within them. In this example, from A Visit to Newgate’, he writes from the point of view of areal man he has seen fora moment (not a fictional character, condemned to execution in Newgate Prison: Seven hours left He paces the narrow limits of his cell with rapid strides, cold drops of terror starting on his forehead, and every muscle of his frame quivering with agony . . . He suffers himself to be led to his seat, mechanically takes the bible which is placed in his hand, and tries to read and listen. No . . . The book is torn and soiled by use – and like the book he read his lessons in, at school, just forty years ago He has never bestowed a thought upon it, perhaps, since he left it as a child and yet the place, the time, the room – nay, the very boys he played with, crowd as vividly before him. (NE2: 1344) Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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