The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Processes of creative writing
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because it removes responsibility for the work’s reception from your name.
Thirdly, it encourages you to explore different styles and voices, which can be allotted in any fixed combination to each of your heteronyms. There are also practical and political considerations, some of which are strategies for survival.
Women have published under male names in order to conceal their gender at a time when publication for women was near impossible, as Virginia Woolf explains in A Room of One’s Own’:
It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George
Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man.
(NE2: For similar reasons, some writers from minority cultures have published using names from the dominant culture in which they live. Some writers have published anonymously or under assumed names in order to conceal their identity from society or to create curiosity about their work. Walter Scott, for example,
published all his novels anonymously.
Effacement
‘One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality – George Orwell. That said, a writer is going to end up saying a lot about their personality over the two hundred or so pages of a novel, or the eighty or so pages of a poetry collection. Some writers try to remove themselves,
or any of their selves, from their writing by self-effacement of voice. One of the purposes is to throw the personality of the writer into the background entirely.
What is said is what is held out to the reader the message, never the messenger.
Self-effacement creates an illusion of objectivity, for it is itself a deliberated posture, an action of the personality, and a choice of style. In nonliterary forms,
such as scientific writing, impersonality of this type is taken to an extreme, and the active voice and the personal pronoun had no place until recently. The problems created are the illusion of impersonality (who is saying this and why are they deliberately absenting themselves, and the risk of seeming somewhat cold or aloof intone. Creative writers might take note that many scientists are now being encouraged to warm up the self-effaced passive voice of their communications, and return to a more active, first-person engagement with readers who are, after all, their fellow scientists as well as members of the public.
It would be a challenge to write a story in which effacement of personality ran up against its opposite in a twin style of telling.

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Creative writing
Using depression
Many writers suffer depression – the manic phase often delivers their writing,
while the depressive phase that follows bouts of creativity is misinterpreted as a failure of creativity. Some writers mistake depression for the real thing, and there lie padded rooms and early graves. Sigmund Freud was wrong writing is not a neurotic activity, but a natural activity that takes pleasure in the contemplation of relations, and associations and disassociations of form in language.
Literature is not by its nature destructive the practice of creative writing,
like any art form, is on the side of life. However, some writers view the practice of writing as a confessional business, or a paper trail of suicide notes.
The process is both more subtle and cleverer than to cut your wrist, and a world away from the arch deliberations of self-effacement. This is writing cold to look at yourself from outside, as our ghostwriter must, and make objectively simple what is subjective and complex. You become your daemon.
We may come to see that this apparently severe experiment in self-perception can have the result of making our writing more honest. It may even make us more honest, more aware of our flaws. If you are depressive, this is one means of using the depressive phase constructively. It may sound strange,
but depression can be a useful tool fora writer if they know how to play with it.
Change your life
In his Letters to a Young Poet, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke has this to say about the perceptions and exactions of the literary life (advice that applies to new writers of any genre):
You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work.
Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now . . . Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night must I write Dig into yourself fora deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple I must, then build your life in accordance with this necessity your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

Processes of creative writing
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Different states of mind are useful for writing learn to engender the states that best suit your working rhythms. Some writers, famously, have used alcohol or drugs to reach these preferred states for others, it is a kind of self-hypnosis.
What I am advocating is less intense self-acknowledged playacting. With constant practice, the role becomes a reality through simple discipline and repetition. However, if anew writer cannot access one of the others within themselves who can perform these placebos of voice and self, and be the first audience to that writing, then there maybe no option than to stop writing or to change their life. What I am advocating, after all, is really no more than a kind of individualistic drama, and these states of mind can be very enjoyable in themselves. If anew writer cannot take the steps of experimenting with different states of mind or practice such as suspension of belief, the Other, playing dead, playing and being others, translation, ‘self-effacement’ or writing cold’,
then they must review the question of writing at all.
If the answer in the small hours to the question Must I write is I must’,
then they must change their life. They must begin over as a writer, reinventing a self that will be as unfamiliar to their friends as a person who has gone away fora longtime and returned with afresh history and a different face. For some writers, this takes place several times in one lifetime, and produces differing but noticeably fresh artistic phases of development. For some, it requires the writer to abandon familiar surroundings and people and begin over or that they give up writing altogether, although they may return to it later in life when time and experience have had their say on them and they have something to write about or against.
For a few, though, answering Rilke’s question signals the end of the game.

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