The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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Creative writing
Recommended reading
Many books probe the process of literary composition as well as practices that encourage fluency. The novelist Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird Some Instructions
on Writing and Life (Anchor,
1995
) draws brilliantly and provocatively from experience, and offers sensible instruction on everything from index cards to writing groups. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers How to Edit Yourself into
Print (HarperResource,
2004
) by Renni Browne and Dave King is genre- specific but a very clever sharp and amusing take on the planning and plan-
ing needed for writing a novel. The notion of selves and others is wittily explored by Margaret Atwood in Negotiating With the Dead A Writer on Writing
(Cambridge University Press. Arguing that a writer cannot really begin their work until they have a voice of their own, the critic Al Alvarez contends in A Writer’s Voice (Bloomsbury,
2005
) that voice – as distinct from style is what makes a writer great. Writing: Self and Reflexivity (Palgrave,
2006
) by
Celia Hunt and Fiona Sampson is an expert synthesis of the critical and creative theories for voice, authorship, characters and selves, and the question of an essential writer’s ‘self’.

Chapter 6
The practice of fiction
You can’t start with how people look and speak and behave and come to know how they feel. You must know exactly what’s in their hearts and minds before they ever set visible foot on the stage. You must know all,
then not tell it all, or not tell too much at once simply the right thing at the right moment. And the same character would be written about entirely differently in a novel as opposed to a short story.
e u do raw e lt y (Plimpton,
1989
: Fiction writers know a lot about point of view. One thing they know is that,
from the point of view of their publisher’s accountant, commercial success has considerable edge over artistic truth. This is frustrating for authors who serve their art scrupulously but make little return on it. Unfortunately, loss-making writers give the impression that if you sell well, because you can turn plot and character, you area lesser species. Many new writers find themselves at this crossroads of literary choice.
When you are starting to write, choose the road more travelled by. For simplicity, I use the term story throughout this chapter to describe your writing,
although I am aware you may write something that does not have a traditional form or structure. Any recommendations I make about wordcount are for guidance only, and are in noway prescriptive. Your job is to create story that is,
to make believable prose narrative and characters. Accept Orwell’s proposition that Good prose is like a windowpane, and then proceed to build your story straightforwardly and without frills. Later – even in a later drafting – you may turn the House of Fiction upside down and smash all its windows. The truth is many writers secretly desire the cultural cachet of literary fiction while not so secretly yearning for the popularity (and royalties) of a great storymaker. There lies your challenge. For new writers, the best way to make story is by knowing what forms are open to you by taking a thread of narrative and letting it lead you by dreaming your scenes into verisimilitude by building credible characters and placing them in situational conflict and by asking your story the question What if this happened?
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