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
| Writing Game T H EN OISE OF STORY Four games in one Write a short-short using words of one syllable only. Then write a short-short of 400 words, in which every sentence has exactly 8 words. Then write a short-short of 300 words which is entirely one sentence. Write a short story of 2,000 words using no adjectives or adverbs and which can only be understood clearly when it is read aloud by two disembodied voices. A I M Professional oral storytellers vary the speed and rhythm of their voices to capture and maintain our attention. The page is no less demanding an arena than the ear. Short story Although the marketplace for short stories is difficult, many new writers choose to begin with writing them, almost as a rite of passage, a place for honing language, testing their narrative nerve over a shortish distance and organising a palette. Later, these abilities find release across a novel’s vasty fields. The short story is a place of order, resonance and closure. Language, imagery and form are super-concentrated. All high excitements are necessarily transient, wrote Edgar Allan Poe, and the short story enacts that intense transience. Richard Ford suggests in his introduction to The Granta Book of the American Short Story ( 1992 ) ‘there’s a rage for order in certain of us, a fury which nothing but a nice, compact little short-course bundle like a story can satisfy’: 158 Creative writing Or maybe story writers – more so than novelists – are moralists at heart, and the form lends itself to acceptable expressions of caution You! You’re not paying enough attention to your life, parcelled out as it is in increments smaller and more significant than you seem aware of. Here’s a form which invites more detailed notice – displaying life not as it is, admittedly, but in flashbacks, in hyper-reality, with epiphanies and without, with closures, time foreshortenings, beauties of all sorts to please you and keep you interested xvii) The short story offers restriction in length of anywhere between 7,500 and words, and can be read in one sitting. Writing a good short story may take several sittings. Concision is everything. To begin, create a single character or two characters. The classic structure begins with a significant event involving your character that precipitates the story, followed by rising action until a climax, a fall inaction and a denouement. Short stories take place over a short period endings are often abrupt or open. Imitate the concisions of previous writers. Read, study and imitate influential historical models such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (NA, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown (NA 1263), Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener (NA 2330), Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (NA 452), James Joyce’s The Dead (NE, William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (NA 1790), Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party (NE 2423) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro (NA 1848). The anthologies edited by Ford ( 1992 ) and Bradbury) offer solid introductions to the modern notion of the form, and your understanding of the form’s possibilities will be further extended by reading short stories by Honor´e de Balzac, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Gabriel Garc´ıa Marquez, Guy de Maupassant, Jorge Luis Borges and Isak Dinesen. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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