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 W R IT ING ABOUT YOURSELF CRISIS AND CONFLICT Think of something which has caused you pain, fear or doubt and which has led to crisis or conflict in your life. It could be something like a phobia, an addiction, illness, or a painful childhood memory. Use this as a starting point. Write the topic in the centre of a page, and write notes around it, including images, scenes, dialogue and associations. Research the topic find out what other authors have written about it and carryout at least one interview with an expert. Begin drafting your piece using a chronological framework of vivid scenes. Make nothing up write from life and keep it simple. When did it start How did it precipitate conflict or crisis In subsequent drafts, subvert the order of the scenes, and leave the conclusion open-ended. A I M In Chapter One , I mentioned that some writers find creative writing therapeutic. Some writers of creative nonfiction write essays as a direct response to crisis, especially their own illness or the death of someone close. Although the main point of this game is to create a vivid autobiographical memoir that deals with an issue, you may find the process of writing about conflict liberating. It may not solve the conflict, but it can lend it perspective and clarity. Pulling back You may sometimes have experienced the dislocating sensation that you are starring in a film of your life. Begin to practise the writerly trick of freeze- framing moments of your life as they are experienced, fixing them sharply in your memory (it helps to write them down in your notebook, and ceasing to be merely a passenger in your journey through time. However, do not practise this self-consciously to the degree that it begins to change the way you live or behave. It is all too easy to become snared in nets of self-awareness by asking too many questions, such as how well any of us know ourselves, and how well any of us know how others perceive us, or think of us. Be serious you are not going to know the answers to all of these questions and, if you did, it would not help you or your writing. Mirrors and photographs offer you an external take, skewed by light levels. When a camera sees us, we cannot help but perform a little. Your voice, when recorded, distorts the burr or drawl you hear through the bones of Creative nonfiction 187 your own head and body. It is the same with writing it conducts, reflects and transforms. That does not mean that it lies. Indeed, it often clarifies. School yourself into the idea that few people are more knowable to yourself than you are, but that you are a story. Like a story, how you are perceived depends on a point of view. For readers, nothing is worth knowing about you unless you tell the story memorably. To write about yourself requires ego, but so does all writing. However, the risk with this kind of writing is egotism. You may possess the most fascinating set of experiences in the world and still be a bore. The first business of one who practises creative nonfiction is to get rid of self-conceit because it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which they think they already know. As you make notes on yourself, remember that you are open space. You are many influences. You are many points of view. There are many versions of you. And you change with time. When you are writing about yourself, you are creating a story that tells one of several versions of the truth about yourself. You are creating aversion, and everybody knows that. Do not distract yourself or your reader with egotism. The best creative nonfiction manages this balance of self-involvement and impersonality. The critic Northrop Frye said that literature was a disinterested use of words. There is a cancelled phrase in John Keats notebooks that captures the attitude of the writer of the self very precisely The feel of not to feel it. Use both these notions as talismans while you are writing. Knowledge is self-knowledge The way you choose to tell your story will carry precise but subtle messages about your philosophy and experience, about the essential truths of your character and its falsenesses. Write with emotional candour, even though candour might feel slightly unnatural or showy. Do not be in a hurry to disguise your own flaws in your own story. They add depth – even truth. As Jean Cocteau urged, ‘Cultivate your flaws. They are the truest thing about you In Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing (2000), Celia Hunt presents research showing that writing fictional autobiography as part of an artistic apprenticeship not only helps to extend literary skill and the finding of voice, but also benefits the writer therapeutically. Remember again that many readers read for self-instruction. They may appear to read your personal narrative to find out more about you, but what many of them are doing is trying to discover more about themselves and their own flaws and life-lessons. To do this well, you must get outside yourself during the time of writing, looking at yourself as dispassionately as you dare. In his classic nonfictional 188 Creative writing study of the Far North, Arctic Dreams, one of the insights that Barry Lopez unfolds is that self-knowledge and knowledge area continuum. For him, creative nonfiction offers an arena for their reconcilement, for Arctic Dreams is also partly memoir: The edges of the real landscape became one with the edges of something I had dreamed. But what I had dreamed was only a pattern, some beautiful pattern of light. The continuous work of the imagination, I thought, to bring what is actual together with what is dreamed is an expression of human evolution Most of what we meditate upon is external to us, and we need to get to know ourselves better so we can better respond to the world and the people around us. Nobody is an island our lives are the people we meet. If we can learn to write clearly about ourselves, then we earn permission to explore more openly the patterns and stories of the people in the world around us. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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