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 REAL PEOPLE INVESTIGATIVE WRITING Working in teams of two people, carryout an investigation into the world of work in your area. Choose an occupation or profession that is relatively unknown to you. Using telephone directories, locate workers in that field locally and arrange to interview at least two of them. Discover their motivations and daily routines, and try to gain permission to shadow them on a daily basis for at least a week. Write a fly-on-the-wall article about their work, and include your own experience of it. A I M The details of work are interesting to many readers it allows them to experience another life vicariously. People are not defined by the work they do, but working life is central to people’s concerns, and to the way society runs. This game introduces you to interviewing and research. It also accesses a huge amount of telling detail that you may use at some other point in apiece of fiction. Fieldwork and interviews Research will involve carrying out Internet searches on your subject, and checking library databases for books and articles on the same or similar subjects. Importantly, check whether your subject has already been covered, and what gaps are left between subjects that are ripe for research and writing. Try also to read a national newspaper at least twice a week to keep upon current affairs, and maintain what writers calla futures file of press clippings in your notebook. These clippings may touch on your subject or contain matters you may wish to write about later. If you are writing about local or family history, then you need to become acquainted with record offices. Most cities and towns possess excellent archives of official documents, papers and records. Talk to their archivists and librarians about the kind of information you are seeking. Third-party help of this type can allow you to access materials it might take many weeks to find under your own steam. Research might also include interviewing an expert in afield simply to get information. However, interviewing people about their own stories is a different matter. Interviewing people is an art form in itself but it comes down to three matters being interested in what a person has to say becoming a good listener; and recognising which materials to select from an interview. Choose your interviewees with care, and make sure you are well prepared. Try to formulate your questions so that they do not lead to predictable responses, but that they Creative nonfiction 191 elicit long answers that may even take the form of an anecdotal story or joke. Nurture the relationship with a subject this promotes mutual trust but also allows you to take in more than mere surface information. It allows you to know people better – their values, attitudes and thoughts. It should also lead you to make fewer factual, or moral, mistakes. It is your judgement whether you should use a notebook or recording device during an interview. Some writers of creative nonfiction find that these produce a distancing effect between interviewer and subject, and that the writer is less likely to listen attentively and sensitively, probing deeper into certain answers, if they have the fallback of a recording device or the screen of a notebook. Some writers use nothing but their memories. Once the interview is over, they simply write down as much as they can remember. If you use quotations from interviews, especially if you have compressed or doctored them to fit your piece, it is only fair to allow interviewees sight of copy (the final draft before submission, so that they can either corroborate the manner in which their words have been used, or request changes. A literature of hope You are writing during the silver age for creative nonfiction. It is probably the most communal, idealistic and open-ended of literary genres – If I were asked what I want to accomplish as a writer, I would say it’s to contribute to a literature of hope, states Barry Lopez in About This Life ( 1999 : 15). Creative nonfiction is now an international supergenre encompassing memoirs, history, autobiography, biography, travel writing, nature writing, popular anthropology, film and music writing, popular philosophy, ethnic studies, journalism, writing on religion, literary studies, and more. It contributes to the boom in popular science and a greater public awareness of the work of scientists. It expands the continent of creative writing, presenting complete pictures of a subject and fresh ways of looking at the world around us. Its permeable open space continues to grow and capture evermore subjects, writers and readers, especially through weblogs (see Electronic performance in Chapter Nine ). We discussed in Chapter Five the metaphor of an invisible audience that stands behind poets and novelists while they are writing. Such writers are often writing in the dark to an extent, and only begin to refine or change their work once it is finished and they begin to have a clearer idea of who might read it or attend a performance of their work. Remember that your creative nonfiction generally has a less phantasmal relationship with its audience since it often takes their real world as its subject. However, unless you have been asked to write specifically fora small and known faction of readers, do not be misled into 192 Creative writing thinking that you must tailor your style and subject to suit anybody. To make your work new and challenging you must still write primarily for yourself, and that remains a huge challenge to any notions you may have for telling the truth and showing the shape of truth by using art. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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