The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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| Writing Game W R IT ING ABOUT THEW OR L D TRAVEL WRITING Research the history of your neighbourhood using record offices, your local library and local history archives. Try to gain the trust of older members of your community, and then interview them about their experience of life and work. Create a collage of these interviews and histories, and thread a narrative through it that holds the work together. Use as much of the interviews as you can, but be selective. A I M The local is global. You do not need to be a world explorer to write well about travel. Close study of your own area, even your neighbourhood, will reveal many mysterious aspects, hidden histories and fascinating people and stories. Apply this technique next time you travel to somewhere that is strange and new. Recommended reading As a cautionary tale about the liberties and licence of a certain type of journalism, and the importance of a creative nonfiction writer’s fidelity to reality, Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (Granta, 2004 ) remains indispensable. William Zinsser’s stripped-down exposition of nonfiction’s provenance in On Writing Well (Collins, 2005 ) teaches by example. This early guide to writing nonfiction (first edition, 1976) carries introductions to writing about science, technology and sport. Research and craft are emphasised in Philip Gerard’s highly useful Creative Nonfiction (Story Press. The novelist and filmmaker Lee Gutkind edits Creative Nonfiction, which is highly recommended, as is his The Art of Creative Nonfiction (John Wiley & Sons. In the UK, the best international creative nonfiction is published in the magazine Granta; and The Granta Book of Reportage introduced by veteran editor Ian Jack (Granta, 2006 ) is an excellent representative anthology. Autobiographical Writ- ing Across the Disciplines, edited by Diane Freedman and Olivia Frey (Duke, reveals the remarkable breadth of the intellectual movement toward self-inclusive scholarship. With primary texts, begin at first by reading some of the earlier models listed at the start of this chapter. You may also gain by reading the autobiographies and biographies of any writers you admire. Rather than Creative nonfiction 193 landing you with an extensive and probably partial list of exemplary books, I suggest you follow your enthusiasms at first, not so much for authors but for subjects that interest you. However, in your first attempts at the genre and within the time constraints of a creative writing course – you will learn a huge amount about the different available styles, and gain by their imitation, through reading nonfiction and essays by writers such as Martin Amis, John Berger, Truman Capote, Bruce Chatwin, Richard Dawkins, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Maureen Dowd, Louise Erdrich, Martha Gellhorn, Stephen Jay Gould, Ian Jack, Ryszard Kapu´sci ´nski, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Norman Mailer, Janet Malcolm, Blake Morrison, John Pilger, Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, Iain Sinclair, Lewis Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, E. O. Wilson, Tom Wolfe and Tobias Wolff. Chapter 8 Writing poetry Behind several theories of what happens to a poet during the writing of a poem – Eliot’s escape from personality, Keats’s idea of informing and filling another body, Yeats’s notion of the mask, Auden’s concept of the poet becoming someone else for the duration of the poem, Val´ery’s idea of a self superior to the self – lies the implied assumption that the self as given is inadequate and will not do. How you feel about yourself is probably the most important feeling you have. It colors all other feelings, and if you area poet, it colors your writing. It may account for your writing. r i chard hug o , The Triggering Town Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (1979: Where does rhythm come from The cellular life of a poem is its language. All language naturally possesses rhythm, even nonhuman languages. Rhythm is made of beats, whether of a skin drum in a frog’s throat, or a hoof’s thrum. For living creatures, rhythm is used to create and defend territory, and communicate. Song is modulated in order to carry it best through resistant matter, as whale song is through the soft walls of ocean, or an owl’s call spooling through woodland. The languages of most animals on our planet are based on sounds, and the sound carries the meaning. Rhyme and rhythm are not as artificial as you might suppose – they are natural mnemonics, occurring in birdsong and animal calls. Slow a skylark’s song and you will hear a sophisticated thematic development of beats within just one second of song, yet the bird sings continuously in real time as you pass beneath. What is the secret of poetry? Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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