The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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amount of time available to writing. Some writers, for example, rise early and attempt to get as much writing done before they go to work, or before their family wakes. Do you watch a lot of television Cut down. Do you spend a lot of time talking about your work Try silence. Do you suffer from pagefright? Try
Writing Games. If one of your enemies is prevarication, cheat yourself into writing by resolving to carryout a Writing Game, some freewriting, writing in a set form,
imitating or translating.
A
I M You will be astonished at how much time we waste through displacement activities and distraction. Create anew schedule that excludes self-made enemies of promise. Keep to this schedule. It will become natural and less of a pose (for pose is also an enemy of promise).
Challenges of translation
Many writers use translation as a means for taking an internal vacation from their own processes to collect ideas and borrow verbal energy from other writers and to pay homage to writers in other languages whom they admire.
It is also an effective medicine for fallow periods in writing, say when you are between major projects. If you believe in writer’s block, then translation is a part-cure, in that one writer leans on another to walk a line of words across a blank space of paper. All these reasons depend on the otherness of the process. This is not translation strictly it is about taking the work of others and possessing it for yourself otherness-translation.
What is lost in translation
For creative writers, translation shares the continent of writing. Fora growing number of professional literary translators, it is another form of creative writing after all, they own the process. Yet Poetry is what is lost in translation.
It is also what is lost in interpretation – Robert Frost. Writers have often seen interpretation as an enemy of creativity. However, Frost’s famous remark says more about the nature of poetry than it does about the process of translation.
As we have discussed, language is a shifting and evolving system. Some words are charged with particular meanings in their host language, but that does not entail their carrying those associations into another tongue.
Stealing across a spectrum
Meaning is one thing, but we cannot ignore the importance of sound in language of cadence and voice and, in poetry, of rhyme or a line’s inner music.

Challenges of creative writing
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Is there a perfect or perfecting way to carry such cargo from one country to another – No. What is it that gets lost in translation – Everything a writer values the poetry of the author’s inner ear, its intentions and intuitions. Are we even more ruthless than that – Yes, even given our respect for the original,
and for the host-writer we are parasitising.
That respect glitters greenly across a spectrum of approaches. Some creative writers practise the adaptation of an original work by a dead author. However,
some writers mix the colours in the palette of otherness-translation: adaptation equivalence → version → imitation → variation → artistic theft plagiarism. As creative writers, you work across this spectrum by exploring it,
even exploiting it by going around it, although poetry lends itself more easily to this process than fictional prose. Some adopt the modes of parody or pastiche.
For some writers, the challenge can be one of possession, not fidelity. Some writers steal, without quoting their source. When done well, critics and readers consider it an act of homage when done badly, they cry plagiarism. As Lion
Feuchtwanger stated playfully in Adaptations (1924), some creative writers acknowledge the debt to the host-writer by putting the little word after before the name of the host-writer. If the host is dead, you can be sure that all the flaws of the work will be attributed to the living writer and all its worth to the dead writer. To paraphrase Ngugi wa Thiong’o, translation moves beyond and around language. Many creative writers argue that all writing is translated in that it is translated from silence, but it is also translated through a writer’s prism of influences and artistic sympathies.
Variation’s mirror
A writer may well be fluent in the language they are translating. More likely, they may acquire only enough of the language to translate the pieces to which they are drawn, or they may use a gloss – for example, the prose gloss of a poem, such as John D. Sinclair’s exemplary 1939 translation and commentary of Dante’s
The Divine Comedy. Instead of faithfully translating the other language, the writer imitates the original to produce aversion of it plays variations upon it;
or uses it to create starting points fora wholly independent piece of work. The final aim is to own it, and this is a writing exercise you should try for yourself.
Your own writing gains by this use of translation. If artistic creation is a mirror to nature, then variation is a mirror on a mirror.
The work becomes that of a translated other, a melding of the two writers creative minds. Important and controversial examples include Robert
Lowell’s Imitations (1961), energetic versions of European poets, a process of working that Lowell likened to moving into anew air (Hamilton,
1982
:

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289); Ezra Pound’s equivalences of the Troubadour poets and Don Paterson’s fascinating spiritual portraits of Antonio Machado in The Eyes, a process of otherness-translation he writes of as having many dead friends you can talk to (1999: 60). For an inventive creative writer, translation must seem a type of literary super-oxygen, reviving as it does the dead from the cells of their words.
Some writers fake this process entirely, fabricating an original work and author and translating them into their own tongue (an effective creative writing exercise. Sometimes the process is consciously fraudulent, although the result often possesses considerable compositional panache. Historically, the most famous and tragic illustration is the poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide at the age of eighteen. He published a pseudo-archaic travelogue, aversion of an original which he claimed to have discovered in a chest in the church St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. Chatterton then released poems that purported to be the work of an imaginary fifteenth-century monk and poet,
Thomas Rowley. The shame is that Chatterton is remembered more as a figure of youthful misfortune than as an inventive imitative poet, a maker of translations from silence. As Antonio Machado stated, In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it Chatterton’s inventiveness effaced itself completely. Be careful.

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