The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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- Confidence and practice
| Writing Game R E AD ING NATURE Here is an extract from a poem about a snail by the Australian Les Murray from his book Translations from the Natural World: by the gilt slipway, and by pointing perhaps as far back into time as ahead, ashore being folded interior, by boiling on salt, by coming uncut over a razor’s edge, by hiding the Oligocene underleaf may this and every snail sense itself ornament the weave of presence. ‘Mollusc’ (1993: As with Bishop’s A Cold Spring, note again not only the precise observations, but also the naming (Oligocene, and the concise sounds within the language which simulate what the words are describing (coming uncut over / a razor’s edge. Your game is to find a natural history field-guide, and locate a found poem or story within it. Write it out as your own, before altering it as you wish in order to make a final poem or short story that imitates the precision of language of a field-guide, and a precision of your own observation in the writing. A I M The language and syntax of Murray’s poem seek precisely to imitate the movement, the inner world, the perceptual world, of the snail. This takes an alert writer the poem must be a snail the poem must itself ornament the weave of presence. In language (to quote William Blake, energy is eternal delight, and the energy of your expression as a writer gains from precision the right words in the right order. Confidence and practice It is not only important to practise a certain degree of ruthlessness as a writer; it is also imperative to practise confidence. Who is born confident The possession of confidence says much about how a person was raised and educated; about how others treated them and about their attitude to themselves. Confidence clambers over some of the same obstacles as talent, and the difficulty and complexity of those obstacles creates and shapes the writer. The absence of confidence tells its own tale. Many writers appear, on the face of it, to possess confidence very often, they do not. It is an act, another performance to some degree, although it need not be pretence. The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn’t matter Edward Albee. 142 Creative writing The invisible audience When you, as a writer, sit down to work, there is always a certain amount of prevarication as you adjust to the condition of the task ahead, and for new creative writers that prevarication can be extremely uncomfortable because the condition is unfamiliar. The role is also unknown, and the role is difficult to understand because the writer performs at nothing, to nobody, to a notional audience, invisible to the writer – possibly an audience that does not exist, or has yet to be created. An actor takes to the stage and views their audience the audience’s response makes and moulds their performance and a good actor can smell when the audience is on their side, or when they need winning. A writer’s audience, as Margaret Atwood says, consists of individuals whom he may never see or know. Writer and audience are invisible to each other the only visible thing is the book, and a reader may get hold of a book long after the writer is dead One of the benefits of a creative writing course is that you have abetter idea of who the audience for your work might be, even if it is only the writers teaching the course. For many writers, the sheer habit of writing is what forces the performance, which is why discipline is so important. Another trigger is the knowledge that not writing makes one feel a great deal worse than writing, which, when the performance is going well, creates euphoria in the audience within the writer. The writer-as-actor senses the invisible audience within themselves, willing them onto win that self or selves. Suspensions of belief A new writer should try to suspend belief in what they are uncertain and unable. One of the processes offered by cognitive psychotherapy is to imagine a situation that causes you to feel awful to hold that image in your mind; and then to shrink it as the opposite situation takes over. Let that image be you, the new writer, sitting down to work. Using your imagination, place the same situation in a positive light – a fine paragraph made, an electric piece of dialogue, a poem of precision. Hold that image in your mind alongside the first negative image. Then, gradually, enlarge the positive image and shrink the other, until only the positive one remains. Remember how you feel as you hold that image in your mind, and teach yourself to think and feel that way every time you sit down to write. You will begin to believe in your own possibility, and that creates confidence. Confidence affects the quality and style of your writing, and writing in this frame of mind will become habitual and addictive, Processes of creative writing 143 as euphoria becomes familiar through practice. We become what we seem what was performance becomes life you inhabit the character of the writer without pretence. The action of writing can prove to bean act of writing, only there is nothing phoney about it. It would be glib and misleading, however, to think this is going to work all the time, especially if the writer suffers from self-doubt, as all door depression, as many do. Reversals to type will happen. To continue, we have to become somebody, or several people, other than ourselves. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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