The cambridge introduction to creative writing

For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting the characters you see in this image:The cambridge introduction to creative writing - uction to creative writing -- e210, section burroway imaginative writing: the elements of craft, 3rd ed. Organizing your research in a document or spreadsheet can ve writing track for summer and semester students. The study ce of creative nonfiction writing will include an examination of elements ve writing refers to the practice of writing prose ... Creative writing refers practice of writing prose fiction, poetry, scripts and sometimes auto/uction to macro d-generated command-line text ... The paper moves from point to point dge coaching introduction to the mcat - reasoning section. So skillfully, the reader doesn't really need to think of ve writing ate leading undergraduate work in english studies, volume 2 (2009-. Is an introduction to apa and mla formats, providing a sample ve writing - winghill writing school - student 11: novels. Unit 16: writer's first-aid ing the relationship of creative thinking to reading and ts lists available at sciverse sciencedirect. Auster, paul (hand to mouth), ographical novel, 251, 253 autobiography basis for characters, 58 undergraduate creative writing workshop - university of ... The creative writing process paper arises out of my experience of working on a creative writing ma, a way to reconnect with a personal practice of creative writing and as introduction to cambridge international examinations board ... Creative writing: a workbook with readings: the open university, —unprepared for the emotional roller coaster of foreign adoption. Scrapbooking introduction to the cambridge advanced modeller - 20, 2010 - cambridge advanced modeller (cam)–a configurable software ... Are relatively easy to extend or customise–since only knowledge of ve applications of human behavior understanding - cambridge ... Cambridge introduction to creative writing - creative writing comes from, the various forms and camouflages ...... At whatever stage we reach, in the writing game we are all page intentionally left cambridge introduction ve writing this pioneering book introduces students to the practice and art of creative writing and creative reading. David morley discusses where creative writing comes from, the various forms and camouflages it has taken, and why we teach and learn the arts of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. He looks at creative writing in performance; as public art, as visual art, as e-literature and as an act of community. As a leading poet, critic and award-winning teacher of the subject, morley finds new engagements for creative writing in the creative academy and within science. Accessible, entertaining and groundbreaking, the cambridge introduction to creative writing is not only a useful textbook for students and teachers of writing, but also an inspiring read in its own right. Dav i d m o r l e y is associate professor in english and director of the warwick writing programme at the university of dge introductions to literature this series is designed to introduce students to key topics and authors. Accessible and lively, these introductions will also appeal to readers who want to broaden their understanding of the books and authors they enjoy. Ideal for students, teachers, and lecturers r concise, yet packed with essential information r key suggestions for further reading titles in this series: eric bulson the cambridge introduction to james joyce john xiros cooper the cambridge introduction to t. Scott fitzgerald janette cambridge introduction to early english cambridge introduction to shakespeare’s goldman the cambridge introduction to virginia woolf kevin j. Jimmie killingsworth pericles cambridge introduction to walt cambridge introduction to mcdonald the cambridge introduction to samuel beckett wendy cambridge introduction to emily messent the cambridge introduction to mark twain david cambridge introduction to creative nadel the cambridge introduction to ezra pound leland s. Person john cambridge introduction to nathaniel cambridge introduction to joseph robbins the cambridge introduction to harriet beecher stowe martin scofield emma smith peter cambridge introduction to the american short story the cambridge introduction to shakespeare the cambridge introduction to english theatre, 1660– todd the cambridge introduction to jane cambridge introduction ve writing dav i d m o r l dge university press. Niels e r 1 introducing creative r 2 creative writing in the r 3 challenges of creative r 4 composition and creative r 5 processes of creative r 6 the practice of r 7 creative r 8 writing r 9 performing r 10 writing in the community and rative bibliography purpose of this book is to introduce readers to the practice of creative writing. Equally, the purpose of this book is to introduce writers to the practice of creative reading. This double helix of reading and writing makes you more alert to your potential as a reader and writer of yourself, of other people and of other writers. As this is an introduction to a discipline, we discuss where creative writing comes from, the various forms and camouflages it has taken and why we teach and learn it. I do not present you with an anatomy of the various histories of creative writing in higher education; there are fine examples available in print (dawson, 2005; myers, 1995). The first five chapters explore principles and procedures of creative writing that apply generally to the writing and techniques of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry and, to some extent, drama. Guests to this party include reading, criticism, vocation, influence, reflection, experience, play, publishing, editing, language, translation, imitation, experiment, design, form, quality, discipline, notebooks, working habits, fieldwork, composition, incubation, planning, fluency, finishing, rewriting, deadlines, precision, confidence, practice, audience, voice and selves. We look at the meaning and sound of language; the different states of mind we use for writing; the workshop in its various guises and disguises; and the enemies and allies of creativity. They present some of the techniques and practice for fiction, poetry and the international supergenre, creative nonfiction. We look at creative writing as a verbal art in performance; as hybrid with public and visual art; and as electronic literature. I argue that none of these is at odds with the making of books; they are open to creative literary practice. Chapter ten looks at writing as an act of community; i then attempt to speculate modest engagements for creative writing in the creative academy, for example within science. The cast of this book is about the roots of creativity in writing, and the routes into the writing of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, rather than higher techniques. My reason for the book’s architecture is to send you immediately into the action of writing, by offering a series of open spaces for discussion, reflection and practice. I agree, and the book is designed to address these complementary phases of creative development. A book about creative writing requires lifetime subscription to the alexandrian library, and my recommended reading lists scan only the eye-level shelves. Since this is a book about, of all things, creative writing, i tried to keep my language open and personal, tuning out academic white noise – citations only when necessary, endnotes shown the door. I wanted to make a book that hits things fresh; one that is written from inside writing. I reflected on my own teaching of creative writing in universities, adult education, communities and schools; and co-teaching and observing teaching in the english-speaking world, especially the united states, canada and in europe. Writing this book has been a chastening personal experience, and my admiration for writers and teachers has increased inestimably. Errors in this book are my es and sources for writers readers who wish to become writers find resonance – even purpose – in statements on the writing process made by authors who have lived their lives by the word. When thinking about the aims and processes of creative writing, literary biographies and autobiographies are a useful place to begin to find out about a writer’s working methods and philosophy. I signal a variety of key works and further reading that amplify, or exemplify, matters that need your closer attention, especially in regard to writing fiction, creative nonfiction and poems. There are several superb technical books on imaginative and formal writing (behn and twichell, 1992; bernays and painter, 1991; burroway, 2006; fussell, 1979; koch, 1990; matthews and brotchie, 1998; novakovich, 1995; padgett, 2000; steele, 1999; stein, 1995; strand and boland, 2000); on the practical and philosophical processes of writing fiction, poetry or creative nonfiction (addonizio and laux, 1997; boisseau and wallace, 2004; brande, 1981; burroway, 2003; dillard, 1989; eshleman, 2001; gardner, 1983, 1985; gutkind, 1997; hughes, 1967; hugo, 1979; king, 2000; kinzie, 1999; kundera, 2000; lamott, 1995; lodge, 1992; oliver, 1994; packard, 1992; sansom, 1994; stein, 1995; zinsser, 1976); on creative writing, revision and rewriting (anderson, 2006; bell and magrs, 2001; browne and king, 2004; le guin, 1998; mills, 2006; ostrom et al. 2001; schaefer and diamond, 1998); and on the nature of creativity and the psychology of writing (boden, 2004; hershman and lieb, 1998; hunt and sampson, 2006; koestler, 1975; lakoff and johnson,1980; pfenninger and shubik, 2001; pope, 2005; turner, 1996). Writing games writing creatively can feel a little like working out logistical, even mathematical, challenges. Writing games clone this process, and are often true to the natural rhythm of literary production in that technique and style are often learned on the job. There are many creative writing projects embedded in the text, as well as ideas and suggestions that students and teachers can use as starting points for games. Thanks to those who made life easier during the time of writing this book, especially peter mack and thomas docherty. My thanks to those who discussed some of these ideas, or who, over the years, were teachers or co-teachers: anne ashworth, susan bassnett, jonathan bate, richard beard, mike bell, jay boyer, zoe brigley, andy brown, elizabeth cameron, ron carlson, peter carpenter, nina cassian, jonathan coe, peter davidson, douglas dunn, brian follett, maureen freely, dana gioia, jon glover, david hart, miroslav holub, ted hughes, russell celyn jones, stephen knight, doris lessing, denise levertov, emma mccormack, paul muldoon, les murray, bernard o’donoghue, maggie o’farrell, melissa pritchard, al purdy, jewell parker rhodes, jane rogers, carol chillington rutter, william scammell, michael schmidt, jane stevenson, george szirtes, michelene wandor; and to the following institutions where thinking took place: the arvon foundation, the university of warwick, national association of writers in education and the virginia piper center for creative writing at arizona state university. Finally, thanks to my former teacher, charles tomlinson, who taught me that the first cause of creative writing is creative reading. Game in your end is your beginning write a 500-word introduction to your own imaginary collected poems or complete stories. What were your strengths; and why did your audience first ignore your writing, then welcome it? Creative you wish to be brief, first prune away those devices that contribute to an elaborate style; let the entire theme be confined within narrow limits. By choosing to act, by writing on that page, we are creating another version of time; we are playing out a new version of existence, of life even. Writing a poem, a story or a piece of creative nonfiction, is to catalyse the creation of a four-dimensional fabric that is the result when space and time become one. Writing can create personal universes in which this system of events within space-time operates for the reader; the reader is its co-creator. Readers fill in the gaps for themselves, in essence, writing themselves into that small universe, creating that fifth dimension, and their experience of that dimension. A well-drawn character in fiction or poetry, say, may find their actions and language imitated by readers simply because of the creative radiation of that fictional self, and the accuracy of the writing. I argue that, although there is an inherent simplicity to this, ucing creative not simple as a practice. Hemingway, writing of the practice of fiction, states: you have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true . Can change people, for writing creates new worlds and possible universes, parallel to an actual. To some, writing remains an artifice, a game even, and it is – as most things are, as all of us are – something made or played upon. However, when nurture builds carefully on nature, then life is not only made well, it can be shaped well and given we write writing is so absorbing and involving that it can make you feel more alive – concentrated yet euphoric. Certainly, the process of writing is often more rewarding than the outcome, although, when you capture something luminous, that sense of discovery and wonder swims through the words and leaps in the page. However, while creative writing is no panacea, some writers find its practice therapeutic; and some teachers of writing believe that writing is a powerful aid to various types of therapy, from the treatment of depression to social rehabilitation. Writing wakes you up – it forces you beyond your intelligence and quotidian attention – and anything that makes you think and perceive more clearly and expansively may with finding perspectives on yourself and others. But, as the poet richard hugo advises writing students, ‘isn’t it better to use your inability to accept yourself to creative advantage? If writing is not subject to these tests and taut self-tests, then you cheat your devil of his pay. It is possibly more therapeutic to allow writing to become both a form of pleasure and a form of work, rather than an outlet exclusively for emotions and epiphanies. To move from ‘this’ to ‘that’ requires a process which is both creative and which requires work, work that is sometimes euphoric and easy, and sometimes difficult, jagged. Sometimes you will write as though you are stumbling through a dark forest; your thought is sh`ucing creative writing. Any new writer who fears that flow and ebb, who takes no pleasure or pain in it, who is incapable of studying their own flaws or the flaws of their writing too nearly, must try to find their own balance. If one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly, what one says is , for all that commitment or familiarity, creative writing is not a mystery. One of the purposes of the academic discipline of creative writing is to demystify itself without falsifying its intricacy. Creative writing can be opened and learned, like any craft, like any game of importance. Writing is rewriting, and the character of the writer is rewritten by the activity of writing and rewriting. Yet you do not need to write creatively if your ambition is to be a great reader. Writing game the word hoard go to a shelf of books of fiction or poetry. Write this phrase in your notebook and, once you have written it, keep writing for five minutes. There are only two rules to this game: you must not stop writing; and you must not think. Now read what you have written read it forwards,Creative writing then read through it, word for word, backwards. As we shall see in chapter four, this ‘free-writing’ exercise is effective for warming up for writing, but it is also effective at creating unusual phrases, ones that possess a surprising amount of personal linguistic energy. You should try to do this exercise every day, not only to keep your writing mind limber, but also to create a hoard of original and unusual phrases from which you can draw when you are writing. There are as many energetic views on how to teach writing as there are university writing programmes, writing workshops, writing theorists, teachers of writing, books about writing – and writers. Given that speed of evolution, there is no wrong or right about the pedagogy of writing – no frozen framework. There are many literary theories of writing, but those theories are not within my remit. However, the quality of ucing creative so various can be confusing for a new writer searching for models, or one searching for some philosophy of practice they can lean against, or into, while they develop. All these viewpoints about teaching writing are all right so long as they work within their time, and so long as they are not disingenuous (creating promises they cannot keep) or dogmatic (creating premises you, the new writer, cannot keep). They are really the same question, but you will often hear it posed ‘as a challenge rather than a genuine enquiry; a challenge which threatens to damn the foundational premise of creative writing by daring the addressee to answer in the affirmative’ (dawson, 2005: 6). The novelist david lodge concluded, ‘even the most sophisticated literary criticism only scratches the surface of the mysterious process of creativity; and so, by the same token, does even the best course in creative writing’ (1997: 178). It is not empirical science; teaching and learning writing is not like teaching and learning are some cards; here is my table. I think creative writing can be taught most effectively when its students have some talent and vocation for it. If a teacher can shape the talent and steer that vocation, and the students enjoy the shaping and steering, then i think creative writing should be taught as a craft. The whole point of teaching creative writing, however, is that students must learn to make and guide themselves, for writing is mostly a solitary pursuit, even when written collaboratively using electronic media. I also believe creative writing could be taught within other disciplines, as an option alongside science and social science, if students of those disciplines have some desire to try it, and can take the practice of creative writing for what it is: a possible second string, or a second chance at something from which they gain pleasure. Writing is an extreme act of attention and memory; it pleads with your brain cells to make new connections. Creative writing ‘commands’ these different departments of self to start cooperating, and they will, by stretching out synapses over relatively huge neural distances, wiring up. We are capable of developing complementary senses – sight with sound, taste with touch, time with hearing – or all senses simultaneously ucing creative h the medium of one line of poetry, or one paragraph of description. We are neurologically changed by our experience of writing as much as we are by reading. Creative writing is the art of defamiliarisation: an act of stripping familiarity from the world about us, allowing us to see what custom has blinded us to. Scientific, philosophical and artistic breakthroughs often go through four stages of cognitive and creative process – attention to detail (of a problem) → translation to metaphor → defamiliarisation → receiving something at a different angle – in effect, perceiving it anew, as a child does. The making of creative language and story is natural, and part of everybody’s potential world. If we go back to the plausible origin of creative writing as a taught discipline, we open aristotle’s poetics, and read that ‘the standard of rightness is not the same in poetry as it is in social morality or indeed in any other art’ (that is, poetry as an art of fiction and drama). The craft of writing lies in the way the cards of language are played; the voice in how the cards become your g game discovering your continent imagine a door. Then put it away for three weeks, after which revise it completely into a short story or ucing creative writing. It is a good idea to try these questions on yourself regularly, writing with your eyes closed while you are visualising the images in your mind’s eye. A student is an apprentice to writing and, by innocent attachment, to those selfsame myths and lies. Some students of creative writing know who they are already, and will have sensed this self-knowledge at some early stage of their lives. Your creative writing teachers are your first real readers, and they are editors of your writing. You need to possess a purpose for writing, and to learn to keep this purpose strong and supple. If an apprentice of writing does not have some genuine aptitude for these skills, then their time may be better spent some other way. It has more to do with being trained, taught and encouraged in creative language and writing when you were a child. This argument for aptitude (rather than, say, desire) would be accepted for any other profession, and creative writing is no different. It may prove that you can take the lessons of creative writing into the world, and use them to help conduct creative lightning if you are lucky and talented, but that depends on several factors, including your willingness to face failure. A passion for language will push you through a wall of words, and a passion for writing will push up the temperature of your written voice. There is nothing wrong with being passionate or even obsessive about creative writing; drivenness can oxygenate writing when technique is under on’s providence vocation is important to many professions, including those of science and medicine. The poets john donne, george herbert and gerard manley hopkins were men of the church, although the ucing creative the writer as an actual believer is thorny and interesting since some writers seem to require a structured belief system in order to write (or their books create belief systems for their reader, as in the work of j. Some believe that creative writing and belief are callings that sit all too shakily on the scales of responsibility and guilt. If that ossifies into a pose, that pose arises from their conception that creative writing is hieratic. If vocation is thought of as belonging to somebody who places importance on acquiring and developing literary skills, then creative writing is a vocation, humanly commonplace in its constituency. If you possess a vocation in addition to writing, you may wish to consider the demands on your time and mind before you commit to both. At best, the other vocation offers language, philosophy and material to the vocational practice of writing. Be warned that top-heavy seriousness can create a very disabling tension, putting too much pressure on yourself, expecting miracles of composition – the result is creative constipation. We make our own providence as writers, and there is nothing more spoiling to providence than pomposity; or programmatic ideas about writing; or outlandish measures of our importance. It can also make our writing itch with puppy-fat self-consciousness and self-importance, both of which are unattractive qualities for many readers. Writing game obsessive sermons playfully, write a 500-word monologue spoken by an authority figure (who should be somebody known by everybody in your group). If you go about the business of writing in the mask of the professional, then you remove most of the fun from the natural guesswork of writing, and stymie your chances at finding your luck or voice. Of course, in your dealings with the world of workshops and publishing, you should act professionally, but you can leave that persona, along with your ego, at the door of your writing room and the workshop room. Try to view writing as something of a daily habit, rather than a moral activity. Vocation should have the quality of being commonplace, even lighthearted, like having a daily working job, which – lucky us – is to write what we es creative writing is a discipline with many apprentices, but one that respects the fact that, at whatever stage we reach, in the writing game we are all beginners. Thus, writing seems a sharper vocation than most because of the unsettled and unsettling material with which it deals. You will know yourself better through failure and retrial, however tortuous the process, and learn more about yourself than others would have you know, by going beyond your own intelligence in language and writing. You will acquire different and oscillating rationalisations for your writing: from jane austen’ucing creative urist conception of painting upon two inches of ivory, to franz kafka’s yearning to smash the frozen sea inside us. In the end, much good writing is gained by practice, by knowing your objectives and knowing how to achieve them in language. As the renowned novelist and creative writing teacher john gardner states in the art of fiction: most of the people i’ve known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers. Your approach to the continent of writing, you may find yourself serving an audience, sometimes by serving their consciences on their behalf, or by creating work that is entertaining or consoling. Writing in time some people believe there is something new or untested about the discipline of creative writing, and nowhere is this debate more volatile than in some departments devoted to the study of literature. Rare forests of paper are given over to compacted debate, the heart of which comes down to an argument between two vested interests: a desire for a mystification of the process of writing by some writers, and a covetousness of that privilege, that process, by some critics. What is clear to many writers is that creative writing, and its teaching, never really left the university ions of creative writing the modern version of the discipline of creative writing begins in 1940 with the foundation of the iowa writer’s workshop, although there were precursors, including george baker’s ‘47 workshop’ at harvard from 1906 to 1925. It originates before that because aristotle’s poetics is an account of creative practices accepted and used for years, and is no more than a fragment of the knowledge he gathered for study. However, aristotle’s work goes further, for it has a moral aim, and creative writing teaching inherits this aim to some extent. For example, carol bly’s beyond the writers’ workshop (2001) went as far as to include an ‘ethics code’ for creative writing teachers and students. There is a moral dimension to creative writing; it is one of the reasons it troubles its detractors as well as its advocates. What does poetry ‘water’ in today’s creative writing classes, and what might wither otherwise? What does the teaching of creative writing do to, or with, its small society when it goes beyond teaching mere technique? Is creative writing about more than just new writers, streaming into formation behind their teachers like a self-invading squadron? It beaches itself ucing creative body of theory about literature and poetry that formed and informed the renaissance. Speaking and writing were seen as art, and rhetoric (from the greek rhetor, ‘public speaker’) taught the means to speak and write effectively to persuade an audience and bind a society. Step aboard the time machine of this book, and travel back in time to the middle ages to take part in a class taught in the thirteenth ic’s play how would you feel if your creative writing teacher asked you to write a story or poem that personified ‘the cross lamenting its captivity under non-christian rule and urging a crusade’? But what drives poetria nova deep into memory is its playful delight in restrictive and thematic creative writing. A stanza is a room, and a poem a house containing many lit rooms: if a man has a house to build, his hand does not rush, hasty, into the very doing: the work is first measured out with his heart’s inward plumb-line, and the inner man marks out a series of steps beforehand, according to a definite plan; his heart’s hand shapes the whole before his body’s hand does so, and his building is a plan before it is an e yourself a student of creative writing in the thirteenth century. I would love to sign up for his creative writing class, but i am 800 years late. The most effective teachers of creative writing teach wide, deep reading and the value of trying on voices, strategies and styles. It was field-knowledge for the whole curriculum – lessons for survival through manipulation of, and skill with, language: for it happeneth verye sildome, that a man not exercised in writinge, how learned so euer he be, can at any tyme know perfectly the labour and toile of writers, or taste of the sweetnes and excellencye of styles, and those wiser observations that often times are found in them of olde tyme. Rhetoric was the vehicle for what we call now active learning, such as writing exercises; practising verbal gymnastics within incredible linguistic or formal constraints (anticipating the oulipo; see chapter three); and creating arguments and compositions in face-to-face competitions (what we would call slams). Aspects of the old teaching went to sleep in europe one century; they woke up in america in the next, in safer hands, in a newer form called creative writing. Back in europe, the sublime came into its thin inheritance; ideas of inspiration rose to their ucing creative walked away pocketing notions of deliberation, intelligence and practice. Writing gained an image, it even gained a kind of audience or celebrity, but it lost the ability to hear part of its history with reason and clarity. The rise of creative writing has reinstated a reality to one aspect of higher education and the writer’s place within it. Writing game recreating the snow-child write a very short poem from the point of view of a worn-out tablecloth, or an angry french fortress. You may wish later to use these examples to create a story set in the middle ages, in which such a writing class took school of wildness creative writing has been looked upon with intellectual suspicion, or dismissed as a school for amateurism and wildness. Yet, the relation of university-based criticism and scholarship to contemporary writing and poetry has been affected by the redevelopment of creative writing, and always has been. Courses in which creative writing is part of learning need not have the purpose of only turning out better writers of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction and children’s literature. In on becoming a novelist, john gardner claims, ‘strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked’; its presence in writing reveals ‘the very roots of the creative process’ (1985: 57). A good writer can scent creative wildness and will know, from their own experience, how best to develop and direct it toward a constructive target, without taming. Writers make for sympathetic teachers of writing because they are familiar with the weird and wayward process of making literature. The teaching of writing is an ancient discipline but there cannot be a narrow ‘modernising-standardising’. Creative writing schools provide an open spatial structure in which learning basic principles goes hand in hand with a certain amount of wildness and invention. Wildness is shaping the redevelopment of creative writing has now changed the composition of some literature faculties. This provides a powerful dimension for creative writing, and for the art form’s development. Many combine critical and creative work in a way that presents a distinctive opportunity for research, linking a writer’s knowledge of literature, gained through practice, with perspectives developed by criticism, theory and scholarship. It appears to be creating – i would say, recreating – a synthesis between work in universities and the nonacademic professions of writing. There have been mistakes made along the way, not least our allowing the perception that creative writing is some adjunct or educational tool to literary studies. There will always be theoreticians who patrol the approach roads to creative writing, setting up signs and limit-markers in their own unintelligible jargons. It is also a significant error to suppose that creative writing needs to take place in higher education when it already has a strong life outside it, in schools, libraries, literary festivals and communities. Neither does it matter greatly if some imaginative writers create a parallax view of writing within the academy: a view judged by intuitive laws and standards of literary achievement and craft, rather than one informed by an academic’s antennae for the lattices of power and history that the new work’s language is ‘performing’. The very finest practices in creative writing deliver strong literary achievement and incisive critical reflection on the social and historical context of the new work; our best writers are our most incisive critics and self-critics. A writing course will usefully teach a would-be writer that they cannot, and do not want to, write creatively. As donald hall lamented, writing workshops sometimes trivialise the art by minimising that terror of total process. Although learning to write creatively can be fun, becoming and being a writer is a far more ruthless, wilder game, and creative writing teachers should make no secret of this or try to disguise the true nature of this endeavour. Writing teachers try to be the opposite of deceivers, even when it hurts the student or even when it hurts the tutor to tell the truth. Rigorous teaching methods for writing courses and degrees fuse reading and critical discussion with concentrated practical work in a way that creates progression. As with the teaching of other art forms, this honesty about development and progress is the main reason that literary practitioners should teach creative writing, and not be teachers of technique or theoreticians of pedagogy. The presence of writers can lead to other outcomes just as valuable, such as creative ve communities rigour wins respect, widens and deepens the knowledge base of writers, and helps create cultural centres of excellence in which new writers apprentice themselves yearly to more experienced writers. One of the practical benefits of creative writing is that new and supportive communities and constituencies of writers are created and nurtured – real rooms with real writers in them. Teachers and students then begin to learn from each other, look after each other, set up enterprises such as magazines, presses and web journals, and receive help for these enterprises from that slightly apologetic patron of new writing: the university. For example, women from asian communities in the midlands, and children from inner-city schools in our region, are given free space in the humanities building of the university of warwick and warwick arts centre in england to develop their creative work. Some have used their experience to travel into other subjects, even into work areas not usually associated with creative writing, such as science, technology and business. Taught with ambition (and risking both hubris and envy), creative writing can teach us how to travel into our own potentialities; it can create renaissance people. As i suggest in chapter ten, the discipline of creative writing is not the reserve of humanities but can be multidisciplinary. It is our job to stress the importance of practice, reading, criticism, drafting, as well as the poet-scientist miroslav holub’s liberating notions of ‘serious play’, and the oulipo school’s conception and creation of ‘potential literature’ that cuts across mathematics, the sciences and writing in the same way as rhetoric. We are all wilder than we sister arts we do not burden other taught art forms with the first name ‘creative’. We do not talk of going to classes in creative music, creative painting, creative dance, creative film or creative acting. Creative writing provides a period of ‘constant schooling’, and the space and time to practise in language and form, for writers also stand in danger of stopping halfway. Constant schooling is a habit of mind that the teaching of creative writing can inculcate. In chapter nine, i will demonstrate some ways in which creative writing works with other art forms such as performance, music and the visual g game responding to art as a group, visit a museum or art gallery, and spend at least half a day responding in writing to several paintings or photographs. Or hand out postcards of art and paintings in class, and respond directly to them in writing. A i m : responding to art in this way is called ecphrasis, and is a stimulating tradition in creative writing. You write something in homage to a piece of visual art, or use visual art, sculpture or film as stimuli for ucing creative g and the individual writer reading is a kind of rewriting but by many hands and eyes. Writing is only a more exacting form of reading, individual in its action and exactions. To become, and to remain, an original creative writer you must first become, and be, as original a reader, and pursue your individual taste with restlessness, competitiveness and trust in your intuition. Most writers agree that the best way to write well creatively is to write for yourself. It is useful for research, obviously, but is not only about research, for nonfiction will supply you with ideas for the subject of poems, for characters and situations in stories and for the creation of further nonfictional writing on subjects that excite you. Nonfiction is also a good space to relax, or to hide from the gravitational pull of other creative writers’ voices while you are working on your own stories and poems. Reading literary criticism and theory is less likely to lend itself to creative writing, but can be a good way of lying fallow when, and if, you do not wish to write in the open. If you want to be a writer, at least one hundred books of original creative writing for every book about writing seems a minimum ratio – and public libraries will be your g game adventures in reading go to your nearest library, but make your way adventurously to a subject or genre area that you have never previously visited. Repeat this process until the reading begins to become a habit, and/or the writing begins to feel easier or more natural. A i m : creative reading does not come easily to everybody; sometimes you have to compel yourself to read work that is not familiar or useful. Reading widely, even randomly – picking books out for qualities that many non-writers find slightly wayward – is a way to surprise you into making creative connections that have not existed before. It is also vital to force yourself to read beyond what you know, to open up new ways of writing but also of perception; to begin to write what you do not know. We are nest-weavers, pillaging other writers for ge’s music reading is also a form of listening; and the tunes of language trigger new writing. Nadezhda mandelstam, writing in hope against hope, describes the effect on her poet-husband: i imagine that for a poet auditory hallucinations are something in the nature of an occupational disease . I sometimes saw mandelstam trying to get rid of this kind of ‘hum’, to brush it off and escape from ucing creative would toss his head as though it could be shaken out like a drop of water that gets into your ear while bathing. You may even begin to hear your own writing, the soundscapes of your own poems and prose as auditory hallucinations, or a musical phrase that then takes on a more clearcut shape in your mind, even though it is lacking words. Later, it will begin to find the words and you can then help wrestle them into place while writing and g game listening and reading aloud as a class, make a list of stories and poems that you value, and make an anthology of these pieces. After each reading, the other students should tell the reader how they felt about the sound of the writing, and which qualities of sound they found attractive. A i m : not only is reading aloud a good test of style; but it is also a good way to think aloud about writing and writers. All these games are highly effective ways of establishing a small community of new writers with shared interests, meeting outside the times of their formal ve reading creative reading is the kindest favour students can do for themselves if they aspire to be a creative writer. Writing is a form of knowledge creation, and imitation is an honourable and ancient tradition in writing, and the arts, as it is in science and other forms of knowledge. As socrates said, ‘employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have laboured hard for. Mary kinzie describes an active reading process for poets, but her explanation holds for other genres: reading is like writing in beginning in uncertainty and driving towards speculation and experiment. To read this way keeps a ucing creative provisional and still in the making, which is how the process of reading absorbs the act of writing to their mutual improvement in terms of skill and understanding. He checked his reading against his own experience, testing it in the light of his own ideas for writing, as you must learn to do. Writing is a type of unriddling and reading can help you solve local difficulties in your own writing while you are writing (it is a good idea to keep several books about you during your writing sessions). The best way is to follow a curriculum of reading, a task to which the study and practice of creative writing lends itself g across time we learn by example. It cannot be helped also that fashion shadows our perception of writing (as it does with criticism or literary theory). More innocent, but as destructive to reputation or posterity, cultural amnesia consigns most writing to oblivion: the name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of. You are writing against the current ideologies, mores or fashions of your time and place, then you must be prepared to resist pressures to conform to them if this is the artistically honest path for your work.

The creative writing coursebook

Many students come to creative writing because they are genuinely excited by what they ucing creative enced as readers. Faced by their everyday, the reader not only rides through or above their own world’s limits by borrowing the imagination of the original writer; they grow to aspire to create such worlds for themselves, no longer by play-acting and self-fantasy, but by the act of writing and making. Students and new writers also come to creative writing out of an appetite to impress or pose creatively. Annie dillard explains in the writing life how hemingway studied knut hamsun and ivan turgenev . If you do not read, if you do not enjoy reading poetry and fiction, then your time might be better spent doing something more productive in another arena, for you will get nowhere in that competition if you do not read as competitively and as creatively as writers. Those of you ucing creative wish to write might truant from your abilities out of the fear you might actually succeed, that you may have something to say. Better still (and this is one of the best reasons for the discipline of creative writing in education), ask a teacher or mentor to create a reading list that fits the way you, as an individual, write at this time. Have them change and extend this reading list as your writing changes and extends its borders. In the same way that creative writing must teach you to write on your own, and beyond your own intelligence, so the lessons of creative reading must teach you how to read on your own, and to read against your nurture and nature. Then, and only then, we must go about unlearning how to read, and begin striving for simplicity not allusion; for clarity not echo; for finding ourselves in our writing, seeing that those others we wanted to be, whose voices we were echoing, were ourselves g game write what you know: you as a person look around you. Situate your writing in the present day, using the first person (‘i’), and use as many of the observed details about yourself as possible. Once you have finished, put the writing to one side for three weeks, returning to it to complete the project. You will learn to read people, and their many ended reading there are two particularly fascinating studies of the history and evolution of creative writing as a discipline: d. Myers’ the elephants teach: creative writing since 1880 (prentice hall, 1995) and paul dawson’s creative writing and the new humanities (routledge, 2005). Seminal introductions to the neuroscience underlying literary creativity and the nature of metaphor creation are george lakoff and mark johnson’s metaphors we live by (university of chicago press, 1980) and mark turner’s the literary mind (oxford university press, 1996). There are hundreds of books on the nature of creativity, but ucing creative ’s creativity: theory, history, practice (routledge, 2005) is not only an innovatively written text in itself, but also provides a beguiling synthesis of thought and practice, crossing disciplinary boundaries and making fascinating links between the critical and creative. Although originally published in 1934, the reprint of dorothea brande’s becoming a writer (tarcher penguin, 1981) presents some of the most realistic ideas still on teaching and learning creative writing. This new edition carries an excellently provocative foreword by john gardner on some of the root problems of creative writing teaching and its teachers. John gardner’s own the art of fiction (vintage books, 1983) and annie dillard’s the writing life (harpercollins, 1989) bring illumination to the daily practice of writing and the purpose of reading as a writer. Frank smith’s beautifully concise writing and the writer (heinemann, 1982) contains fascinating material on the writer–reader contract, and the ways writers control readers. Writing in the form of compulsion seems to be far more important, in the making of a writer, than innate literary gifts. Historically, in the west at least, criticism and creative writing are two phases of the same activity, and criticism illuminates most sharply when practical experience of writing is at the bottom of it. The best criticism creates new open spaces for ve writing and creative criticism many university creative writing courses place an equal emphasis on the study of literature and the practice of writing. Out of a belief that criticism must rest in balance with creativity (or motivated by an unvoiced qualm that too much creativity numbs or softens critical intelligence), many writing courses are asked to require that students submit for assessment a reflective essay, or a commentary, on the aims and processes involved in writing their portfolio of creative tive criticism as a writer, you are a student of the world. You do not have to be taking a writing course to profit from writing critical, reflective self-interrogations, ve writing in the sistic as the process may appear at first. They often do so vicariously when writing about, or reviewing, the creative writing of other authors. You reflect on the aims of your writing and the process – for example, of drafting – by which it arrived at its final form. You also give critical attention to your own writing – for example, the affinities you may feel it has with the work of other authors – and by placing your work in any intellectual, aesthetic, social or other context you feel it should be seen in. This task is also useful training should you later eke out your income by literary reviewing, teaching or by writing biography. It allows you to think your way inside of writing in the same way that writing a poem or story helps a non-creative writing student to better understand what they are studying. How can you improve your writing conditions, how can ‘you do it as you can’? I want you to use this first statement as a measure of how far your creative thinking and reading has progressed. The knowledge you are translating into new writing may be non-literary; it could be experiential or drawn from non-literary areas. When you write a reflective essay, bear in mind that creative writers seldom begin writing from a theory or to a big theme. However, in the same way that translation theory has little effect on the practice of translation, so literary theory generally has little impact on the way creative writers go about their business. It has to be said that some writers find it creatively disabling to read literary criticism; they find it stalls them in the act of making, or it alters their expectations of literature in ways which are simply false or destructive. Ve writing in the s simply write for themselves, and reading about writing can undo a writer’s useful selfishness to an extent. Yourself as a writer reflective essays on the creative writing process tend towards being small, alert studies in critical realism, what we might term here creative critical realism. This is because they possess personal and interdisciplinary awareness; a demand for evidence, as well as argumentative coherence and consistency; and realism about the act and action of writing. While the creative work submitted alongside it may be affectedly postmodern (or not), the account of how and why it was written will be realist to the letter. You may not be able to articulate it yet, but you know that when you are drafting your own writing (or even writing it) you must become, as it were, somebody else. Reflective, critical writing of this type possesses at the very least: a sense of argument and development of argument; critical thinking and self-reflection; evidence of actual research for writing – for example, interviews with other writers; the critical context of your writing; the problems faced and overcome or not overcome; and, to round it off – to show you’ve read in order to write – a bibliography of creative reading. Writing game reflective thinking here are ten titles with which to begin writing a self-reflective essay. R r r r r r r r r ve writing how do i write what i know? In answering, you reflect on the aims of your writing and the process by which it arrived at its final form; and you give critical attention to your own writing, for example the affinities you may feel it has with the work of other al subjectivity your experience counts, and the foreknowledge that you do not place yourself into the work you write, but that you discover yourself there. Second, i would argue that experience informs and inhabits the most honest and enriching statements of poetics, as it does the most successful essays on the aims and processes of creative writing. While such vexations have led to some remarkable developments in philosophy, they do not tend to influence creative writing directly. Indirectly, of course, creative writers and artists pillage, use and parody such ideas and their hermetic jargons at will. However, some writers find the kind of language used in these discourses at best diverting and at worst ve writing in the do you write? A creative writer’s deepening knowledge of learning through practice frames their own answers to these questions. Criticism, like creative writing, is another open space for engaging an audience, and engaging with the world. Leading critics and interpreters of literature have themselves had substantial experience of imaginative writing at the deepest level. Sometimes it is imaginative writing and sometimes it is expository or critical writing, but usually there is overlap between them. What everybody is hunting for is the pedagogic key to creativity, the metamorphic knack to take teachable matters like metrics and syntax and recombine and transform them into something entirely innovative, producing writing in a style not yet seen or heard. As a creative writer (unlike, say, the writer of an aircraft design manual), what you write about is far less important than how you write it: ‘all the fun is in how you say a thing’ – robert frost. Later in the book, we discuss the importance of concentration and practice to achieve fluency, and demonstrate how playfulness and cunning can be hugely yielding the unpredicted in writing. As we shall see, the qualities of fluency, unpredictability and syntax are not far along the spectrum of writing from originality. What we can all probably agree on is that talent, like taste or character, can be cultivated, creativity nurtured or protected, and the purpose of creative writing as a discipline is to develop the talent and technique of new writers. Most teachers of writing recognise this, which is why, when people sign up for a creative writing course, they are often required to submit a folio of work, and they are selected, and sometimes self-selected, on its strengths. Whether a writer can teach creative writing is another matter, and it is worth your knowing why your teachers might be there, rather than at home, or on the road, scribbling and living the literary life. They want their aesthetic or ideology to survive, so they adopt prot´eg´es as ambassadors, as carriers of their message – a process vulnerable to backlash once the artist ve writing in the some writers, teaching is part of the process of creating an audience and catching them young – in this case, unlike public readings, an already captive audience. The point: where teaching and writing intersect (shapiro and padgett, 1983), a number of writers present the view, based on experience, that teaching writing feeds into the making of writing, and certainly that is my experience. Marriage of heaven and hell the worst thing that can happen to a writer is that their teaching begins to impact on their own artistic practice; their work ‘begins to sound like a teacher writing – intended, crafted, lifeless, and too clever by half’ (freed, 2005). Better to be a grave-digger, a long-distance truck driver or wait at table, they feel, than to be a teacher of literature or writing. They see physical work as nobler than mental work, and holding ial for material and writing. This is as important for the creative health of the writers brought in to teach the subject as it is for the students. Creative writing has always had a wide constituency of practice, thriving in schools, hospitals, adult education and wherever else writers seek to make their temporary homes or residencies. There is a balance between teaching and writing; it teeters one way or the other, but generally the writing gains a slight or more numinous (often unspoken) preference. This is an intuitive procedure while also being pragmatic, since original research informs the best teaching, and writing is the writer’s living version of research. Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual’ – arthur koestler. It electrifies, it enlightens the way they approach teaching: those who can, teach, and they do not need to be in a seminar room to do ence we are all creators of language, but to return to the prospectus offered by the university of life, although creative writing has rediscovered its historicalrhetorical home within the academy, it is blindingly observable that you do ve writing in the to pass through an academy to be a writer. It is best to start preparing for this ing ideas for writing william faulkner said, ‘a writer needs three things, experience, observation and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of others. In an interview, cynthia ozick commented on this aspect of creative writing teaching: the point is that the self is limiting. Might choose to explore this process by seizing stories, characters and ideas from myths, lore and old tales, and using them as templates for a ‘reality’ in your writing. The ultimate exercise in ‘writing what you do not know’ is to try to write a poem or story on the subject of nothing. This is a quality which creative nonfiction adopts and exploits, as you will read in chapter seven. Writing on his poem ‘the thought fox’ (see np: 1810), hughes talks of capturing ideas for creative writing as being like capturing animals – a process of hunting and fishing for poems using language: if i had not caught the real fox there in the words i would never have saved the poem. Sometimes we see daily work as time wasted to writing, but it need not be if you read it as a writer. Some ve writing in the g courses incorporate work experience, but this provides a temporary and possibly illusory experience. One example: writing is widely seen as not being a ‘proper job’, or inferior in value to other forms of study, or work. Moments like this should fire you up for writing: for writing back and against those who have colonised your language. Humiliation, like humility, creates articulate energy; anger and a sense of injustice can help you find your voice and your m, play and magic creative writers are not great ‘joiners’; they sometimes kick against what is expected. As groucho marx would not join any club that would have him as a member, so the attitude of creative writers standing apart (even if it is a pose) rubs off on others, on all of ve writing and freedom of expression one of the most striking aspects of a creative writing workshop is that opinions are voiced with freedom. However, creative writing’s capacity for the creation of illusion-as-truth, and the precision of its language, makes it doubly dangerous to authorities whose power depends on the formulation of illusions, and the debasement and twisting of language. Writers are the antennae for language,Creative writing in the ers of speech, and you, as new writers, should similarly be alert to language’s abuse and debasement. Political regimes, even regimes whose ideologies oppose each other, have found cause to target creative writers and intellectuals, to bend them to the will of their ideologies, to use writers as apologists or celebrants of dogma. As pen, the international writers union, reveals, there are many writers in prison, or under threat, throughout the world because of their writing. The best writing of this type does all of these s play the action of writing, as the poet and scientist miroslav holub put it, is an action of ‘serious play’, of wilful and sometimes wild experiment. Boisseau and wallace, speaking of poetry students, make a strong generic point when they argue for the play of experiment in a writing class: a course called ‘creative writing’ might better be called ‘experimental writing’. Faced with the daunting specter of a blank page, the poet may feel intimidated by the injunction to be creative; create. This is like a writing tutor who has shut out the world and experience as influences; and sometimes his or her pips find it intimidating to ‘play to order’. Play, however, can be deliciously s difficulty we find we are on a tightrope; we recognise where the tipping-points are within ourselves, and try to stay on it for the rest of our lives, writing and balancing all the grand binaries: imagination and rationality, doubt and confidence, achievement and failure. Writing in the labour to make art, and then we labour again to conceal it. The way in which the best writing workshops are conducted is to supply the right environment for a kind of rapid learning; what i would call a stochastic evolution of talent, one that runs in phases and leaps of progressive learning. There is a danger involved in such teaching and learning: the danger that students might fall so badly against their own inexperience that they are hurt to a degree that they turn away from writing, that they lose confidence in the long game. To play with our reading and writing, to play with language, even when in danger of falling into pretentiousness or opacity or simple mediocrity, is to take control of the situation. The more practice we have of this, the more playful we can become, and the more confident in our ability not only to control – but also to let ve writing in the world. Creative writing sigmund freud argued that ‘the creative writer does the same thing as a child at play. Pleasure in the afterword to his book on teaching children to write poetry, the american poet kenneth koch addresses the question of teaching teachers to play again with language and creative ideas: ‘such writing might begin with something as simple as writing a wish poem before they ask the children to . One can be released back into the continent of writing; there is no need to be scared of play. However, as creative writing keeps growing as a discipline – as it becomes more and more accepted, even respected – we must be careful it does not become part of a machine to produce more teachers of creative writing. In that sense, creative writing already stands in a very interesting place in the world, and possesses some interesting g game working with new language open a book of popular science, or a scientific textbook, and make notes on any aspects that catch your attention, especially the scientific language that is used for names of species, concepts or equipment. Now, rather than showing this work to another writer or teacher of writing, find a willing scientist or science student,Creative writing in the share your work with them. A creative writing student and a creative writing department neglect the art and the business of publishing at their peril, for this is where we meet the world head-on. Books about creative writing rightly investigate the process of writing but often ignore the fact that, although writing can be an end in itself, for most people the purpose of writing is to communicate to as many people as possible, while they can. Therefore, what we offer here can be no more than generic points, which are non-specific to their time and nation, but which may hold some resilient s for survival before you submit your writing to a literary magazine, or a book to a publisher, be sure you are completely satisfied that your writing has reached a steady, if not a final, state. This is what i term a circle for survival, a half-visible network that nudges the writing industry in one of its directions occasionally. It sounds surreal, but all these writers eventually become aspects of each other’s writing selves. This is not like the relationship you have with your creative writing teacher or mentor. You will find these friends very willing to put your writing through some very tough, and often meticulous, critical reading, because it is in their interest also, and because they like you. It can give you luck; can make ve writing in the se your chances for luck in writing and publishing. A better, leaner book, however, will be the tte for writers five practical points about publishing: always send your best work; know the kind of work that a magazine or publishing house prefers and submit writing that suits that taste; do not send the same work to different magazines or publishers at the same time; enclose a stamped addressed envelope with sufficient postage to allow the return of your submission; and always send out several pieces of work, and keep these circulating, adding new work when you can and correcting old work when it gets returned, so that when one of them returns with a rejection note you can still retain some hope of acceptance. They bring a hard nose to writing and editing gained at cost, where money is tight or invisible. The ‘nose’ they acquire for choosing good writing is coupled with a knack for knowing when a work is complete, and when a writer is bankable – do not reduce your value by hubris. Although all writing is rewriting, there is a station reached in the writing process when you must be unburdened. Creative writing and the publishing industry without the author, the literary industry would implode; its bustling world – publishers, agents, accountants, libel lawyers, departments of literature,Creative writing in the ers – would suffer the equivalent of nuclear winter. What has happened is that we now perform three jobs – writing, teaching, editing – where once we did one or, at most, two. Creative writing programmes tend to produce novelists and poets whose work can feel self-consciously literary. Some of them do very well for themselves but, for many, it is unlikely their work will sell, however superb their writing. Publishers know that well-written creative nonfiction sells far better than literary fiction or poems (see chapter seven). The foremost magazines and journals publish vastly more creative nonfiction than they do fiction or poems. Creative nonfiction creates an audience through their curiosity about a subject, and then (so writers hope) carries that audience into other genres through their interest in the writer. They sign up new poets and novelists, capture their promise in one genre, turning it to other more lucrative ends by encouraging them to write creative nonfiction. You create a physical or virtual open space for new writing, using print or the internet. Half the ve writing in the that authors will abandon a press if they become commercially successful, even though commercial success is no measure, historically, of literary quality. Improving the work of others is a far more rapid form of ‘writing’ than writing: ‘no passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft’ – h. That process will teach you more in a year about writing and writers than staying outside the arena, and hoping against hope that your talent will be recognised and rewarded by those inside it. Writing game setting up a publishing house become the editor for your community of writers or class. In the process, you will learn just how much bad writing is produced, not only by unknowns but also by known writers. Finding the finance to keep this enterprise going and maintaining a list of subscribers or advertisers will offer you a rapid apprenticeship in the business end of writing and publishing. However, your enterprise must aim for high quality if a good reputation is the desired ended reading the balance between the critical and creative is returning to the humanities slowly and surely, and interdisciplinarity assists this recalibration. Elaine showalter’s teaching literature (blackwell, 2003) contains fascinating studies of the creative teaching of literature, and is positive about the role of creative writing in universities. When writing reflective critical essays, it is essential to offer critical context; to say what other writers think about the issues you have faced in creative writing. Another annual, writer’s market, will help you decide where and how to submit your writing to appropriate markets in the united states and canada. For writers of fiction, carole blake’s from pitch to publication (macmillan, 1999) is a bible on the subject of novel publishing and literary agencies, used as much by literary agents as it is by aspiring nges of creative for women, i thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In this chapter, we look at some significant challenges – and opportunities – that we might be able to bend to the purpose of our writing, including cultural and social pressures, quality, translation, experiment, design and your own mind’s nges to writers the phrase ‘enemies of promise’ entered the language as the title of cyril connolly’s (1961) compendium of circumstances that inhibit writing, and is very much of its time: self-centred, brimming with masculine concerns, and obeisant to elite literature. Although we can now give notice to connolly’s aversion to ‘the pram in the hall’ as an enemy to the sensitive male novelist, there are moments of illumination concerning the impacts on writers and writing of politics, conversation, drink, journalism and worldly success. Writing these books allowed their authors to send plumb lines into their own posterity and those of their friends and allies. As we discussed in chapter two, writing such prose might seem self-regarding, but it is often necessary as a means to define one’s self-purpose and practice: to think yourself forwards into the kind of writer you want to become (or to cease to be the writer you have come to dislike). Like creative reading, this is one way to find allies to your own promise in yourself. You then find other allies, such as mentors, teachers of writing who are practising authors, your fellow student writers in workshops, and the circles for survival that grow around you as you edit and erence the world’s indifference to your writing is remedied by the corrective action of producing and publishing only your best writing, and even then nothing is guaranteed. Trust to the notion that life is short and art is long, and then just keep media some of the social and cultural constraints described by virginia woolf (see epigraph) may have loosened, but others have arisen to take their place, not least a popular view of literary writing as an art form that offers far less than film or digital media, in social and political terms, and even in imaginative experience and technical daring. Make an ally of film and digital media, by either creating fiction that becomes (but challenges) film, or writing that exploits and expands new technologies for its transmission. See the section ‘electronic performance’ in chapter entality, or kitsch the poet and critic mary kinzie has pointed out that it is difficult for new writers to recognise clich´es of feeling in their writing such as:Creative writing the idea that spontaneous reactions are the most trustworthy; that problems should be shared; that trying is more important than succeeding; that everyone is a winner; that the old regret not being young; that the outward reflects the inward; that beauty is somehow ‘correct’; that appetite is finally natural or healthy, and so forth. You do a thousand things to avoid writing: tidying up, rearranging the files on your computer. Think of it this way: only you can write your novels, poems and creative nonfiction. An annual literary prize in north america is given to a nominated writer to make them stop writing; to say, for god’s sake – enough. By allowing and even encouraging distraction, you award yourself your own prize for g it away new writers prevaricate when they should act and, worse, new writers develop a bad habit of ‘talking away’ their work, instead of writing it down. The creative reservoir inside you will dip as you talk about your ideas for stories, poems and articles. You will find you have many opportunities to nges of creative it afterwards; say, with your tutor during the revising process or should it become ism and journalism there are dozens of displacement activities; talking and self-distraction are simply the most obvious. More insidious are those activities that simulate the act of creative writing but are actually its surrogates, such as writing criticism and reviews. These are fine for when you are fallow, or between projects, but they are disastrous forms of displacement when you are writing at full pitch. On the other hand, maintaining a daily weblog or diary are excellent exercises in concision and discipline, and provide a more enduring means for warming up your writing mind for the day. Take the craft and precision of creative writing to criticism and journalism and remake them as creative y and perfectionism some writers do not fulfil their promise for a number of reasons, such as their addiction to a fantasy idea of themselves, spinning daydreams of success, while not comprehending that creative life involves exceptional levels of attention. Many creative writers strive for perfection in their work and working practice, but not enough of them achieve it. That is because they are striving rather than practising, and because perfect writing does not exist, only provisional versions that you revise until they have their own life. Politics outside of an official party is a different animal: writing engages with politics by default. However, as auden said, ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, and cs generally make for etiolated writing, or writing that has, as keats said, ‘a palpable design on the reader’. Try to overcome pagefright using some of the techniques in chapters four and five; use the translation ideas in this chapter; or try the writing games in this book. The way to recover is to stop writing, to print the manuscript and not look at it again for at least three weeks. After this period, it will seem sufficiently distant from your creative mental processes, as if it were the work of somebody of depth feeling out of your depth is a common state of mind for many writers while writing, one of the reasons many of them find apparent certainties intolerable. Writing beyond your skill or experience is frightening and can make the creative process slow or even static. Either you may feel that you do not know enough about what you are writing, or the means for expression seem beyond your grasp. Writing out of your depth allows you to locate and occupy further levels in your own character and your writing, making you keen for further advances into that abyss. He likens the challenge of writing yourself out of the inevitable splat to knitting oneself a helicopter while in freefall (moore, 2005: 46). Of creative -doubt as stephen king puts it, ‘writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the atlantic ocean in a bathtub. You grow used to the sensation of freezing up when writing, of proceeding in fits of stops, starts, ease and block. As annie dillard says in the writing life, ‘the feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged’ (1989: 15). Writing out of the muddle may supply us with material – for autobiographical creative nonfiction, for example. Explain the demands on your time and your hopes for writing, then discuss and decide what is possible and achievable rather than what is impossible or idealistic. By setting yourself realistic (and even short-haul) objectives in writing, you stand a chance of carrying out many of them, without lf a double disappointment of life and literature. This disabling condition arises partly from a clich´e of feeling that writing is a young person’s game and the brilliant among us perish early. Sometimes, creative writing students study the birth date of their favourite authors, calculate their age at first publication, and then vie to match them. This is destructive, not least because you open yet another route to failure, and one that has nothing to do with finding your natural rhythms for writing. Naturally, you should tap your creative energy as early as you can, but this might be during your forties or fifties. It is never too late to begin writing seriously, and there is no virtue in being published young, or before you or (more importantly) your work are as it is, some writers grow freer as they get older. Edward said believes the ‘late style’ of creative artists ‘is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality’ (2006: 9). Writing of the final poems of cavafy, said commends ‘the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile’ (2006: 148). For some writers, in fact, the incubation and gestation times for writing speed up with age, several books running through the cognitive assembly lines simultaneously. You write against it: its nges of creative en nurturing your children is one of the deepest, toughest joys in life, but can feel at odds with writerly discipline – both are justifiably needy. There is only one way around this, and that is to evolve a routine of writing around childcare, exhausting though this will be at first; and to ensure that you take up, or demand, as much support for your writing time as is reasonable. Ensure and assert that everybody understands that writing is your job, and that it is to be treated with the same respect as any other form of work. As seamus heaney once said, ‘the thing about writing is that, if you have the impulse, you will find the time. As children get older, be sure to help them to understand that writing is your work; and that it might be fun (and even educational) for them to try some of your tricks, too. Some writers, when they grow older, miss the regime of discipline created by their presence, questions and g game enemies and allies make a list in your notebook of the factors that stop you writing: ‘enemies of promise’. Make a second list of factors, such as circumstances, that help your writing: ‘allies to promise’. For example, if one of your enemies of promise is time, then think of ways in which you can increase 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. If one of your enemies is prevarication, cheat yourself into writing by resolving to carry out a writing game, some freewriting, writing in a set form, imitating or translating. It is also an effective medicine for fallow periods in writing, say when you are between major projects. This is not translation strictly; it is about taking the work of others and possessing it for yourself: is lost in translation for creative writers, translation shares the continent of writing. For a growing number of professional literary translators, it is another form of creative writing; after all, they own the process. Some words are charged with particular meanings in their host language, but that does not entail their carrying those associations into another ng 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 nges of creative there a perfect or perfecting way to carry such cargo from one country to another? 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. 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. 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 ion’s mirror a writer may well be fluent in the language they are translating. The final aim is to own it, and this is a writing exercise you should try for yourself. The work becomes that of a translated other, a melding of the two writers’ creative minds. 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). Writing game not translation go to a library that holds some books of fiction or poetry in a language you do not know. There will be more distance between the original text and your own than there would be were you imitating the voice of an author in your own nges of experiment sometimes, the challenge to creative writing is not to make something final or assessable, but to make something potential, a kind of audition with language, or even a playful confection of words and letters – art for art’s sake; play nges of creative ’s sake. On the continent of writing, no citizens have as much fun as in the country where the oulipo oulipo 100,000,000,000,000 poems consists of a sequence of ten fourteen-line sonnets by the french writer and former surrealist raymond queneau (1961). They are a positive, enlivening presence in the discipline of creative writing, ts and new writers are urged towards the oulipo compendium (1998), edited by harry matthews and alastair ses in style one of the best places for new fiction writers to start is queneau’s tale exercises in style (1947). Read through the piece (it can be fiction, creative nonfiction or poetry) and note the position of all the nouns. Of creative bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees, and fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; to swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells with a sweet kernel; to set budding more, and still more, later flowers for the bees, until they think warm days will never cease, for summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy a school dictionary, i counted forward seven nouns from the word ‘season’ and reached the word ‘sea-wall’. Writing game exercises in style write a short story of no more than a hundred words. Here is a selection of styles from which to choose:Creative writing opera libretto soap opera bullet-point list passive tense phrasebook translation news report comedy abstract language concrete poem minutes of meeting romantic novel sonnet erotic novel permutations by groups of 1, 2, 3 and 4 e manual insincere self-therapy book political broadcast nihilist suicide note end-of-dinner speech post-modern novel a series of haiku confessional tv chat show scientific paper memo impenetrable critical prose free verse sensationalist enigmatic. I m : all writing is rewriting to some degree and this game is a humorous means for student writers to do the equivalent of practising the scales of their voice, as well as fitting a body of words within a ‘form’ of style or a form of challenge of design the composer igor stravinsky claimed, ‘whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. We design our writing by the use of form, of formal patterns and devices, and by various patterning, shaping and restrictive devices. The challenge to new creative writers is that form is there to be used by you with imagination and wit; you should not be used by ctive liberation form is a powerful tool insofar as it can teach you how to break with it, or bend it, once you have mastered it, but you master it first. A paragraph’s design, or the design of a poetic line, should suggest possibility, not cast-iron certainty – even though the structure may be as involuted as nges of creative c design of a rose, or eye. In stories and poems, form must also be near-invisible, a presence in dialogue with the writing. A self-conscious creative writer can sometimes over-emphasise their formal ability so that what the reader sees and hears is ‘all pattern’. Using form to design fiction or poems is often emancipating for new writers who find it hard to surprise themselves in their writing, but, when faced by the mathematical scaffolding of an exercise in style, or a sestina or pantoum, find themselves in the mental position of problem-solvers rather than what they consider a special mind-set that artists possess. He also famously wrote that writing free verse was like ‘playing tennis with the net down’. Form provides a creative writer with simulation exercises, giving them a series of objectives and rules, such as rhyme scheme, metre and repetition. Writing to a restriction coerces you to create ways of saying things that would have not have occurred to you if you were left to your own netless game-plan. The baby in the cot may learn new words by listening to a nursery rhyme, nges of creative real delight lies in the way it is said: the pattern, the repetition, the rhythm, the rhymes, the metre – the form. Writers are composers: many begin writing a poem or story because the music of it occurs to them first, and demands that words be written to fit that noise. Some creative writers, especially those new to writing, view form as artificial rather than elemental, human and organic. A creative writing student’s reaction against formal writing might simply result from an allergy to the word ‘formal’, in favour of the affirmative antonym ‘informal’. The challenge to creative writing is no different: it needs to be well made to be desirable, even when it is apparently without challenge of quality perception and reception some creative writing students find it difficult to know how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ their writing is. However, there are times when the writing that is produced in these situations is exceptional in quality, but the fact that it has been achieved through the discipline of workshops means that it is not treated, critically, in the same way as it would be had it arisen ex nihilo. Partly, this is because the media promulgate a romanticised view of writing and writers, but also partly because they distrust academia. The public are asked to share these prejudices, despite the very high quality of some graduates of creative writing. It is difficult for some students of creative writing to read the work by certain critically acclaimed authors through the lens of apprenticeship or time. An exercise in perspective is to take the works of renowned contemporary writers, and have the students type some of their works word for word: nges of creative s, poems and creative nonfiction. One of the ways to lift quality within a creative writing course is to lift the level of expectation in reception. Writing a poem, story or investigative article, and knowing it is being written to be marked as part of a course, is not an intense inducement for writing out of your skin. If you, in fact, were to offer a new, young writer a contract with a major publishing house, it is possible that they would find themselves writing up to that higher level out of the sheer desire to impress, or a fear to fail at that one shot at fame. Therefore, the creation of publishing opportunities around such courses should be encouraged, so long as they do not subsequently develop into closed shops, whose output is limited solely to creative writing students and their g game raising your game, and raising the dead this is a group game, requiring role play. Each piece of writing is then ‘damaged’ in some way: ripped, burned, stamped upon or spattered with stage blood. The workshop leader as time should be responsible for most of this damage, for this is what time does to most creative writing.

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Everybody in the group assumes the persona of an archival scholar, whose task is to reconstruct the piece of writing (piece ‘a’). Members of the group take on this persona, and have in front of them a piece of writing they have discovered within the archives of their local library. Please try any trick in this book to make this piece of writing your own. Each piece of writing (a, b and c) is passed to the person on their right. Members of the group take on this persona, and have in front of them a piece of writing, by a minor writer, which they are going to pass off as their own for the sake of the newspaper’s deadline. 10) the students rewrite the piece to the best of their powers, writing up to the expectation of a nobel prize and a major newspaper publication. A i m : this game works on three levels simultaneously: raising the quality of writing because of an increase in expectations; altering the terms of reception so that writing is seen as a cultural object sliding through the dynamics of time; and getting to grips with the spectrum that includes translation, imitation, variation and literary theft. 1) if you raise the level of self-expectation and audience-expectation, it is possible that new writers find themselves writing up to a new higher level of quality. The way in which we view somebody’s writing can be affected by our view of the author, and this viewpoint may include all manner of matters, such as the circumstances in which they wrote, how old they were, and any details we know about their lives. 3) all writing is an act of translation, between authors, across time, and between author and readers. The students rewrite the piece better to reflect its origin as an adaptation, and script a short story describing the fictional nges of creative ing creative writing creative writing students as well as academic staff often ask the question as to how to assess creative writing, and how assessors arrive at a grade. Most teachers of writing would attest that it is a matter of experience and wide reading, and that we – as students, readers, writers and critics – ‘grade’ creative writing every day in the act of reading and the acts of criticism or writing reviews. As we discussed in the section ‘reflective criticism’ in chapter two, many writing courses are assessed by a portfolio of creative writing and an essay or commentary on the aims and processes involved in writing. The writer celia hunt argues thoughtfully that if students work through difficult, emotionally sensitive matters in their writing, then assessment should consider this personal dimension. She contends that creative writing is judged mostly by literary criteria, and these criteria may fit the critical mind but are not always sympathetic to emotional and personal matters (hunt, 2001). She opts, in the early stages of the programme of study, to assess only reflective papers and learning diaries, and not the creative work. The trained critic has been reluctant to judge creative works ‘in process’ and reluctant to define the criteria by which student performance in learning to write may be judged. However, wide varieties of assessment methods are used now within creative writing include the setting and assessment of creative writing exercises, reflective critiques, logbooks, diaries, journals, community and work placements and performances. More emphasis is placed on the importance of drafting original writing, and student logbooks and records of how and why they have changed their creative work are regarded as important aspects of the learning process. In the end, the answer to how creative writing is graded is: it is graded out of a hundred, but how that grade is arrived at may also depend on the context in which it was ended reading tillie olsen’s silences (the feminist press, 2003) was first published in 1978, and revolutionised literary studies. It inspired an explosion of new creative voices, especially women, black authors and working-class writers. Her book identified many of the social and cultural challenges to the writing process and, like virginia woolf’s ‘a room of one’s own’ (ne2: 2153–2214), is invaluable reading about the circumstances that make writing possible (or impossible). All three of the above will prove useful in thinking critically about your own writing. How free is a creative writer to make something new out of another writer’s work in another language? To gain a bigger nges of creative the issues and debates concerning literary design and writerly calculation, fiction writers should turn to the excellent narrative design: a writer’s guide to structure (norton, 1997), which has the benefit of being written from a novelist’s insider point of view by madison smartt bell. Bell uses examples of student writing from his creative writing classes to illustrate key points of narrative design. Porter abbott’s the cambridge introduction to narrative (cambridge university press, 2002) artfully examines designs of narrative in literature (and usefully in film and drama). And creative r it is right or advisable to create beings like heathcliff, i do not know: i scarcely think it is. But this i know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master – something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. Have seen how the composition of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction is mostly a matter of reading and practice. However, there are many ways of building on the open space of writing and working beyond your of mind, principles of practice i said at the beginning of this book that you must learn to trust your own judgement. I suggest here broad brush strokes of practical judgement that unite not only many teachers of writing but also many ition and creative of these notions emerge through their everyday practice, through feeling and instinct, and by els of practice despite the fact that writers, as a mark of their office, tend to be determinedly not of the same mind, it is surprising that so many of them agree on a few principles when they are writing about the act of writing, or when they are engaged in criticism of fellow authors. Many poets go on to write novels and creative nonfiction, and bring precisions to prose. Writers may espouse legislations on artistic practice only to have the mischievous pleasure of debunking them later through the action of antithetical writing; through the creation of anti-narrative; or the making of their own species of anti-literature. An early interest in language is a mark that a person might have a talent for writing. Reading will make you a better writer, but reading-as-a-writer will make you even more fluent in style, teaching you technique and building your ition and creative writing. Writing what you don’t know’ might later hold as much potential as ‘writing what you know’. Your writing voice must be distinctive; it must be differentiated from its precursors or your reader will stop listening. Writing is one of the most joyful and playful activities for the human mind and body. It is as physical as it is psychological, and the real rewards of writing lie within the process of writing, not in publishing. You will learn more about writing if you give yourself the permission – sometimes – to write badly. This book is testing these principles in permutation, and so will you through your writing, rewriting and the writing games within each chapter. Think of it this way: knowing some of the principles we have listed might save you some time, although writing against such principles could teach you something. Mistakes are worth making, and are even a necessary part of a process (as they are in scientific research), and writing clumsily is a necessary stepping stone to writing g game rules of engagement what are the rules by which you write? Put this list of rules aside for the next six months and do not read it, but put your creative piece ition and creative only two weeks, and return to it once you have read the rest of the book. A i m : rewriting is as important as writing, but our frames of reference alter with time and practice. We must do a lot of learning, but most of all we have to do a lot of unlearning, for our preconceptions of writing are usually based on received opinion, our experience of teaching, or on what nadezhda mandelstam called the ‘hypnosis’ induced by passive reading. As we write and read more actively, not only does our writing mutate and become newer to ourselves (and so easier to revise), but our frames of reference become more complex and dynamic. We have clicked our fingers and woken g badly and over-writing it is important to give yourself the permission to write badly, and learn through rewriting. As somebody at the beginning of a writing career, you need to give yourself other permissions, too. Workshop games and writing games ask this of you and, in the professional world, such ‘commission’ is commonplace. Clear writing can be made in this conscious way, but good style is tricky to write to order. Slap the plaster on the page’s walls; planing and rococo can come of language creative writing is a craft that requires continual learning; it is a long game. You may feel, as a student of creative writing, that at some point you will ‘graduate’ into being a writer. Dissatisfaction with what has been written, and what has been published, is the common and perpetual state of mind of many creative writers. Some guidebooks on writing offer various writing strategies and games; writers write the best of these. Ition and creative ence of making your own way through the river is likely to teach you more about endeavour; about error; about language’s nature; about your own character; how to understand and balance all of these; and how to reconcile the difficulty of moving within the flow, the entirely natural forces, of maps certain how-to-write books (which i have not listed or cited, but have read) offer a series of abc methods that, if practised, have the effect of taking the writer on an excursion of technique. The process of writing is far more chaotic, a mapless place, a zone for experiments, and for the constant interruption of failures. Schaefer and diamond in the creative writing guide acknowledge, ‘as any writer knows – or will discover – writing is often a confusing, organic, unorganized process of exploration’ (1998: x). I have tried to reflect this unaffected aspect of the writing apprenticeship throughout this book. Consider, for example, the importance writers place on developing their own distinctive habits of composition; of discipline; and even a personal philosophy which, messy and provisional though this will be, at least throws a little light on why they are writing in the first place. Another example concerns the romanticising of the writing process, and how anybody who wishes to be a writer must learn to live within the disparity between how writers and the writing process are perceived – say, by readers, filmmakers and, surprisingly, academics – and the unglamorous, serendipitous life creative writing actually line part of all of us does not like writing, or rather does not like effort. Begin by finding the place that best suits your writing, and make this your territory: ‘a room of your own’. After a while, the mere act of going to that place will begin to trigger the routine of writing. Find the times of day that best suit your writing process, but bear in mind that you will find this time changes as you get older: young night owls end up as middle-aged nine-to-fivers. Having worked in your space for a fixed amount of time, it will be tempting to start taking breaks – ten-minute vacations from concentration (smokers are especially culpable) – but such breaks disturb and corrupt creative momentum. The enforced discipline (rather than a selfenforced one) is a strong attraction of creative writing courses in universities. They offer you a strict timetable for reading, writing and rewriting; weekly support and criticism; and they force you to stay in the metaphorical ‘room’ of the course. Both joseph conrad and graham greene allowed themselves a relatively low daily word limit of writing. Writing the origin of species, charles darwin suffered a lack of discipline, so he set up stones in a small cairn on the sandwalk outside his study, the path darwin paced as ition and creative out his ideas. Each stone represented a point darwin wanted to make within a daily quota of writing. Within your working day, try to complete a section of a novel or a piece of creative nonfiction, or take a poem through to its pre-final draft. Writers often find it useful to warm up their minds at the beginning of a writing session by revising and rewriting the work they have completed the day previously. As you get more experienced, you should increase your word count, and include a substantial amount of rewriting time to begin your working day. Dorothea brande believed that reading immediately before writing was a bad idea, and that you should build in time for what she called ‘wordless recreation’ (1981: 133). What they create may prove in the end to be good writing, but no writing is good enough to require other people to suffer for its , any conniving of circumstances to bring about your downfall is your own creation, a kind of anti-creation and self-destructiveness. The corollaries of any inertia on your part are that no writing will get finished, and what writing there is will suffer in quality because it has received insufficient time and attention. Without a routine, the times when writing seems ‘given’ will decrease or become erratic as your fluency stutters from lack of practice, and submerged ition and creative any such creative moment arrives, should your discipline have been lax, anxiety can lead to panic. At least you might write from that oks and rituals one thing an ‘abc of writing a book’ does very well is talk of markets, audiences and that chimera for creative writing: money. However, since writing creatively does not always bring much financial comfort, one of its underrated merits for the beginner is that it is relatively inexpensive compared to other art forms. It has more to do with whether the writer possesses some key to the writing process, and whether the thing with which you choose to write has some talismanic power. The secret knowledge they may find problematical to hear is that the difference between becoming a writer and not becoming a writer usually comes down to whether you carry a notebook; are prepared to work in it actively and regularly; and are willing to sit for hours typing and rewriting. The pressure, the responsibility, to make a record of life instigates much writing and, if you ignore this primal mnemonic need, you must either possess a sponge-like memory or be content with a passive reading of your world. A notebook is an active tool; but it is an error to believe that by carrying this spear on to the stage of writing you become a player. You use it for writing regularly, but the main uses will be to record ideas for sentences while you are actively thinking about one hundred other matters; to take down interesting material while travelling; or to record sentences and dialogue you hear, or overhear. You have seemingly finished your day’s work, but your mental processes will still ition and creative ring on their reel. The reservoir of your creative thinking needs time to fill up – let your unconscious mind do all that filling and working. I am saying you should view wide, indiscriminate human contact as a form of research for writing, and make this your ritual. How you organize your notebook is important, but do not use the organization of notebooks and files as a displacement activity for not writing. A simple form of organisation is to possess two notebooks: one for recording and collecting, and one for writing and g game fieldwork go for a walk with your notebook and collect the following ‘data’: two real overheard conversations; three species of birds; two brand names for food; the words from six signs; the name of one planet or star; the name of a lipstick; one time of day; the title of a book of fiction; the title of a painting; the name of a dead politician; two types of onion and one type of potato; the names of three items in a hardware store; a make of gun; and the speech of a child. Revise this writing until the use of this data seems completely inevitable, and neither random nor forced. Force becomes habit; ability becomes facility and es of composition writers can be ritualistic about when they work, and where they work, and this also goes for writing materials. Another excuse for the circular helplessness of writer’s ition and creative ition’s action movement some of our best ideas come when we are otherwise distracted, as when we are going to sleep or driving. However, both exercise and music have the capacity to elicit creative thinking, by blocking conscious thought and inviting contributions from the unconscious: ‘flashes of insight’ we call them, or ‘inspiration’, or ‘the given’, when they are no more than the synaptic impulses of dreamers. You need to trial these practices to test if they work for you (and to make sure you do not use them as excuses to stop writing). Try playing different sorts of music until something begins to answer and propel the rhythm of your and prompts for action aside from notebooks, pens and computers, a new creative writer needs the support of a word hoard, such as the oxford english or chambers dictionary, to locate words and to use them precisely. Dictionaries are richly seamed places to spend time looking for prompts to making creative language. The dictionaries and thesauri that come packaged with word-processing programs are digitally tongue-tied when applied to creative writing (although they are generally fine for academic writing or reports). 1) play some music while you are writing, and change the musical style entirely every half an hour, but keep writing the same piece. 2) take a walk right now, taking with you your notebook, and return to writing immediately after one hour. Now begin counting aloud from one hundred to zero, but keep writing all the time. 2) exercise assists creativity in many ways, not least because it encourages creative dialogue between unconscious and conscious states of mind. Mental switch there is writing and there is not writing, and writing is a ‘zone’. Martin amis believes that ‘much of the time you are writing the fiction that other people have in them’ (2001: 6). Margaret atwood says that it is not just the nature of the activity, it is also because writing carries a symbolic role:Composition and creative ne can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger. We need to assume that we are capable of meeting these challenges, and can answer the silence around us with iting try to focus on your writing as often as possible. The quickest and least frictional method for beginning to know the zone of writing is to practise freewriting every day. You can never stop thinking, but you can stop thinking you are thinking, and freewriting helps you do this. The following morning, pick one of these phrases at random, and write it down and immediately begin writing anything that comes into your mind. You can write what you like, but you must continue writing without stopping writing and without thinking. Freewriting can produce some very interesting phrases and directions, and has been known to lead to some very fine work. However, it is most important in getting you used to the habit and action of writing. Recovering in a clinic from opium addiction, jean cocteau wrote his novel les enfants terribles in an act of extremely fast writing, about which he commented to andr´e gide: ‘the real benefit of my treatment: work has laid hands on me. Capability many writers find that, if they follow a routine of writing, or if they practice freewriting often enough, they achieve various degrees of fluency in their expression (even though the words will need chopping and planing later during rewriting). In fact, when you have an idea for writing, it asks very little of your conscious attention. The creative process can be rather like going into a trance, in which the unconscious and unconscious minds talk to each fluidly if not eloquently, and much writing is achieved in a short time: it’s wonderful, there’s nothing else like it, you write in a trance. It’s ition and creative ation of the body-mind and the dreaming-mind and the daylight-conscious-mind. Read back what les murray says above and, by freewriting, try to induce the painless headache in yourselves. Writing game inducing the painless headache light a candle, and focus your entire attention on the point at which the flame meets the air. Begin writing a story or a poem while in this state of relaxation, and repeat this exercise regularly if it induces writing with which you are content. A i m : active dreaming of this type, like freewriting, is one of the more rapid ways to access creative ideas and associations, and to induce a state of ation and duende new writers mistake the state of trance with inspiration. When a writer or writing student says that they have missed a deadline because they were not feeling inspired enough to write, they make a simple error. Sometimes writers (in the main, poets) claim that they avoid writing in order to precipitate inspiration, as if apparently ‘conscious writing’ were something as forbidden to them as sex to a priest. They argue that the power of writing then grows through abstention, so, when its moment arrives, it strikes with greater force in shorter time. Sometimes calculation works better than inspiration, and even humdrum daily practice can make a more conductive rod for ition and creative ing. Writing proceeds forwards slowly, like a sand dune moving through night and day, simultaneously accreting and eroding. Our writing requires not only analysis, intelligence as well as intuition – it requires discussion; evaluations and feedback from our peers and mentors. Writing plays is, after all, one of the most collaborative of the written art forms. If you are not used to writing regularly, you are unlikely to be attracted to your desk by the sheer habit of writing, a habit that gives pleasure even when difficult. Writing will seem physical in its insistence, like someone demanding his or her own birth. Duende is rooted in your own metabolism: your power of expression changes the metabolism of your own writing on the page, making it more alive and urgent to a reader. All sorts of different stories ition and creative open up as well as the one that must be written: the inevitable final piece. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your of the main purposes of writing workshops is to clear away verbiage and false language. First, take a short excerpt of creative nonfiction from one of the norton anthologies (see preface) and translate it into modern abstract or pompous language. Practise both forms of writing and you will find it easier to identify and eliminate verbiage in your own work and that of nce and imitation the writers who influence us are like heroic teachers. It is in mutation between both the generations of writers as within their time, and in mutation within the writing as it travels through time and before their readers. It is often a good idea to choose models of writing that are plain in style, that have few nervous tics; they allow you to play variations upon a fairly open space before moving on. This is when we mimic a writer’s voiceprint slavishly, an error of the writing process that derives often from the character of the apprentice: afraid of challenging beyond an existing writer’s linguistic territory, or unaware that they have remade a perfectly designed wheel. One point of creative writing, as derek walcott has said, is to find out what we mean; and to find out what we mean, we must first find out who we are. In paul muldoon’s phrase, they have found new g game imitation ask each member of your writing class about the writers who have influenced them most, and also the writers against whom they have reacted. Bring copies of stories and poems by these writers, and ask the students to read examples to class, with illustrations of influence or imitation from their own writing. However, extreme or affected literary styles are useful for exercises in parody or pastiche; try them as an ition and creative ops as open spaces one of the jobs of a creative writing programme is to give new writers the time to develop themselves and their work. One of the ways to accelerate that process and save their time is through the writing workshop, although there are other approaches that simply require the writer to be alone in a room, remain there and get on with it. In creative writing, the function of the workshop depends upon the intents and character of the tutor, and upon the context of the event, such as it being a scheduled part of a university degree. I have witnessed writing workshops in bars, parks, zoos, galleries, medical schools, hospitals, trains, nature reserves, museums, mountain tops and, of course, schools and arts es workshops serve many purposes, one of which is less visible but very important: the creation of a community of writers. Whom a new writer meets in a writing workshop may well be their professional and personal friends for life. Writing is a lonely business; workshops help you access other people’s experience and strategies for writing. Workshops also palliate the loneliness of the writer, although one must be wary about getting too used to this palliation, since a great deal of honest writing emerges from the lack of it. The best workshops have simple, rather than subtle, s writing workshops were born out of theatre writing which, like any performance-based medium, is necessarily more collaborative than writing. They were open spaces; the ition and creative these workshops was not theoretical but practical, and that remains the case with writing workshops. Writing workshops emphasise the practical: in technique, in the methods and devices for getting the desired ends, and in reading what best can exemplify those methods and devices. Writing workshops often use writing, good and even bad, as starting points for discussion of technique, or for imitation, or for redrafting. You will find that if you work hard for another person’s writing, they will work as hard or harder for yours. The best workshop groups ought to have a strict life span, lest their participants familiar with each other’s critical and creative practice. There is the generative workshop, the purpose of which is to catalyse and create new writing, sometimes by creative writing exercises, and often by reading examples for imitation or rewriting. There is the responsive workshop, the purpose of which is to assist with a critical understanding of new writing. It might not even be the state that most in the group can agree upon, for that would lead to homogeneous neity one of the wintry criticisms of writing workshops is that they produce such homogeneity within a false democracy of tender critical standards, notions of worthiness of subject and tone in writing, and back-slapping. You become many writers while remaining true to your individual generative workshop within a generative workshop, another cure for homogeneity is for a rich variety of writing tasks to be set. The basic premise is to trigger a new ition and creative work, and that can be fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, performance or drama. Improvising writing on the spot is an exercise in discipline but also in practising a certain degree of wildness. You learn to apply the improvisatory and wilder modes to your own writing when you are alone. The trigger for generating new writing is often a sample of exemplary writing by a published author, whose style or subject you imitate. Restrictions on your writing may be introduced, such as a form, or a verbal or mathematical pattern in which certain words or patterns are imposed or excluded (chapter three introduced restrictive writing and form). Many generative workshops benefit by beginning with freewriting, the very practice of which helps create as much ‘happy accident’ as it does gobbledegook. In the list of ‘recommended reading’, i list other books containing the most interesting or intriguing writing exercises i have read, or seen used in class. Some creative writing teachers devise a series of ‘recipes’ for writing which have worked for them, and they stick with those. The weather within their writing reads as if it was the same, and not of their making. Some workshops fuse the two approaches of generation and criticism, and some workshops also engage in collaborative writing, in which students work towards a piece that has been written and devised by the whole group or by smaller groups within the class. There is no better way to test the honesty and inevitability of writing, the precision of language or the naturalness of voice. If a student suffers from a speech inhibition (they may have a stammer or be simply shy), then they can elect to have their work read aloud by one of their friends or by the tutor without comment or introduction. All writing should be read plainly and undramatically, lest it elevate the quality of substandard work through a persuasive performance. When a student reads, they are encouraged not to open their reading with a qualification about the quality of their writing, nor should they offer an anecdote about its creation. The writer should not talk about the knowledge that went into the creation of ition and creative g, at least not at first; the subject of the workshop is like the visible part of the iceberg, the work that is above water level, the knowledge of creation below. One of the least lines of resistance in writing, as far as criticism is concerned, is middlebrow humour: not extreme black humour nor tragicomedy, but an engaging, disarming and gentle writing that resists critical scrutiny. In a workshop, it is very tempting for a writer to play for laughs, and to bring writing that performs and pleases. However, easy comedy etiolates a group, starving it of serious purpose, allowing a writer to manipulate an audience or group and get away with murder or, at least, mediocre writing. If the writing group roles, because they make for a frictionless social ride, then those roles can ossify. We become what we seem, for it is far easier to play a character than to be our open selves – and we have spent considerable time creating fictions by which to live our lives – and to populate our writing with created people. Members of the writing group tend to play out caricatures: the clown or the cold fish; the ing´enue or the iceman; the intellectual snob or the noble savage; the therapist or the perfectionist; the silent genius or the iron critic; the wallflower or the flirt; the artiste or an etcetera. Criticism at this level is not an attack – it is not an attack on you; it is not even an attack on your writing. Your writing is not important enough to warrant attack, and therefore it is not necessary to require defence. A constructed argument from an investigation of a piece of writing is useful to your progress as a writer. For complete beginners, you may wish to use a slightly different recipe for critical thinking by making notes under the following headings while the writer is reading the piece aloud to the group: (a) specify what works for you about this piece of writing; (b) specify what does not work; (c) make one specific suggestion that will improve the work; (d) contribute one suggestion as ition and creative reading might help the work or move the writer on from it. Writing game the iceman cometh think about how you and members of your workshop portray yourselves to each other when you are reading and commenting on work. There are dozens of books containing workshop exercises, as well as guides to using and enjoying writing workshops. Candace schaefer and rick diamond offer inventive guidance for writing poetry, literary creative nonfiction, fiction and drama in their creative writing guide (addison-wesley 1998), as does paul mills in the routledge creative writing coursebook (routledge, 2006) and janet burroway in imaginative writing (longman, 2006). Highly innovative class and solo exercises can be found in metro: journeys in writing creatively (addison-wesley,2001) by hans ostrom et al. A thorough introduction to workshop culture and practice can be found in josip novakovich’s fiction writer’s workshop (story press, 1995) and carol bly’s beyond the writers’ workshop (anchor, 2001). Poets seeking firstrate poetry workshop games should consult the practice of poetry: writing exercises from poets who teach (harperresource, 1992), edited by robin behn and chase twichell, and writing poems (longman pearson, 2004) by michelle boisseau and robert wallace. Taken together, these volumes contain thousands of inventive generative workshop exercises by experienced writers for new ses of creative to the poetical character . A clear eye on yourself to ensure you plant the natural stages of the writing process into your daily discipline. Creative writing courses mimic these stages, especially long-term or residential courses where the focus is solely on writing, and you are not studying other subjects. Your life is a course to which writing lends processes preparing the creative process begins in preparation, which includes active reading, imitation, research, play and reflection: all conscious actions. This is also the time when you are settling your project, deciding exactly what you are going to do, and researching ways to help you achieve it, including researching history and other factual data for fiction and creative nonfiction. If you choose this path, you must allow more time for incubation of the project, and for rewriting afterwards. Drafting poems is a kind of training for their inner ear and for writing without verbal padding. On the other hand, some poets turn to prose fiction and creative nonfiction, not only for the money (a chimerical objective), but also because their poetic voice may inhibit choice and exploration of subject in verse. In addition, a poet or short story writer may elect to write creative nonfiction to take the concisions of expression into a genre that more people read: these miniaturists of style seek a larger audience out of a desire, say, to share some important issue. All of them begin their preparation through reading, and some degree of conscious ses of creative ng planning of this type can include research, but can also include other factors, especially acts of premeditation. A creative nonfiction writer usually begins with subject, not structure, and makes a choice; they research the subject, and carry out interviews and archive and internet searches. Their books are an exploration, a journey without maps, or one in which the map of events is a secret held by its characters, as elizabeth bowen explained: the novelist’s perception of his characters takes place in the course of the actual writing of the novel. In his novel old school tobias wolff describes how: the life that produces writing can’t be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s ve writing and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee. Have already examined the importance of dreams, daydreams, unconsciousness, and writing badly; these are aspects of ‘a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer’. Writers agree that getting started on a new piece of writing is the most difficult of all the writing processes. Begin by freewriting and free-associating sentences until some patterns emerge that begin to intrigue you solely for the sound they make, their rustle of possibility. There is no forward march: begin rewriting some of these into sentences or lines of meaning, and begin the forward stagger into writing. This is the reason some creative writing tutors, when looking for the living words within a student’s draft, experiment with the student-author’s intention by striking out the first few paragraphs or stanzas. The process of creative writing is analogous to the process of ‘blocking out’ a painting before shaping the details of the picture, allowing details to become clear within the murk of written ses of creative g if you keep to the discipline and habit of daily writing, then continuing will not present many difficulties, not least because you will begin to enjoy the exploration and actively look forward to seeing what happens next. This is where writing is the most fun you can have, and still call it work. The audience for writing is invisible to you while you are working; a conductor shows their back to an audience in order to give the best of their work. I have suggested you maintain a steady flow of work, even a mechanical word count, putting in the hours, and writing quickly and uninhibitedly. Creative flow has been described by psychologists as a state of total absorption, a superfine focus in which the writer has clear goals but is writing at a stretch: at the limits of their intelligence, in fact. This pushing forward, even when your writing pushes three steps forward and two steps back, is the writer’s natural rhythm and momentum, and you must find your own. As seamus heaney puts it:Creative writing getting started, keeping going, getting started again – in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as g game improvisations choose a time of day when you are free of commitments for thirty minutes. Voyage around your bedroom three heroes of your youth adolescence a horrible truth about your family how to tame a wild tongue how to tell a story five lies you tell about yourself i heard a fly buzz when i died going to the movies when i read a book the missed chance a life history of your grandmother effort at speech between two people thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird building a fire remembering your last birthday reading the mind of your friends pulling weeds scene in a waiting room on observing a large red-streak apple a conversation with your parents the emperor of ice cream the real thing thoughts on the present state of american affairs midnight and i’m not famous yet one square metre of your soul fates worse than death owlwoman and coyote after a dinner party what it is like to be hungry every day why you are ses of creative average word count for each day should be about 500 words. The point is not to create the free associations of free-writing, but to encourage concentration and improvisation on one subject, and to engender the habit of fluency, a little like practising scales before improvising your own melodies. You may wish to play a guessing game of the origins of the titles silence reservoir the writing process is not unidirectional, but a total, an organic process. Writers operate on the same artistic plane for a time, working through several pieces of writing, or even several books. However, given sufficient fluency through practice, they make artistic breakthroughs and leaps while writing one particular piece – a poem or short story, say. Observed from outside, writers evolve their voices and styles stochastically, making occasional quantum leaps in the quality and authenticity of their writing. Be aware of this as you are writing, and watch for such jumps and steps in the evolution of your talent. Like a string of powerful love affairs, every book (as joyce carol oates has written) will feel like the book while you are writing it. What does it do, sitting there on its own like a little crown prince of your continent of writing? Like it or not, it may tip the balance between your work being read or not, and it might form part of what is graded within a writing course. Spend a great deal of conscious time on your titles, and produce many maquettes of it:Processes of creative l versions and variations that you can trial on your fellow writers in your workshops, or your tutors. Choose wisely and, if you do not have that leisure, at least choose writer post-performance rewriting actually, the performance has yet to begin. All of what we write needs planing and pruning and, as all writing is rewriting, so all rewriting is another form of writing. Writing of musical composition, johannes brahms declared, ‘it is not hard to compose, but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table. Rewriting your work requires a quite different state of mind from creating it from nothing. Or: we find something inappropriate in one part of our writing, but it glistens too beguilingly. In rewriting, you create new, knottier pressures, holding the superstructure of your story or poem in place. You require some indifference: either the eye of time or somebody else to ses of creative over. There is merit in abandoning a mediocre piece, and starting again with a blank sheet and a savage sense of accomplishment gained by decisiveness: by learning from error rather than rewriting versions of the same mistake.

It is as liberating as form, despite the sensation that it makes time weigh upon the act of writing. The deadline pays heed to your writing; it does not pay heed to your life. The deadline set for the submission of a student’s portfolio of writing pays little heed to the different ways that students write, learn and live. Deadlines demand concision and conclusion; at some point, a piece of writing is as complete as it can be. You might even view the creative act of drafting as a journalist turning in their copy. Writing then becomes a job, not a chore, not yet an art – which is liberating. We all know the ses of creative not having said what we intended; of not having communicated what you felt was your version of a truth. However, writing gives you time for rehearsal, and time to get your words as right as possible. As strunk and white declare, ‘although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one’ (2000: 79). When we examine and fossick the world for material for our writing, we must be precise about what we really see, hear, touch, smell and taste. Do not impose your own aesthetic judgement, emotions or mood on what you are writing. When you have finished, to the place with your writing, and place it somewhere where it can be seen by other visitors; or hang it from the branch of a tree. A i m : try being entirely self-effacing in this writing, as the best poets, naturalists and scientists are, but also playful in how you ‘perform’ your work. Try writing a story or poem that contains her finding that ‘a steel globe of twenty equilateral triangles – the greatest number of regular sides geometrically possible – could be grouped into five parallelograms and cut from rectangular sheets with negligible scrap loss’ (moore, 1968: 281). You can discover precise, clear language of this type easily, and a good creative exercise is to ‘find’ such material and transform it into something of your own. You are encouraged to take what you can from other writers, but the argument here is that you should also take what you can from other non-literary writers, whether they are scientists, architects or even ion and voice the right names and terms give your writing greater power and show you have done your work. The other property in writing that comes out of precision, clarity and simplicity is a natural ‘sound’ or voice to the writing (raymond carver and robert frost are exemplary in this respect). Alert, evocative, precise writing of this standard is not too far from the best observational nature writing, or writing that arises from scientific inquiry. Obviously, an ethologist would not reach for the simile of ‘exactly like the bubbles in champagne’ while writing a scientific paper, but they might were they writing a popular nonfictional book on the life of fireflies. You may wish to learn this precision, too: by observing the world, and making translations from the natural world into your own creative ses of creative g game reading 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, a shore 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. 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. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn’t matter’ – edward 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. One of the benefits of a creative writing course is that you have a better 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. Confidence affects the quality and style of your writing, and writing in this frame of mind will become habitual and addictive,Processes of creative euphoria becomes familiar through practice. The action of writing can prove to be an act of writing, only there is nothing phoney about it. Or: our body gets in the way of the practice of writing with illness, depressions and mood swings. Moments like this can precipitate artistic crisis: writing careers can fall apart, the language becoming clinical or unravelled and worn-out. This is the time to employ a metaphorical ghostwriter, to become your own ghostwriter in the employ of your writing self. It is time to discover your other writing do you require crisis to make discoveries? But your writing voice must be distinctive; it must be differentiated from its precursors or your reader will stop may seem mysterious not least because, in creative writing, it begins as a metaphor. Voice is a three-way metaphor: for writing as you speak; for writing as you speak at your best; and for writing with rigour, stripping away all the unnecessary apparatus from language that stop you from speaking clearly, that stop you being phoney. The reader will always be able to tell when you are not writing in your voice, since your syntax will sound inauthentic. Although writing is often there to make a fiction of the world, and to convey fiction’s greater truth, the voice makes the writing honest and authentic, truer than any relative truth. The self we see in the mirror, and the selves we explore in the mirrors of our writing, are always different. The self is mutable, and writing is a performance of one’s self and selves. This game objectifies that ses of creative o selves as i wrote, finding your voice may be one step to finding several voices, even to the point of ‘losing your voice’. What i term ‘placebo writing’ often produces interesting work by people who have struggled to write anything with ease, energy or imagination. As you carried out the writing games in this book, especially as you free-wrote, you began to realise that the self you know is not necessarily the self who writes, or the one who writes well. Other the idea of the other is only a metaphor for a state of mind while writing. It is best to keep it simple, and say that many creative writers experience the sensation that somebody other in them is at work while writing. Like negative capability, the other is a psychological notion, ses of creative ociation within the sensibility of the self: a controlled bipolar sense, one that allowed the poet arthur rimbaud to speak of an ‘i’ that ‘is an other’: je est un autre. Sometimes that other feels disassociated to the degree that it is outside of you; in this case a creative daemon, a creature or person that stalks you, is tracked by you, but is part of you, a little like the figure of the devil in james hogg’s novel the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner (1824). You do need to believe in it, at least while writing or beginning to write. Well, you can learn to care less about the whole received idea of writing as something mystical. Write as though a dead line lay so near to you that what you are writing is the final thing you will write. By doing so many times, it will become one of the habits of writing, and one of many self-roles of the dramatic personae within you. Remember: it is a tone of g others you will begin to recognise that there is some heartlessness at the core of writing, despite its assertion and celebration of human values. Claims that he lets the ‘first self’ go on living, so that the other self can create literature, and that this writing justifies the existence of the first self: ‘my life is a flight and i lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him’. To paraphrase margaret atwood, in her book of essays on writing negotiating with the dead (2002), a writer also consists of individuals whom they may never see or know. The person and the writer are invisible to each other or they might move between selves, characters of themselves, while they are writing. Indeed, this facility is one of the engines for development of characters in fiction and creative nonfiction, or of voice (and voices) in writing more generally. When in the flow of writing, it is almost as if the ses of creative gone native with their created personae or characters, like an actor staying in role to explore their stage or movie character to its fingertips. Game ‘method’ writing each member of the writing group elects to be another person within it for one week. For example, the portuguese writer fernando pessoa invented four writing selves, each of whom published under their own name and had their own style of writing (1974). Secondly, it gives complete freedom to write as you wish,Processes of creative e it removes responsibility for the work’s reception from your name. Currer bell, george eliot, george sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Some writers try to remove themselves, or any of their selves, from their writing by self-effacement of voice. In non-literary forms, such as scientific writing, impersonality of this type is taken to an extreme, and the active voice and the personal pronoun had no place until recently. Creative writers might take note that many scientists are now being encouraged to warm up the self-effaced passive voice of their communications, and return to a more active, first-person engagement with readers who are, after all, their fellow scientists as well as members of the public. It would be a challenge to write a story in which effacement of personality ran up against its opposite in a twin style of depression many writers suffer depression – the manic phase often delivers their writing, while the depressive phase that follows bouts of creativity is misinterpreted as a failure of creativity. Sigmund freud was wrong: writing is not a neurotic activity, but a natural activity that takes pleasure in the contemplation of relations, and associations and disassociations of form in language. Literature is not by its nature destructive; the practice of creative writing, like any art form, is on the side of life. However, some writers view the practice of writing as a confessional business, or a paper trail of suicide notes. This is ‘writing cold’: to look at yourself from outside, as our ghostwriter must, and make objectively simple what is subjective and complex. We may come to see that this apparently severe experiment in self-perception can have the result of making our writing more honest. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple ‘i must’, then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this ses of creative ent states of mind are useful for writing; learn to engender the states that best suit your working rhythms. However, if a new writer cannot access one of the others within themselves who can perform these placebos of voice and self, and be the first audience to that writing, then there may be no option than to stop writing or to change their life. If a new writer cannot take the steps of experimenting with different states of mind or practice such as ‘suspension of belief’, ‘the other’, ‘playing dead’, ‘playing and being others’, ‘translation’, ‘self-effacement’ or ‘writing cold’, then they must review the question of writing at all. For some, it requires the writer to abandon familiar surroundings and people and begin over; or that they give up writing altogether, although they may return to it later in life when time and experience have had their say on them and they have something to write about or against. For a few, though, answering rilke’s question signals the end of the g game change your life after your creative writing class has been running for three months, exchange all works of fiction in progress with other members of the group, handing over a hard copy of this work and a version on disk. Strip it of any over-writing, and weigh each sentence and paragraph carefully by reading it aloud to yourself. A i m : one of the quickest ways to rewrite is to get outside your writing and, obviously, it is easier to do this with somebody else’s work. The novelist anne lamott’s bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life (anchor, 1995) draws brilliantly and provocatively from experience, and offers sensible instruction on everything from index cards to writing groups. Self-editing for fiction writers: how to edit yourself into print (harperresource, 2004) by renni browne and dave king is genrespecific but a very clever sharp and amusing take on the planning and planing needed for writing a novel. The notion of selves and others is wittily explored by margaret atwood in negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing (cambridge university press, 2002). Writing: self and reflexivity (palgrave, 2006) by celia hunt and fiona sampson is an expert synthesis of the critical and creative theories for voice, authorship, characters and selves, and the question of an essential writer’s ‘self’. For simplicity, i use the term ‘story’ throughout this chapter to describe your writing, although i am aware you may write something that does not have a traditional form or structure. Literary fiction is the customary objective for an apprentice to creative writing – the making of novels, novellas and short stories, as well as the modes of flash fiction and anti-narrative. The answer is that some writing schools do teach commercial genres, and there is every chance that many more will follow: the teaching of children’s fiction, after the success of philip pullman, jacqueline wilson and j. Like poetry, we value some species of writing for reasons other than their price within the free market. Writing game a miniaturist tale write a whole story from the narrative point of view of an adolescent (‘i’). More than any other type of writing, a short-short should be written and redrafted in one sitting; part of their energy arises from that concentration of nerve. Ron carlson comments, ‘i’m all for short good writing with no sagging in it at all, but i’m also for good long writing with no sagging in it at all . The page is no less demanding an arena than the story although the marketplace for short stories is difficult, many new writers choose to begin with writing them, almost as a rite of passage, a place for honing language, testing their narrative nerve over a shortish distance and organising a palette. Richard ford suggests in his introduction to the granta book of the american short story (1992) ‘there’s a rage for order in certain of us, a fury which nothing but a nice, compact little short-course bundle like a story can satisfy’:Creative writing or maybe story writers – more so than novelists – are moralists at heart, and the form lends itself to acceptable expressions of caution: you! The anthologies edited by ford (1992) and bradbury (1988) offer solid introductions to the modern notion of the form, and your understanding of the form’s possibilities will be further extended by reading short stories by honor´e de balzac, anton chekhov, vladimir pushkin, ivan turgenev, gabriel garc´ıa m´arquez, guy de maupassant, jorge luis borges and isak dinesen. Writing game creating character in short story in 400 words, write part of a whole short story that takes as its subject a contemporary news item. It allows you to get to grips with writing a story because you have already been given setting and, to some extent, practice of a some new writers choose the novella form to find their voice before writing a full-length novel, gathering maybe three or four novellas together between one cover as a means of setting out their stall. Thinking about numbers is counter-productive when writing a novella – ‘an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic’, as stephen king calls the form – although 40,000 words seems a sensible target for a new writer. We explored some of these ways of thinking about writing in the first five chapters. I suspect that most of us enjoy a story, and that story is one of the things that drew you to reading and writing as a child. Think about these issues, but then forget them while you write (but less so while you are rewriting). This game is also one way to begin creating a new story, ‘in dialogue’ with a known and structure in chapter three, we introduced the practical notion that design leads to more surprises in writing than free expression, and that form, such as patterns and restrictions, liberates creativity and imagination. Your form some writers use the terms ‘form’ and ‘structure’ interchangeably because it is almost impossible to separate them in the act of writing. As ailsa cox explains in writing short stories, there is obsession among creative writers about the classification of literary forms because of a ‘question of status. For example, if you feel your story is thorny with events, swarming with characters and powered by a succession of conflicts, then you are probably writing a novel. Writing game flash fiction to short story write a story in exactly 1,000 words, no more, no less, taking no more than 100 minutes. In chapter four, we saw how les murray spoke of ‘the painless headache’ of writing as ‘an integration of the body-mind and the dreaming-mind and the daylight-conscious-mind. Writing fiction may induce this trance of composition, and of reading, but technique will maintain it for you, and for the reader. A novel is a long haul, and a creative writing workshop will not miraculously generate a whole one (a doctoral programme in creative writing presents a modus operandi). Writing games often make miniatures or set pieces, such as character sketches, exercises in style or point of view. As you should beware of clich´es of feeling, or kitsch, in your writing, you should also be aware of clich´es of plot, not that following a traditional plot structure is a bad thing. However, just as retelling myths and legends offers a good writing game, your first efforts may mirror these templates. Writing game believing in character write a short portrait of 600 words on an imaginary character. Although you know what the character is feeling, do not mention this in your writing. Finally, characters can simply be invented, but you will also find with practice that characters arrive in your imagination as you work on a ter history we have discussed the importance of rewriting in chapter five. Adapt your style of writing to the subject matter of this information; that is, let your character lead the way. Writing game character development most of us have some sort of bag where we keep daily belongings. As with character, you decide the point of view of your story before you begin to write, and prewriting several points of view will help you decide which of them, singly or in combination, carries the story most honestly. Writing game point of view write a short story, based on an event in your own life, but write it in the third-person omniscient. When you begin writing, think about what you place behind it (a scene), and who opens it (a character), and what can be heard behind it (a dialogue). Writing game beginnings skim the anthologies recommended in this chapter, and write down at least ten opening sentences of stories you have not yet read. In creative nonfiction, writers often take two aspects of life and lean them against each other so that they become more than the sum of their parts. Anne bernays and pamela painter offer a whole book of writing exercises with this question as the title. That information may never even enter the text, but it will implicitly affect the behaviour and mood of your characters, just as it affects es we explored rewriting in chapter five. If you find that some of the writing seems flat, shift sentences and paragraphs around to see what sounds more true to character; what order of words makes characters more emotionally honest; and what intensifies description. Annie dillard in the writing life remarks, ‘it is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away . End writing on why even great novels can have disappointing endings, the critic james wood (2005) cites the russian formalist critic viktor schlovsky’s praise for chekhov’s ‘negative endings’, which ‘frustrate our sense of tidy form by refusing to end: ‘and then it began to rain’. You can then tack the gap skilfully by knowing beforehand the nature of your landfall and the speed of the story’s ended reading there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to books about writing fiction; some jewels shine more honestly than others. Some offer a systematic abc approach at odds with the open space of creative discovery. It is ary as a species of creative nonfiction, a novel-length reflective essay on his aims and processes. Ailsa cox’s succinct writing short stories (routledge, 2005) focuses on an important form for writing students, and does its reader a further service by also looking beyond literary fiction towards genre fiction, science fiction and cyberpunk. Fiction writers will also find a highly useful demonstration of formal craft in writing fiction by janet burroway (longman, 2003), ursula le guin’s steering the craft (eighth mountain press, 1998) and david lodge’s the art of fiction (penguin, 1992). While travelling the world’s creative writing departments, the most common book i have observed is a well-thumbed copy of what if? The seven basic plots (continuum, 2004) by christopher booker is a fascinating introduction to the templates of universal plots, useful to the writer in that they can copy or confound them. No creative writing classroom or new writer should go without two great anthologies of modern short stories: the penguin book of modern british short stories, edited by malcolm bradbury (penguin, 1988), and the granta book of the american short story, edited by richard ford (granta, 1992). Creative nonfiction usually takes reality as its origin, but that does not mean we dispense with the mind’s natural skill for story. Creative nonfiction deals with realities truthfully – experiences, events, facts – yet the drive of the writing is the author’s involvement in the story, and writers use every literary device in the book to tell that story well. This chapter introduces some of the introductory elements of creative nonfiction, and some basic literary tools. We then look at some of the more common projects that new writers and creative writing students can carry out to get them started in this fascinating y’s literature time makes stories of us all; history rewrites us. Creative writing explores the narrative of humanity moving through time, and creative nonfiction makes those realities readable. In his work in this field, the writer barry lopez mission as bringing the observed together with the imagined, to achieve a steady state of consciousness in writing, ‘a state in which one has absorbed that very darkness which before was the perpetual sign of defeat’ (1986: 414). With such vigilant aims, you can see that creative nonfiction shares many of the perceptual and philosophical possibilities of poetry and fiction, but it reaches out even further to readers: it teaches to some extent; it has a purpose beyond entertainment or art for art’s r models try to think of creative nonfiction as simply an evolved term for something that has been with us for some time, but that we called by other names such as ‘belles lettres’, journals, memoirs and essays. In order to see the variety and possibility of creative nonfiction, read earlier models such as dorothy wordsworth’s ‘journals’ (excerpts in ne2: 385); charles lamb’s essay ‘old china’ (ne2: 505); william hazlitt’s ‘on gusto’ (ne2: 510); henry david thoreau’s walden, or life in the woods (na1: 1807) and ‘walking’ (na1: 1993); frederick douglass’s the narrative of the life of frederick douglass, an american slave, written by himself (na1: 2032); john ruskin’s the stones of venice (excerpt in ne2: 1432); virginia woolf’s ‘a room of one’s own’ (ne2: 2153), ‘professions for women’ (ne2: 2214), and the excerpt from her autobiographical essay moments of being called ‘a sketch of the past’ (ne2: 2218); george orwell’s ‘shooting an elephant’ (ne2: 2457); and the excerpt from keith douglas’s vivid account of a battle in alamein to zem zem (ne2: 2538). However, when the author tom wolfe in the 1960s named a fresh wave of fact-based literary writing ‘the new journalism’, he largely kick-started what we now write, read, teach and learn as creative nonfiction but which, until that point, traded under many cy and art if you think about the normal nonfiction you have read, you will probably be picturing books that place and explore the apparently solid world of facts. Writers of creative nonfiction try to close that distance between reader and writer while also dealing in the factual. For creative nonfiction, subjectivity of approach is fine; the writing does not have to be structured for maximum information in minimum space; and balance is not required. Writing on nonfiction as literature, william zinsser contends that he has ‘no patience with the snobbery that says nonfiction is only journalism by another name and that journalism by any name is a dirty word . You should hold that ideal in your mind, not so much when you write, but when you redraft and revise your g creative nonfiction creative nonfiction exercises an almost incredible gravity. If you have a story to share, you will use any device of literary craft to tell it well, or at the very least s in creative nonfiction, these devices will include many of the characteristic methods of the practice of fiction. These might include story-like qualities such as ‘hooking’ the reader with the first sentence (the device is more permissible than in literary fiction); developing convincing real-life scenes and characters; using linked events and narrative; writing description vividly and tautly; creating and maintaining a believable point of view and setting; and using speech and dialogue compellingly. Reality must be transformed into literature, but remain recognisable and grounded in life and vivid sly, the range of creative nonfiction is vast. To give you an idea of range, here are two contrasting examples from radically different experiences – war and nature – by two young writers who are both writing close to their worlds, with absolute precision. In your own writing of creative nonfiction, begin paying attention to the worlds to which you are closest, and maintain a logbook of your structure we will discuss topics later; first, we look briefly at a basic structure for your creative nonfiction. In a creative writing class, it is simpler to concentrate on shorter forms of writing such as a memoir, rather than a whole autobiography, or an article that explores some aspect of the world around you. We use the essay’s form as a basis for writing articles, and even memoirs. Think of your creative nonfiction articles as simply creative essays – essays with literary panache, essays that employ narrative. It offers your piece structural clarity; however, it is simply the starting ting the structure in subsequent drafts, play creatively with the order of narrative, and inject your writing with energetic details and devices. Try to replicate some of vonnegut’s literary and rhetorical effects in your own ng with the reader the attitude of the work should not merely echo your writing voice; it should be your voice, even to the extent of it being your spoken voice, and an honest voice at that, for – as in all writing – honesty is a craft. In 1933, the poet osip mandelstam, writing in his great nonfictional account ‘journey to armenia’, wryly supposed, ‘it must be the greatest impertinence to speak with the reader about the present in that tone of absolute courtesy that we have for some reason yielded to the memoirists’ (2002: 200). Writing is a matter of responsibility, and there is much to be said about writing well about the concerns of your time, such as social and political injustice or the environment. In fact, journey to armenia is a superb example of that very form of address, dealing as it did, obliquely, with the harmful realities of soviet collectivisation even though the aim for its sponsors was propaganda disguised as literary travel n and involvement creative nonfiction differs from nonfiction by its very literariness, by the quality of expression and construction and, as lee gutkind argues: when people are discussing essays, articles or nonfiction books, they use words such as interesting, accurate, perhaps even fascinating. Not to view memoir writing as a place for confession, since real-life details ‘confess’ much more in being shown to the reader than you ever could by ‘telling all’. The information carried in creative nonfiction is accurate and scrupulously researched, but you deploy creative devices such as narration, edited (but real) dialogue, characterisation and well-developed scenes to maintain a reader’s attention. Sometimes the writer is in fact partly the story; sometimes the writer’s style is a large part of the story; and sometimes, as in autobiography, they are the g about yourself writing a memoir engages both memory and memory’s natural selectiveness. Writing of this type helps to reconnect them to both self-knowledge and face of life one of the reasons for finding difficulty at first in writing what we know seems to be that we now gain so much knowledge in a relatively frictionless manner, such as the internet and television. It will read like a forgery of life, or simply under-researched, unless the details are real, and you have some experience of them (through travel or work, for example), or are ready to find and interview people with real-life experience (see ‘writing about people and the world’ below). Writing game writing about yourself: what you do at the end of chapter one, we wrote about what we know about ourselves, using real-life details taken from our present day. This will provide practice for writing about subjects ‘you do not know’ and which require observation and are a story i said at the beginning of this chapter that time makes stories of us all. These shaping processes should suit creative nonfiction, since stories and memoirs are themselves dynamic and selective. When nabokov was writing the first version of his autobiography speak, memory, he claims he was ‘handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history, and, consequently, by the impossibility of checking my memory when i felt it might be at fault’ (2000: 9). Writing game writing 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. 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. 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. 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. When you are writing about yourself, you are creating a story that tells one of several versions of the truth about yourself. 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. To do this well, you must get outside yourself during the time of writing, looking at yourself as dispassionately as you dare. 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. Writing game writing about real people: character sketches as with flash fiction (see chapter six), a character sketch is a tightly written and highly focused form of around 500 words, and an extremely effective exercise for new writers of creative nonfiction. William zinsser declares that new writers ought to begin their writing lives with creative nonfiction because ‘they will write far more willingly about subjects that touch their own lives or that they have an aptitude for’ (2005: 99). For creative writing students from academic backgrounds the sciences, creative nonfiction comes into its own, and ‘writing what you know’ might prove to be writing about your own studies or research (see ‘creative writing in the creative academy’ in chapter ten). Those new creative writers who worry that writing about external matters is less authentic a project than writing about themselves ought to be relieved by the certainty that the style of any piece of writing is going to reveal as much about the writer as it is about the subject. Again, test out its promise and literary integrity by writing it as a scene, or a series of scenes. If it does not possess and excite you, then this will show in the writing. Writing game writing about real people: investigative writing working in teams of two people, carry out an investigation into the world of work in your area. Importantly, check whether your subject has already been covered, and what gaps are left between subjects that are ripe for research and writing. If you are writing about local or family history, then you need to become acquainted with record offices. 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 fall-back of a recording device or the ‘screen’ of a notebook. 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 expands the continent of creative writing, presenting complete pictures of a subject and fresh ways of looking at the world around us. 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. Writing game w r i t i n g a b o u t t h e w o r l d : tr a v e l w r i t i n g research the history of your neighbourhood using record offices, your local library and local history archives. Apply this technique next time you travel to somewhere that is strange and ended 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, 1996). The novelist and filmmaker lee gutkind edits creative nonfiction, which is highly recommended, as is his the art of creative nonfiction (john wiley & sons, 1997). 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 writing across the disciplines, edited by diane freedman and olivia frey (duke, 2003), reveals the remarkable breadth of the intellectual movement toward self-inclusive scholarship. 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´scinski, barry lopez, john mcphee, norman mailer, janet malcolm, blake morrison, john pilger, steven pinker, oliver sacks, iain sinclair, lewis thomas, hunter s. Wilson, tom wolfe and tobias 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. It colors all other feelings, and if you are a poet, it colors your writing. R i c h a r d h u g o , the triggering town: lectures and essays on poetry and writing (1979: 67). It is to invite you to see writing poems as an activity worth your time and attention, so that you may eventually feel like reaching into flames on a poem’s behalf – you may then find one day you are also that poem’s author. Writing game metre and rhyme write a poem of twenty lines in iambic pentameter, without rhyme. Other forms of compensation arrive eventually; and nowhere else is the experience of creative process, especially drafting, more of a love–hate place value on language above every other literary consideration. The flux and flow in language can create a sense of continual crisis when writing poetry. You may sometimes feel fraught as the language in your poems reacts against itself during rewriting. Writing game kennings a kenning is a compound poetic phrase that takes the place of the name of a person or thing. In writing poems, you hear, see and feel every word, space and punctuation mark intimately. Like the best short stories, writing poems is one of the few open spaces in literature where you have the opportunity to make something resonant, complete and independent, even if that happens only a half a dozen times in your writing life. Writing game wishes and curses write two poems in free verse but using repeated phrases as a restrictive device to pattern your poem. Try to combine all this material by using the form of address of a letter, but writing in lines. A i m : an obsessive and concentrated effect using something concrete and recognisable allows greater flexibility than writing about something abstract. However, there is latitude for discovering a lot more along the way, and you can learn to allow this sense of uncovering the mystery of what you think you ts and ways of saying the poet john redmond believes that many new writers limit themselves by writing what he calls the ‘default poem’: ‘a simple lyric formula: an ‘i-persona’ describing its state of mind and feeling as though chatting with the reader across a coffee-table’ (2006: 17). It will not liberate a country or open a prison, and to write in free verse well is often harder than writing in form. You can try writing in syllabics right now by creating a haiku – a three-line poem of seventeen syllables in which the syllable count of the lines is five–seven–five. Read this poem by the author about a bird called a ‘redpoll’:Creative writing as if she had spilt from cherries, from holly, from a shake of line break between line two and line three ‘shakes’ the nightshade-bush of the poem as the bird flies from it. Writing game a personal anthology as we discussed in chapter four, writers often use their notebooks as ‘commonplace books’ to collect pieces of writing that impress them, show them something new, or speak to them emotionally and to their own need to you have assembled at least 200 poems of these types, make copies of them, and begin looking at them all with the view of creating your own anthology. Your task is to find the poems you want to write; the ones you are capable of writing well; and, if you want to become a poet rather than a ‘writer of poems’, to find poems which nobody else could o and diamonds to do this, you practise several modes of writing poetry, until you reach a way of writing where subject and form ‘click’ together, as robert frost put it. Most of these are bad poems that contain clich´es of feeling and imagery; clich´ed or archaic writing; prosaic, dishonest or forced expression; inelastic or inappropriate form, however ‘free’; or just common-or-garden dullness. You may then feel compelled to reproduce your first excitements about poetry within your own work, since it appears a wholly natural progression that readers who are wakened in this way by poetry wish to try writing it. If we were to replay anatole france’s analogy between carpentry and creative writing, the space around this poem is waist-high in wood-shavings. Nowhere is the editor’s razor sharper and more frequently in use than in rewriting poetry. Yet weak, leaden or plodding poetry is the path to good writing, even though the ratio between them might seem horrendous at first. Writing game drafting long to make it short think about an experience that is lodged in your memory, possibly a childhood event that caused you some pain, or which matured your view of yourself. Using these notes as a starting point, begin writing about this experience from the first-person point of view, breaking the narrative into rough lines. If you possess a vocation, then you follow that calling but, if you do not, there are other significant incentives for writing poems. You do not have to ‘fake it’ in writing, even if you write from behind a mask or take on a dozen voices. Yet, if this quality of creative conduct attracts you as a reader, then poetry may possibly suit you as a writer simply because it will suit your character. Then, attempt to wipe your mind of any experience of poetry or writing, and write a recollection of a childhood experience of language or reading. These two small exercises attempt to remind the writer how individual and strange is our relationship with words and language, and how a writer’s personal reading, listening and writing are intimately linked within any ended reading as with fiction, there is a glittering hoard of handbooks about writing poetry, and the finest are written by good poets. In my experience, the leading texts are michelle boisseau and robert wallace’s writing poems (longman pearson, 2004), and mary kinzie’s a poet’s guide to poetry (chicago university press, 1999). Taken together, they provide a penetrating explanation and exploration of every facet of writing poetry, and a sense of progression in craft and art. Both william packard’s the art of poetry writing (st martin’s press, 1992) and james fenton’s an introduction to english poetry (penguin, 2002) are lessons in writing economically, clearly and yet personally about poetry, as well as having the effect of making the reader feel like they are meeting the possibilities of the craft for the first time. Peter sansom’s writing poems (bloodaxe books, 1994) has been a gracious guide for many new british poets. Should you be one of these unfortunate many, you can begin to fill that deficit by reading the generous an introduction to poetry (longman, 1998) by x.

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Two fascinating books from quite different figures will introduce you to the angular psychologies of poetic practice: clayton eshleman’s companion spider (wesleyan university press, 2001) and richard hugo’s the triggering town: lectures and essays on poetry and writing (norton, 1979). If you are ever short of writing games, you will find an open mine of them in the practice of poetry (harperresource, 1992) edited by robin behn and chase. M a r g a r e t at wo o d , negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing (2002: 21). This chapter looks at three performance modes: public events and readings; performance as concept and public art, crossing into art forms; and the modes of electronic ng and performing the magic anthill writing in performance is an art form, just as drama is, and requires as much attention to detail. This ‘magic anthill’ of writing, performing and publishing is as much about permission and self-belief as it is about the validation given to your work by fellow writers, readers and audience. Like the world of writing, the world of literature in performance seethes with workers, drones and guards. As we discussed previously, teaching writing can also be performative, but the best teaching in writing workshops is more centred on students’ writing than on the teacher’s performance, although being effective in performance may prove useful to the writer in the classroom. Publication is not everything, and book promotion is only a small part of creative writing in performance. You do not have to be a well-known writer to do public performances of your work, although you are obviously less likely to be paid for ce as reader a book or portfolio of writing signals finality for its writer and potentiality for its reader. The spoken performance of your language escapes books by this means and audiences read you as the messenger, not the message, of your writing. In a concert, the music comes first; in a performance of writing, the words always come first. We should aim, first, at clarity (as in our writing), then aim at bringing the listener into the work (as we would a reader, by sleight of style). Actors must learn to trust writing and realise it is not some sorry-faced relation of drama. If they choose not to go to creative writing, then we should do everything in our power to open creative writing to them. Some creative writers and promoters have written and argued the art form into a closed room where it is not permitted to entertain. They allow that writing may educate – it can even innovate – but it cannot clown, or simply create rapture in a live audience. New creative writers need to reinvent the world where fine literature drew its audience to it, and did not look down on them. There is nothing wrong with these, but consider this: your work might well be extending the territory of writing, but the territory may prove, culturally, a small pond aswim with other new writers. If writing in performance seems like a direction for you, then the next section shows you some of the basic things you can do to help you make the best of work the tongue’s arrow in all likelihood, you will perform standing rather than sitting. And stream of speech many creative writers use the page of a manuscript or book as a screen behind which to hide. Voice work for creative writers has the same purpose as for actors or professional speakers. You learn by going to festivals of new writing, and to live readings, and watching, hearing, then imitating, writers in performance. Choose to perform in venues that are harsher about the place and purpose of creative writing; or create a situation in your real life that becomes such a performance (the more surprising of these appear to be spontaneous but need thorough planning). As a class, create a list of local places in which you will perform and begin writing for permission, or planning your ‘spontaneous’ performance. Your task is to create such a place for yourselves, and define and extend expectations of creative writing in performance in your g techniques and music a charm approach your own event with as much calm seriousness as you can muster. Sift the work you are going to read and what you might say about it by way of introduction. With a novel or book of creative nonfiction, read short excerpts that tug on a reader’s curiosity, or which are playful, relaxing the audience. You might even improvise poems or stories on the spot, freewriting them aloud from prompts solicited from the audience. Cold open one way you can begin improvising with creative performance tactics is to try ‘the cold open’. These kinds of literary guerrilla tactics – memorisation, oral storytelling, audience participation, variations, improvisations, cold opens – bring many non-readers to creative writing. However, more poets cross over into writing novels than ever before, taking with them the skills of the impoverished troubadour. Writing game the creative audience put on a performance of writing, with all the participants in your class or writing group. Try a creative blend of approaches:Straight readings from the page with improvised introductions readings from memory direct to audience walking among the audience while reading using audience participation improvising to challenges made by the audience with visual background material such as slides or overhead projection original music accompanying work or interwoven with it acting out the work reading with two or more voices reading work in different tones of voice, such as offering directions or sympathy r singing the work. The project will also provide you with good practice should work become successful and you are asked to do readings, or you decide to pursue a career allied to writing such as literature promotion, arts programming, publishing or t as performance what is a book anyway? Not all types of creative writing are created to fit the pages of a book. Writing can perform as a spoken or musical art, as a species of visual art, or as a form of electronic art. Their existence means there are more concepts possible for writers willing to exploit another open g game performing your writing as visual art write a poem on a kinetic subject, such as ‘hard rain then light rain’, ‘the flight of doves’, ‘cloud movement in storm’, ‘panther’s attack’, ‘a clock’. The french poet apollinaire created ‘calligrammes’ that performed the same trick of blending the visual with sions some authors will not commit to writing at all: their poems and stories are memorised for oral delivery. Writing game storyboarding and digital film draw the cells of a comic strip on a page, and try to break one of your poems or short stories into small visual scenes as if they were storyboards for a film of . This is also the routine by which any novel, story, play or poem is prepared for filming: a director must be able to visualise the action of the narrative ming your writing as public art when an artist blends different art forms, the result is a hybrid, as if two different species of flower or fruit tree had been cross-fertilised. If you are working with a particular space, such as a sculpture, its space increases the restriction within which you work (as time would, were you writing for film or radio). The poet ian hamilton finlay transformed his garden, little sparta in scotland, with emblems, word sculptures and conceptual art, writing of the process that ‘certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks’. In the past, poets who sought ‘a place to stand’ assumed the role of gardener, and gardening was seen as an act of composition, analogous to writing. This kind of approach to writing can make you think and work using a far larger compass than a page’s four points. Your writing project might have bird’s-eye perception, like walking the plot of james joyce’s ulysses, superimposing a huge question mark on the street map of dublin. It is a useful paradigm to see the place in which you live as an open book, one already written by its history, a palace of memory on which you can draw for ideas for this writing. It could be the windows of a building; sand on a beach; snow in a field; sidewalks that are ‘read’ as they are walked by its ‘readers’; skywriting seen from below; or words made from pebbles, twigs or garbage. Writing game writing as a public art the task is for everyone in your group to create a short poem, the placing of which does not require the page at all, and the composition requires some other vehicle for its ‘reading’. This might involve using any, and more, of the following:Performing writing r r r r r r r r r r r r r r a colossal poem on the sand of a beach, or in snow in a park. Projects such as this are very open to civic and private sponsorship should you wish to make public and conceptual art part of your working life as a onic performance as creative writers, the internet is another open space for the creation and performance of our writing, or the digital or kinetic performances of poems and stories that are first written for the page. There are several kinds of digital writing including weblogs, hypertext fiction and poetry, kinetic poetry, code poetry, and writing that takes advantage of the programmable nature of the computer to create works that are interactive (see ‘recommended reading’). Some programmes also generate text, or involve sound, or use e-mail and other forms of network communication to build communities whose purpose is collaborative writing and esthetics electronic performance allows huge room for experiment, especially in the technological melding with writing in live performance of other art forms, such as film, visual art or music, a phenomenon margot lovejoy explores as transaesthetics (2004: 270). The result can sometimes be seen as a new genre of creative writing, inasmuch as writing and the spoken word are at its roots. An author’s creative use of nodes, the self-contained units of meaning in a hypertextual narrative, can play with the reader’s orientation and add meaning and play to the orative performance in the virtual continent of electronic literature, the literary concept as a performance is often interactive and even collaborative. Creative writing students might begin with something as simple as an e-mail list for the class to which they all contribute new work and criticism, before developing a website that performs the same function more publicly. Using computers to produce your first anthology of writing using a desktop publishing programme is an outcome at which most classes should aim, but you should also publish it online. The next natural step is a website that performs the role of an online journal of your new writing, and that of other writers. Writing collaboratively using e-mail and the web produces new, multiauthored poems and stories in a virtual generative workshop. I believe this form of writing is a huge ally to creative writing, and a space for creativity and cross-art-form practice. The difference is that this diary of experience, imagination and observation is online and public, and it alters the way you write, even though the audience is invisible, as when writing a book. Other positive aspects of blogs are that they need to be written concisely and entertainingly – they require the inevitable spices of art and ecomony to become very good – and they assist fluency and variation of expression, since they are in effect highly visible performances of writing. They are beginning to alter the face of literature – especially creative nonfiction – and the speed at which we write, read and respond to what we are reading, for many blogs allow for written interaction from and with the reader. All students of creative writing should maintain blogs; teachers of writing may consider setting up a blog for any course in writing to which tutor and students ce learning many universities, such as the open university in britain, teach creative writing through distance learning. This is a continual responsive workshop with common objectives for all its writers, and the performance of the process of writing is open to all its participants regardless of country or time zone. In these situations, the writing process itself is performative, an open space into which you step before an audience of your fellow students, but one in which you find them stepping up beside you, all bearing virtual pages. Obviously, you could use your own blogs to set up a virtual writing course or workshop for yourself and your fellow writers. Writing game setting up a writing workshop online take the e-mail addresses of everyone in your class or workshop and set up an e-mail list for them. Recommended visits include the peggy guggenheim museum in venice, which holds fine examples of writing as carved or as illuminated sculpture; and the wales millennium centre, which carries inscriptions on its copper portico, side by side in welsh and english by gwyneth lewis: ‘in these stones / horizons / sing’. For new writers, a stimulating exhibition of finlay’s writing and public art is ian hamilton finlay: a visual primer by yves abrioux (reaktion books, 1994). Well, shaped well, writing ceases to feel like artifice and becomes alive, and the moment that happens it ceases to be your own and becomes communal. There are creative writers who argue that you cannot be a good writer without also conducting your life with a degree of care, with a kindness, a kind of accounting for oneself within a larger community. Richard hugo reads this statement as a private understanding ‘that a lifetime of writing was a slow, accumulative way of accepting one’s life as valid . How a writer reaches a balance between these private points of view is always revealing: it reveals itself in their work, and in how they position themselves and their writing within public arenas. In this final chapter, we explore two important and sometimes conflicting public arenas for creative writing students, writer-teachers and writers: community and g in the community and ity as open space as joyce carol oates declares in the faith of a writer, ‘through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. Writing is solitary work some of the time, but even writing can be a social process through the living of regular life, discussions and workshops. In the dark writing can be an act of community even if the writer does not stir from their room at all, even if they choose never to meet a reader or give a performance of their work. Communication engenders community; and a creative communication implies a heightened regard for community, however unknown (or unknowing) that community may be. Creative writers might even prey and spy on a community for material, but they carry its message forwards even if the writer is underhand or duplicitous with them. We could argue by extension (and as provocatively) that there are few, or no, ethics to writing. After all, isn’t one of the principles of creative writing that writers write for themselves, and that only by writing for themselves can writers hope to please an audience beyond their own writing room? This may all seem contradictory, but the very contradictoriness is symptomatic of the world of creative writing as we saw in chapter one. It is why i call the discipline of creative writing an open space, and asked you to think of literature as a continent that contains many countries, languages and countless points of view. What we can agree is that it is impossible to deny that writing and speaking are forms of binding together. They seek guidance from creative writing, even though what they find is art and artifice, symbols and patterns. Writing is a way of saying you and the world have a chance’ – richard hugo (1979: 72). For many people, books are lights in their dark, and creative writing is a means by which to see, hear and stay in touch. People sign up for creative writing courses to learn literary style, but many also sign up because they are seeking a quality of perception that we used to call truth. They have found it through reading, and they wish to discover it again through g game te l l i n g a c o m m u n i t y ’s s t o r y write an extended work of creative nonfiction about a community for whom you are the ‘carrier’ of its story. A i m : work of this type trains you to listen and watch your world carefully, seeing through the everyday smokescreens and filtering out ity as open space writing as a public art is one way of being unequivocal about the place of writing in a peopled landscape. But creative writing thrives in many open spaces, and new writers are often to be found in less visible spaces in which writing thrives just as openly, if less famously. Probably the most super-official version of writing in the community is the poet laureate consultant in poetry to the library of congress in the united states. The poet laureate’s job is to raise national awareness of the reading and writing of poetry, and some of the projects are exceptionally inventive. Some writers are drawn to community writing because this is simply the milieu out of which they work. Leaving their physical community would mean killing their reason for writing, and being dishonest as artists and as human beings. In some cultures, the idea of a writer not being of a community would be simply bizarre, since the writer is the carrier of their community’s story through history and times of change: its maker of tales, its memory-banker, its g game adventures in the community as a class or writing group, devise a project for your local community. Create a writing project that takes off from some issue that concerns or attracts many people. Allow the project to run for one week at least, and work with as many people on their writing as possible using a site that is open and accessible, such as a public library. The process will affect you, too; it will make you think even more clearly about your own writing and the kind of audience you might need to create for grassroots of creative writing however, some people work as writers in a community because, unless they are very lucky or very ruthless, many find themselves needing to. A freelance writer can only earn so much by their writing, and working in schools and the community will allow you to earn time for your writing. However, teaching community writing will feed you, in more ways than you might expect, including your own creative work, a matter exemplified by the many contributors to the point: where teaching and writing intersect (shapiro and padgett, 1983). Earning time for writing seems a fair payoff for a pursuit whose process is its own reward. Community writing makes you stay in touch with different audiences; it keeps your feet on the ground and your head in the world. That is why some creative writing programmes present opportunities to develop a project outside college, with a community group or in a workplace. The poet kenneth koch taught creative writing regularly to schoolchildren, but also to older people in a nursing home in rhode island. He knew the obstacles of such a project, but he ‘sensed possibility’: he sensed how the pleasure of writing could itself be ‘a serious thing for them to work at, something worth doing well and that engaged their abilities and their thoughts and feelings’. Koch, working with an assistant poet, arrived with no preconceptions aside from an idealistic view that, since he loved writing poetry so much, and gained so much pleasure from the process, he imagined everyone else would: ‘it is such a pleasure to say things, and such a special kind of pleasure to say them as poetry’ (1997: 6). Game a room of your own this is not a writing project; it is a means to several projects. Try writing the story or poem that emerges from any writing game in this book, but write it in different places within a single morning. A i m : you will discover that some places and locales suit your writing better. Dislocate your creative practice from the places you expect it to arise: the quiet study, the studio, the bedroom. You should adopt this new place as your ‘writing room’, a territory for your creativity. Serendipity is an important aspect g, and writing in an unusual place can bring unexpected material. Of our own writing as an act of community is important; but the space in which you write, and the community writes, is vital. A seminar room can be helpful of course, but a housing project, a foreign city or a walk in the woods can be seminar rooms and writing houses too. Writing needs seminar rooms, but it also needs more rooms of its own outside the arena of formal education, in the interstitial zones of society. To this end, i suggest that creative writing students and teachers begin a campaign for every major city in the world to create a writer’s room, a low-cost, writerly version of a painter’s studio or atelier. The room’s walls will be covered with whiteboards to assist teaching and writing, as they are in some institutes of mathematics (ideas always arrive at inconvenient times). Society needs to make more space for its creative writers, especially writers from non-traditional writing backgrounds, and we need to catch them young. In order to explore that engagement, and how academies become such open spaces, i need to talk a little more personally about why i wrote this ng writing in the creative academy i began my working life as a scientist, one who also wrote creatively, and i would say that if what you do requires you at best to write clearly, then we are all writers. Creative writing as a discipline may help to shift the debate into a more constructive set of engagements. This topic offers you a few genies escaping their ve writing across disciplines as i said under ‘why we read’ in chapter one, reading nonfiction is as vital as reading fiction or poetry. In my own university, undergraduate students take a three-year honours degree in creative writing, balancing the study of literature with its practice. In their second and third year, students tend to specialise in a genre, such as poetry, fiction, drama or creative nonfiction. Therefore, these students are also encouraged to take or audit courses outside humanities and creative writing – for example, in philosophy or psychology, but also in medicine, physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry or information technology. Obviously, they need to have some interest and experience of these subjects first, but what they are doing is ploughing a subject for language and material they might use later in creative writing. And they are acting as ambassadors for creative thought and practice among students of science and social science; they gain experience of people and ideas they otherwise may not encounter. Some of the most enthusiastic students of creative writing at my own university come from physics, computing and mathematics. They understand that the industry of ‘business games’ as icebreakers, creativity exercises and meeting energisers is close in approach to that of the generative writing workshop or writing game. Just like ve writing with science it is a fair, if flawed, perception that, somehow, the hypothesis-making part of the scientific process is creative, and the testing and experimental stage draws away from art. Repeated experimentation and the process of scientific dissemination are precisely analogous to the processes of rewriting, publication and criticism. Popular science writing requires the same creative and technical skill as the writing of creative nonfiction. In fact, it is creative nonfiction, and the skill with which it is composed has been responsible for melting many of the falsehoods that have iced up between the arts and sciences, not least the idea that scientists cannot write. Scientists, such as the popular science writers margaret boden, max perutz, steven rose, steven pinker and richard dawkins, are creative writers. An example – writing on the discoverers of dna, max perutz observed:Writing in the community and leonardo, crick and watson . Courses in creative writing may encompass writing popular science; courses in science may encompass writing creative nonfiction. Just as many writing students do not become serious writers, so not all students who sign up for science degrees become scientists, but many could become clearer and more energetic communicators of their disciplines, as journalists, or as mediators between the public sphere and scientific endeavour. In the same way that many of our best creative writers have also been among the more insightful critics, many of our best scientists are its best communicators and critical exponents of science. The use of creative writing in science courses might contribute to a greater public understanding of science and technology. Writing game adventures in the laboratory as a group, or individual, arrange a visit to a scientific laboratory, with the request that you work alongside scientists for one week. Discuss their work with them every day, and write a story, poem or piece of creative nonfiction in direct response to that conversation. Share your work with the scientists, and ask them to respond with their own creative writing at the end of the week. Tune in to this play of thought, and use the language of your scientists innovatively and precisely within your own ve writing as a crossover discipline at my own university, creative writers and their students now work directly with undergraduate students and postgraduate researchers in the departments of medicine, business, biology, computing, engineering and physics. We do not teach composition or generic skills; we build on them, and work with exceptionally gifted r, one underlying principle, agreed with departmental heads beforehand, is to help these students begin to think more laterally in language – even more wildly – and to conceive of ideas and paradigms via the unusual route of writing games and thought-experiments based on the creation of poems and fictions. What is striking is that, although some initial scepticism about these experiments in teaching and learning came from the scientists, they quickly realised that students were doing better in their writing, communicating their findings more clearly, and benefiting from human contact and creative play as researchers. Students often use logbooks and journals, and the idea, as in creative writing, is to become an active participant in your subject and that practice can create fluency. All this is coterminous with the discipline of creative writing, although it has to be said that, at some institutions, creative writing occupies a much more privileged position in terms of the status of both students and faculty. At my own university, we experimented with using many creative writers and creative writing games to deliver these parts of the curriculum, and to do so with creative panache, teaching them as though they were performance art. In britain in the early twenty-first century, the royal literary fund went even further, and organised residencies for hundreds of creative writers to work at many uk universities. The ‘bear of little brain’ bequeathed more than what might have been expected of him, for in this way creative writing and the teaching of advanced rhetoric rejoined each other through a bold experiment. The purpose was not to teach creative writing, but to work with students on their academic and expository writing. The thinking was rooted in the notion of not burning up the creative g in the community and creative writers on teaching poetry and fiction, but on focusing their skills of clear language and argument. It is arguable that creative writing began finding some new, unusual, maybe historical, rooms of its own (some of which we explored in chapter one). However, although the uses of creative language and creative reading are important for these new open spaces, sometimes we reach a space where language runs ve recognitions i offer only two examples from personal experience as an environmental scientist working on freshwater insects in the lake district of england. I always regarded science at this level as a form of creative and collaborative writing. I have never felt closer to that balance of perception and imagination than when i am writing creatively, or watching students in a creative writing class making discoveries for themselves among the swarm, noise and dance of language. When i claimed earlier that in the discipline of creative writing we are all beginners, some of that tone of mind informs the natural process of scientific discovery: the design and making of pattern; the neural ravelling of understanding and perception. The repercussions for the role g in the community and ve writing as a discipline speaking across disciplines could be tremendous. Since that interdisciplinary genie is out, we can seed a few y as open space wishes i wish that the discipline of creative writing saw itself even more as a natural landbridge to a far wider community of readers and writers. Writing in the community is not some worthy cause, neither is it some claude glass reflection of real life from which to compose. Maybe more university writing workshops could take place in malls, community centres and places where people work and live. Community projects within writing courses are a small and necessary means universities can use to make these first steps. I wish it were more clearly understood that, in some ways, higher education needs creative writing more than creative writing needs higher education. However, higher education also desires the social, cultural and political relevance, and understanding, that writing and writers bring to higher education. I wish we allowed ourselves to recognise that all good writers are creative, that even, say, textbooks of philosophy or zoology, when written clearly and entertainingly, with an eye on the audience, are acts of creative writing. Have come to believe, reluctantly, that ‘creative’ is an abused word, abused to the point where it has become divisive. But do we really mean that some writers are creative and the rest of them are uncreative? Isn’t the difference between creative and non-creative at this level largely the difference between good, thoughtful writing and bad, thoughtless writing? Writing across the disciplines is a hugely important movement; a lot of the energy for it came from people who cared about writing. Creative writing across the disciplines’ seems a natural step; the interdisciplinary energy and focus might come from the discipline of creative writing. It is now as important for creative practice to be reintroduced in high schools as it is in universities. Artistic insecurity emerges from that friction, and feeds the desire to keep the creative writing territory free of competitors from other non-literary fields, and even from younger writers. Taking creative nonfiction teaching into science and business is the obvious way to get inside their respective troys if that is where one wishes to create and challenge g game making a drama out of a crisis read aloud glengarry glen ross by david mamet (na2: 2509); try to perform it as a group. Yet, if all colleges of writing vanished, we would not find ourselves suddenly short of writers. As we discussed in chapter two, sometimes teaching and writing feed negatively into each other, falsifying natural, intuitive practice; and a programmatic philosophy develops, ossifying into assertion or ideology, rather than inquiry and demonstration. They risk getting lost in corridors of power, or are too much at ease in the status-greedy structures of education, more toxic to creative thought and action because they are phantasmal. As the novelist russell celyn jones has written, some writer-teachers protect themselves from becoming institutionalised by ‘developing a wilful amnesia towards the dreary language of administration,Never writing about campuses . The worst thing that can happen to the writers is their teaching begins to mess with their own writing. As lynn freed argued, their work sounds like a teacher writing – low risk or theory-driven or forced. The creative writing industry can also begin to look like a conspiracy of worthiness and mere competence. Packard continues, ‘our present era has been characterized by william jay smith as filled with a lot of ‘creative writing writing’ – competent, passionless stuff learned in workshop and seminars and published in mickey mouse magazines. In the literary pages of newspapers, contemporary fiction writers who have attended courses suffer the same caricaturing and censure as poets, for there are those for whom the creative writing industry is a cartoon world, a cloud-cuckoo-land of fantasy accomplishment and vacuum-sealed reputation. At best, the teaching of creative writing provides a moving edge for literary evolutions and language’s revelations. The more we practise attending to language in our reading and writing, and the more we practise attending to the world in which language lives, the more experienced we become at translating our individual senses and our perceptions into writing, and being believed by readers who, it is worth remembering, live in this world, and whose attention we have to earn. An open book of possibility, the creative academy is an open space, but it sometimes needs rewriting. Third, we can work on equal terms within other fields of creative endeavour, including science, by raising public awareness of other knowledge systems through popular science and creative nonfiction. If nothing else, i hope this book demonstrates that creative writing is above all a natural human activity. Once upon a time it was taught through the writing and speaking exercises embedded in rhetoric and the dramatic arts. I possess this positive view of creative writing because of moving a long distance from a position of scepticism about it. I originally chose to be a scientist and, as somebody who veered from literary matters, i have felt a starvation for creative permission, as though i was standing outside a lit house with no permission to enter. Let us explore a new level for writing in education that investigates any false borders between community and academy. We seek to extend creative writing’s franchise in education, and also extend our work into the communities, workplaces and schools outside the academy – to write with our door open on the g in the community and g game f i n a l l y, a g a i n w h o a r e y o u ? A i m : compare your answers with those you wrote in the writing game on this theme in chapter two. By all means, go into yourself; climb down to the invisible abyss from which your writing rises. The light of writing allows us to find our way through, and recall lawrence’s ‘bavarian gentians’ from chapter eight: ‘let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower / down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness’. We, as students, writers and teachers of writing, work and write within our social and educational communities – we are those communities. Our lives can be somewhat anarchic, not least because creative writing is a discipline that slides and slices across knowledge, thereby cutting across conformity. They campaign by their very presence to make it a better space for creative thought and action. Writers teach because they can, so the first and best thing you can do for yourself, as a new writer, is to apprentice yourself to a mentor who is a practising author, one who understands the fact that writing gets you lost, and who can help you sense the guide ropes that lead through the inferno’s circles to and from your abyss. We learn creative writing because we can, remembering that learning, like writing, is also an act of community. Creative writing throws open doors to the world, and even to other worlds within us and beyond our own. This is as important a book for new creative writers wishing to adventure into the community as it is for teachers seeking new ways to get children writing. Koch also worked in nursing homes, encouraging creative writing, and i never told anybody: teaching poetry writing to old people (teachers and writers collaborative, 1997) is another satisfying teaching book for community writers. Creative writing in health care is an association with a powerful tradition among writers and medical practitioners. A number of creative writers explore this tradition as practice in fiona sampson’s creative writing in health and social care (jessica kingsley, 2004). David morley’s the gift: new writing for the national health service (stride, 2002) brings together creative writing by authors and healthcare workers in a unique community writing project coordinated by the author, the purpose of which was to explore ‘the art of medicine and the medicine of art’. Creative writing’s role within therapy and personal development is explored in celia hunt’s therapeutic dimensions of autobiography in creative writing (jessica kingsley, 2000). This is also a fine example of popular science as an act of creative writing. For readers interested in writing, imagination and science, they might consult the writings of the sociobiologist e. The literary animal, edited by jonathan gottschall and david wilson (northwestern university press, 2005), is a fascinating collection of essays by scholars at the forefront of evolutionary literary analysis: by scientists who take a serious interest in creative writing; and by literary analysts who have made evolution their explanatory framework. It seems clear to me, as a scientist and as a poet, that the synthesis of the humanities and what steven pinker calls the ‘new sciences of human nature’ is an open space in which the discipline of creative writing finds ever-stronger g in the community and g game in your beginning is your end write a 500-word afterword to your own imaginary collected poems, complete stories or the final edition of your creative nonfiction. Behn, robin and twichell, chase (eds), the practice of poetry: writing exercises from poets who teach, new york: harperresource, 1992. Freed, lynn, ‘doing time: my years in the creative writing gulag’, harper’s magazine, july 2005, pp. Hugo, richard, the triggering town: lectures and essays on poetry and writing, new york: norton, 1979. Koch, kenneth, i never told anybody: teaching poetry writing to old people, new york: teachers and writers collaborative, 1997. Olsen, tillie, silences, new york: the feminist press, rative , hans, bishop, wendy and haake, katherine, metro: journeys in writing creatively, new york: addison-wesley, 2001. Shapiro, nancy and padgett, ron (eds), the point: where teaching and writing intersect, new york: teachers and writers collaborative, 1983. Zinsser, william, on writing well, new york: collins, ies, higher education 241–247 as open space 247–248 as patrons of writing 23, 82, 249–251 teaching and learning writing outside 44, 46, 234–257 achebe, chinua 41 activity, displacement 66 adaptation 73 agencies, literary 59 albee, edward 141 allende, isabel 164 amateur, honesty of 14 ambition, literary 15, 30, 56 amis, martin 104 anger, writing from 47 anti-narrative 89, 163 apollinaire, guillaume 226 aristotle 16–17, 33, 54 poetics 10, 16 arnold, matthew 41 ashbery, john 41 atwood, margaret 41, 104, 142, 148, 185, 215 auden, w. 41, 67, 194 audience 91, 142, 211 as reader 216–217 creating an audience 43, 82, 216, 217–218, 235 writing for an audience 142, 191 austen, jane 14, 161 authenticity , richard 79 beckett, samuel 38, 46, 70, 135, 148 behaviour, studying human 101 bellow, saul 41 berry, cicely 219 bierce, ambrose 158 bishop, elizabeth 39, 47, 140 blake, william 141, 226 blegvad, peter 226 blogs see weblogs bloom, harold 20, 25, 41, 235 bly, carole 16, 177 boden, margaret 242 bohr, niels vii, 245 boisseau, michelle 50, 196 boland, eavan 41 booker, christopher 9, 164 borges, jorge luis 148, 158 bowen, elizabeth 127 brahms, johannes 133 brande, dorothea 97 brodsky, joseph 27, 41, 237 bront¨e, charlotte 88, 92 bront¨e, emily 92, 110 wuthering heights 88, 92, 110 brook, peter 24 burgess, anthony 159 burns, robert 202 burroughs, william 112 and ‘cut-up technique’ 112 byron, george gordon 119, ound 47 baker, george 16, 116 baudelaire, charles e 72 calvino, italo 75 capote, truman carlson, ron 96, 157 carver, raymond 43 castiglione, baldassare 18 cavafy, constantine 70 chaplin, charlie 14 characterisation, fictional 2, 127, 155, 166, 167–168, 173 main and viewpoint 168 chatterton, thomas 74 suicide of 74 chatwin, bruce 27, 102 chaucer, geoffrey 16 chekhov, anton 158, 174, 209 children, impact on writers having 71 ‘circles for survival’ 56 clarity 90, 135, 137, 200 cocteau, jean 106, 187 coleridge, samuel taylor 20, 41 collins, billy 29 ‘commonplace books’ 100, 207 competitiveness 31, 32, 57, 70 communities, creative 22–23, 115, 234–257 connolly, cyril 64 enemies of promise 64 conrad, joseph 96, 159 coover, robert 163 cox, ailsa 162 creative nonfiction 37, 59, 177–193, 242 and interviews 185, 190–191 and memory 185 and point of view 186–187 and science 248 as a literature of reality 177–179 devices of 179–180 fieldwork for 189, 190–191 finding a topic 189–190 general writing strategies 179–183 introductory structures for 181 origins of 178 qualities of accuracy and art 178 range of 191–192 speaking with the reader using 182 subverting the structure of 181– experience to create 183–184 using passion to create 183 writing about people and the world 188–191 writing about travel 192 writing about yourself 183–188 writing a memoir 185 writing an investigation 190 writing family history 189 writing in scenes 189 creative writing and academic assessment 85–86 and academic standards 82–86 and business studies 242, 249 and composition 88–124 and dangers of professionalism 14 and freedom of expression 16, 48–49 and interdisciplinarity 8, 23, 39, 241 and knowledge 2, 28, 37, 38, 183, 187–188 and memory 185, 200 and neural development 8–9, 26–27, 52, 102, 185, 197 and other art forms 19, 23–24, 42 and rhetoric 17–19, 76 and science 28, 242–243, 245–246 and the academy 16–17, 30, 85, 241–247 and the community 234–257 and the media 82 and the publishing industry 55–59, 61, 82 and the self 1, 7, 46, 142–153, 212 and tradition 19 and value 156, 197, 211 as a craft 81 as a crossover discipline 243–245 as an academic discipline 1–33, 54, 82, 241–247, 252 challenges of 50, 64–87, 160 course-creation 85, 248 distance learning 231 doctoral programmes ve writing (cont. Future developments for 252 grassroots of 238–239 in schools 238 in self-development 3, 143–153 in the world 36–63, 188–191, 251 learning 6–15 possible disciplinary origins of 15–19 processes of 125–154 some principles of practice 88–93, 112 teaching 7–8, 41–44, 52, 216, 231 creativity 1–5, 9, 41 physical activity promoting 103 critical realism 39 criticism 36–39 and development of creative writing 20–21 as a complement to creative writing 25, 36, 89 as a negative influence on creative writers 21, 38, 40, 67 within a group of writers 56–57, 117, 121, 122–123, 134 dante 73 the divine comedy 73, 85, 254 darwin, charles 96 da vinci, leonardo 42, 243 dawkins, richard 242 dawson, paul 7 daydreaming 97 deadlines 135–136 death 70, 147 de balzac, honor´e 158 defamiliarisation 9, 90 de maupassant, guy 128, 158 depression 143, 146, 152, 249 de vinsauf, geoffrey 1, 17 poetria nova 1, 17–18 diaries, learning 85 dickens, charles 50, 149, 217 dickinson, emily 30, 110 dictionaries ulty 50–51 dillard, annie 32, 69, 174 dinesen, isak 158 discipline 69, 95–99, 129 and indiscipline 97–99 productive forms of 96–97, 129 dissatisfaction 94 donne, john 12, 202 douglas, keith 178, 180 alamein to zem zem 180 douglass, frederick 178 dove, rita 237 drafting 57, 86, 91, 174–175, 199, 210–211 drama 16, 18, 109, 217, 221, 248 dreams 2, 45, 100–101, 163–165 duende 12, 110 d¨urer, albrecht 89 economy 90, 135 editing, close 210 editors 58 effacement 151 egoism 187 einstein, albert 20 eisteddfod 80 eliot, george 151 eliot, t. Xvi, 14, 41, 60, 194, 240 empson, william 41 ‘enemies of promise’, concept of 64 envy 67, 70, 99 essays, reflective 38, 65, 85 expectation, raising the level of 83 experience, writing from 40, 44–45, 47, 153, 184, 212, 242 writing against your 47 experimental writing 74–78 failure 14, 134–135, 212 addiction to 99 importance of 68, 69, 134–135, 212 fantasy 31, 54, 67 faulkner, william 45, 158 fenton, james feuchtwanger, lion 73 fiction, practice of 155–176 and conflict 166, 173 and verisimilitude 155, 163, 169 as ‘storymaking’ 169–175 beginnings 171–172 character driving story 166, 168 character development 168, 173 character history 167–168 dreaming a fictional continuum 163–165 endings 175 flash fiction 156–157 form and structures for contemporary literary fiction 161–163 narrative voice 170 novel 159–160 novella 159 plotting 163–165 point of view 169–171 prewriting 167 pros and cons of writing literary fiction 156–161 research for 160, 167 rewriting 174–175 setting 173–174 scenes 163, 165 short story 157–158 ‘storymaking or storytelling? 69 france, anatole 5, 210 freed, lynn 250 ‘free verse’ 81, 196, 205 freewriting 105–106, 119 freud, sigmund 54, 152 frost, robert 15, 41, 72, 80, 200, 202, 208 frye, northrop 187 fuentes, carlos 30, 235 fussell, paul 205 game-playing 76, 80, 110, 128 gardner, john 15, 20, 38, 41, 43, 90, 160, 163, 166 genius 92 gibson, william 94 gide, andr´e 106 goethe, johann wolfgang 42 graves, robert 198 greene, graham 96 gunn, thom 41 gutkind, lee 183 hall, donald 22, 210 hallucinations, auditory 26, 27 hardy, thomas 102, 166 hawthorne, nathaniel 158 hazlitt, william 178 heaney, seamus 14, 41, 71, 129 heller, joseph 49 hemingway, ernest 2, 3, 11, 66, 121, 122–123, 133, 136, 158 herbert, george 12 hill, geoffrey 41 hogg, james 147 holub, miroslav 23, 49, 246 homer 166 honesty 69, 90, 120, 140, 144, 152, 186, 187, 211 hopkins, gerard manley 12 hubris 44, 164 hughes, ted 36, 41, 46, 69, 103, , richard 4, 194, 197, 234, 236 the triggering town 194, 212 humiliation, writing from 47 humility 47 hunt, celia 85, 187 hypertext 229 idealism 43, 69 imagination 8, 45, 91, 142, 160, 167, 243 imitation 32, 73, 91, 113–114 incubation see writing, incubation before indifference 64, 65, 134, 147 individuality 32 inevitability 50–51, 79, 90, 120 influence, literary 32, 89, 91, 113, 187 in media res 128 insecurity 101, 248, 249 insincerity 81 inspiration 79, 90, 103, 108–110 insularity 60 internet 229 interviewing 39, 185, 190–191 iowa writer’s workshop 16 james, henry 7, 159, 166 jarrell, randall 41 jennings, elizabeth 212 johnson, b. 205, 254 lear, edward 202, 207 ‘learned helplessness’ 99, 102 le guin, ursula 134, 171, 174 lessing, doris 59 levertov, denise 200, 209 lewis, sinclair 48 lewis, wyndham 60 life as a fiction 67, 137, 143, 184, 236 changing your 152–153 exercising discipline in 69 work–life balance 43, 69–70, 71 writing from 101–102, 183–184 line, the poetic 72, 195, 196, 209 listening to language 194–198, 220, 251 to music 27, 223–224 lists, reading 33 ‘literary apprenticeship’, concept of 11–12, 113 litt, toby 165 lodge, david 7, 169 logan, william 138 logbooks 86 lopez, barry 177, 188, 191, 236 lorca, federico garc´ıa 12, 110 lore, using 46, 139, 165 love 4, y, margot 230 lowell, robert 73, , les 41, 107, 108, 141, 163, 245 myth, using 46, o, antonio 74 mccullers, carson 159 mcewan, ian 67, 163, 236 macleish, archibald 201 mahon, derek 198 ‘makar’, concept of 19 mamet, david 248 mandelstam, nadezhda 26, 29 mandelstam, osip 26, 29, 182 journey to armenia 182 manifestos, literary 75 mann, thomas 159 mansfield, katherine 93, 158 marketplace, the literary 30, 59, 82, 155, 157 marquez, gabriel garc´ıa 158 marx, groucho 48 mathematics 40, 52, 76 and the natural world 2, 52, 246 writing using concepts from 52, 75, 79, 139 maugham, somerset 50 media, rival 65 melville, herman 158 memoir 185 memorisation 27, 28, 209 metaphor 9, 10, 245 ‘method writing’ 150 metre 80 poetic 194–198 metres, welsh 80 michelangelo 89 middlemarch 85 milne, a. 244 milton, john 18 money, writing for 42, 99, 198 moore, alan 68, 226 moore, marianne 5, 138, 206, 212 mozart, wolfgang amadeus 42, 122 and the salieri complex 122 muldoon, paul 41, 94, 114 murdoch, iris v, vladimir 66, 177 names 138–140 ‘negative capability’ 21, 106, 146 neruda, pablo 203 networking 56, 116 nobel prize 84 nonfiction 25 notebooks 45, 99–101, 137, 167, 187, 191 oates, joyce carol 129, 234, 235, 255 objectivity 40, 151 obsessiveness 92, 136 o’connor, flannery 22 o’connor, frank 134 o’hara, frank 38 olsen, tillie 64 silences 64, 86, 240 originality 6, 25, 26, 32 orwell, george 41, 49, 67, 110, 151, 155, 159, 178 ‘politics and the english language’ 49, 112, 122 other, the 146–147, 148 oulipo, the (ouvroir de litt´erature potentielle) 23, 74–78, 230 overconfidence 69 over-writing 93–94 ozick, cynthia 15, 29, 46, 66 packard, william 250 ‘pagefright’, concept of 68 panic 99, 134 paris review 61 parody 28, 73, 113 passion 12, 92, 183 pasternak, boris 12 pastiche 73 paterson, don 74, 157 pen, international 49 perec, georges 75 perfectionism 67, 69, ming writing 215–233 and audiences for live literature 216–218 as a conceptual art form 225 as an oral art form 216 as a public art form 227–229 as a visual art form 226–227 as literature promotion 216, 220 collaborative performance 230 in a mushairas 216, 224 ‘preaching to the converted’ 218 reading techniques 221–225 speaking and performing in public 215–218 subversions 226 types of venue for live literature 218 using acting and actors 217, 221 using music 223–224 voice work for live literature 218–220 persona 150–151 pessoa, fernando 150 perutz, max 242, 246 phrase-making 110 pinker, steven 242 ‘placebo-writing’ 146 plagiarism 73 plath, sylvia 200 plato 16 play, writing using 14, 49–50, 52, 68, 76, 119 plotting 163–165 poe, edgar allan 157, 158 poems, writing 134, 194–214 adapting your own experience for 212 addresses for 202–203 alliteration 196 and formal design 203–208 and poets 125, 199, 211–213 and qualities of language 194, 199, 200–203 and slams 18, 212, 216 and song 194, 196 and translation ble strategies for 208 finding the language for 198–200 ‘found poems’ 140, 209–210 free verse 196, 205 iambic pentameter 195 metre 194–198 practising several modes of 208–211 problems in writing poems 203 repetition devices 197 rewriting poems 199, 210–211 rhyme 196–197 sequences and collections 207 ‘strangeness’ of poetry 201 subjects for 202 subverting form of poems 206–207 syllabics 195, 205–206 teaching the techniques of 197 poetics, developing a 37 politics 48, 52, 67 posing 32, 72 pound, ezra 21, 38, 41, 60, 74, 90 precision 136–141, 210 and voice 140, 211 pre-writing, concept of 167 pritchett, v. 41, 94 process, creative 22, 39, 55, 70, 91, 125–154 ‘promise’, concept of 64, 71 publishing 55–61, 83, 120 and the small presses 58, 59–61 as business 55 etiquette of 57 on demand 230 pragmatics of 61 pullman, philip 11, 156, 171, 173 punctuation 110 pushkin, vladimir 158 queneau, raymond 75, 76, 226 exercises in style 76 readers 2, 7 as writers 7 reading 25–33 aloud 27, 83, 120, 133, and fashion 29–30, 82 and learning to write 31–33, 159, 208 and taste 30–31, 33, 208 as a writer 39–40, 90 creative 26, 28–29 for instruction 187, 209, 236 reality 45, 177 receptivity 131 recognition 30, 55 redmond, john 80, 202 reed, henry 49 repetition 80 research 39, 68, 101 for creative nonfiction 125 for fiction 125, 160, 167 for writing 25, 44, 99 reviewing 37, 67 revising see drafting rewriting 133–134, 135, 199, 210 rhyme 72, 80, 194–197, 198 as a design tool 79 full-rhyme 196 half-rhyme 197 nursery 80 rhythm 194 as a mnemonic device 80, 194 rich, adrienne 41 rilke, rainer maria 152, 254 rimbaud, arthur 147 risk-taking 43, 68, 113, 143 rodin, auguste 42 roethke, theodore 203 rose, steven 242 rowling, j. 156, 240 royal literary fund 244 rule-breaking 92 ruskin, john 83, 178 ruthlessness 91, 97, 148 said, edward 70 sand, george 151 schlovsky, viktor 175 schmidt, michael 60 school of wildness, the 20–21, er, james 100 science 40, 140, 151, 189 popular 25, 54, 182, 241–242 using the language of 54, 241 scott, walter 151 self-belief 15, 142–143 self-consciousness 13, 79, 142–143 self-doubt 69 self-importance 13 self-pity 46 sentimentality 65–66, 164, 203 serendipity 77, 127 shakespeare, william 20, 109, 138, 148, 217 ‘shelf-life’ 71 shelley, mary 119 and the writing of frankenstein 119 shelley, percy bysshe 9, 41, 90, 119 a defence of poetry 90 ‘showing not telling’ 166, 197 sidney, sir philip 41 sinclair, john d. 73 silence, and writing 72, 74 simile 245 simplicity 140 smart, christopher 202 smith, william jay 251 socrates 28 speech, qualities of human 27, 101, 195 spiegelman, art 184 spontaneity 66 steinbeck, john 129, 132 stevens, wallace 212 story 8, 155, 246 storytelling 31, 80, 169 stravinsky, igor 92 style 90, 93 using a variety 77, 114 subjectivity 40, 46, 85 success 33, 67 as a relative value in writing 155, 198 suicide 74, 152 syllabics 138, 195, 205– 110, 144 szymborska, wisl
awa 199 talent 8, 11, 12, 24, 36–63, 132 talking, hazards of 66–67 teaching as anti-creative 43 as a performance art 216 by distance learning 231 motivations for 42 theme 38, 119, 166 theory, literary 38 thesauri 103 thiong’o, ngugi wa 41, 73 thomas, dylan 79, 202 thomas, edward 146 thoreau, henry david 31, 66, 178, 180 walden, or life in the woods 180 thought-experiments 77, 119, 147, 244 titles 132–133 tolkien, j. 13 transaesthetics 230 translation 72–74 and fabrication 74 and imitation 73 and ‘otherness’ 72, 74, 146 and poetry 73 and the practice of variation 73 as a creative act 72 as a cure for writer’s block 72, 146 as adaptation 73 as a form of stealing 72–73, 113 challenges of 72–74 truth 46, 90, 137, 144, 169, 202, 236 turgenev, ivan 158 turner, mark 8 two cultures, the 241 ‘unlearning’, concept of 93, 208 ‘unreliable narrator’ 168 updike, john 156 val´ery, paul 194, 201 van gogh, vincent 9 visualisation on 11, 12–13, 22, 212 voice 10, 72, 91, 140, 143–144 ‘finding a voice’ 144 vonnegut, kurt 181 walcott, derek 114 wallace, robert 50, 196 walking 103 weblogs 67, 229, 230–231 wells, h. 48 writers 136 character of 5, 11, 31, 69, 91, 97, 126, 143, 212 reputations of 82 ‘writing across the curriculum’ 244 writer’s block 72, 102, 108 writing: about people and the world 188–191, 236–238 about yourself 183–188 and ageing 70 and belief 7, 13 and chance 26, 52, 77, 111, and childhood 15, 54, 80, 81, 105, 197 and choosing a genre 126 and confidence 141–143, 171 and confusion 95, 142 and design 78–81, 203–208 and ‘flow’ 129–130 and friendship 56, 115 and identity 114, 254 and impersonality 136, 146, 151 and intuition 126, 160, 246 and playfulness 14, 77, 208–211 and pleasure 4, 49, 54–55, 238 and possibility 78, 111, 128, 142, 162, 211, 239 and silence 72, 74, 131 and surprise 79, 92, 110, 127, 164, 194 as a form of teaching 42–43, 216 avoiding 66, 108, 142 badly 91, 93, 210 beginning a piece of 128 creative nonfiction 177–193 demystifying the processes of 5, 15 electronic forms of 229–232 fiction 155–176 finding a rhythm for 4–5, 70, 96, 129 finishing 131–132, 133 for yourself 15, 25, 39, 90, 160, 192, 235 ideas for 45, 242 improving skill at 52, 57, 68, 131 in different states of mind 143–153 in performance 215–233 in persona 150–151 in the community 234–257 in your ‘zone’ 104–105, 126, 129 incubation before 127–128, 202 literary 93, 160 material for 46, 101 on ‘nothingness’ ations of choice during 75, 110, 162, 175, 208 planning as part of the process of 127 poems 194–214 preparation for 125–126 processes of 125–154 props and prompts for 103–104, 136 reasons and motivations for 3–4, 14–15, 25, 38, 95, 211–213 reasons for not writing 32, 142 rituals for creating the best conditions for 102–106 talking away your writing 66–67 tools for 99 using heteronyms to assist with 150–151 ‘writing cold’ 152 writing games xiv, 68, 163, 244 rationales for xiv, 163, 242 ‘writing in the disciplines’ 244 writing programmes 6, 59, 115 ‘writing what you know’ 34, 45–47, 91, 183–184, 189 writing workshops 56–57, 115–123, 134, 169 and the danger of homogeneity 118 ‘generative’ 118–120 hazards of 121–122 human dynamics in 117, 122 improvising writing in 119, 129, 130 origins of 16, 116 purposes of 115 ‘responsive’ 118, 120–123 setting up an online workshop 231–232 yeats, william butler 97 ‘youth-envy’ 70 zinsser, william 179, uction to creative writing -- e210, section ve writing refers to the practice of writing prose ... Uction to macro uction to graduate dge coaching introduction to the mcat - uction to writing traits and writing ve writing ve writing - ve writing uction to technical writing - , the uction to research paper ve writing - winghill writing school - student ing the relationship of creative thinking to reading and g 2222 f 001 special topic: creative writing: food writing ... Introduction to the cambridge advanced modeller - ve applications of human behavior understanding - cambridge ... 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Gft /so 1 * ii £ page intentionally left cambridge introduction pioneering book introduces students to the practice and art ve writing and creative reading. David morley creative writing comes from, the various forms and has taken, and why we teach and learn the arts of fiction, poetry ve nonfiction. He looks at creative writing in performance; art, as visual art, as e-literature and as an act of community.

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As g poet, critic and award-winning teacher of the subject, new engagements for creative writing in the creative academy science. Accessible, entertaining and groundbreaking, dge introduction to creative writingis not only a useful students and teachers of writing, but also an inspiring read in its . Aspiring authors and teachers of writing will find much morley is associate professor in english and director of k writing programme at the university of dge introductions to series is designed to introduce students to key topics and ible and lively, these introductions will also appeal to readers to broaden their understanding of the books and authors they enjoy. Key suggestions for further in this series:Eric bulson the cambridge introduction to james xiros cooper the cambridge introduction to t. Scott e dillon the cambridge introduction to early english e dillon the cambridge introduction to shakespeare's goldman the cambridge introduction to virginia j. Jimmie killingsworth the cambridge introduction to walt es lewis the cambridge introduction to mcdonald the cambridge introduction to samuel martin the cambridge introduction to emily messent the cambridge introduction to mark morley the cambridge introduction to creative nadel the cambridge introduction to ezra s. Person the cambridge introduction to nathaniel peters the cambridge introduction to joseph robbins the cambridge introduction to harriet beecher scofield the cambridge introduction to the american short smith the cambridge introduction to thomson the cambridge introduction to english theatre, todd the cambridge introduction to jane cambridge introduction dge university dge, new york, melbourne, madrid, cape town, singapore, sao dge university edinburgh building, cambridge cb2 8ru, hed in the united states of america by cambridge university press, new publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision nt collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take t the written permission of cambridge university published in print format -13 978-0-511-28519-6 ebook (ebl). Too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as r 1 introducing creative writing r 2 creative writing in the world r 3 challenges of creative writing r 4 composition and r 5 processes of creative writing r 6 the practice of fiction r 7 creative nonfiction r 8 writing poetry r 9 performing writing r 10 writing in the rative bibliography purpose of this book is to introduce readers to the practice of g. Writing and reading share an interdependent orbit open space of double helix of reading and writing makes you more alert to ial as a reader and writer of yourself, of other people and of other also creates a discipline in your life that makes these acts of attention a way . It is then vital you learn to work alone and beyond your potential - readers alike work beyond their own this is an introduction to a discipline, we discuss where creative from, the various forms and camouflages it has taken and why we learn it. I do not present you with an anatomy of the various histories ve writing in higher education; there are fine examples available in print. First five chapters explore principles and procedures of creative apply generally to the writing and techniques of fiction, creative nonfic-. States of mind we use for writing; the workshop in its various guises ses; and the enemies and allies of creativity. They present some of the techniques and practice for fiction,Poetry and the international supergenre, creative nonfiction. We look at creative writing as a verbal art mance; as hybrid with public and visual art; and as electronic literature. Argue that none of these is at odds with the making of books; they are open to creative literary practice. Chapter ten looks at writing as an community; i then attempt to speculate modest engagements for g in the creative academy, for example within experts in this field, all of what i have to say is rudimentary. This for creative writing students, beginning writers and new teachers of cast of this book is about the roots of creativity in writing, and the the writing of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, rather than ques. My reason for the book's architecture is to send you the action of writing, by offering a series of open spaces for discussion,Reflection and practice. I agree, and the book is designed to address mentary phases of creative is an introduction, partial and selective. A book about creative writing requires lifetime subscription alexandrian library, and my recommended reading lists scan only -level shelves. Those lists are starting this is a book about, of all things, creative writing, i tried to keep ge open and personal, tuning out academic white noise - citations necessary, endnotes shown the door. I wanted to make a book that hits things fresh; one that is written writing. Writer, the first excitements of reading, the waking in created ve writing - even clear writing - closes distances between us. What this book offers you is an introduction and an of it as a miniature stage: the matters that are closest to the covers entrances and exits. I reflected on my own teaching of creative writing sities, adult education, communities and schools; and co-teaching ing teaching in the english-speaking world, especially the united states,Canada and in europe. When thinking about the aims and processes ve writing, literary biographies and autobiographies are a useful begin to find out about a writer's working methods and philosophy. A variety of key works and further reading that amplify, or exemplify,Matters that need your closer attention, especially in regard to writing fiction,Creative nonfiction and poems. There are several superb technical books ative and formal writing (behn and twichell, 1992; bernays and painter,1991; burroway, 2006; fussell, 1979; koch, 1990; matthews and brotchie, 1998;. 1995; padgett, 2000; steele, 1999; stein, 1995; strand and boland,2000); on the practical and philosophical processes of writing fiction, creative nonfiction (addonizio and laux, 1997; boisseau and wallace, 2004;. 2001; schaefer and diamond, 1998); and nature of creativity and the psychology of writing (boden, 2004; lieb, 1998; hunt and sampson, 2006; koestler, 1975; lakoff and johnson,1980; pfenninger and shubik, 2001; pope, 2005; turner, 1996). Editors: margaret ferguson,Mary jo salter and jon stallworthy, norton, g creatively can feel a little like working out logistical, even mathematical,Challenges. Writing games process, and are often true to the natural rhythm of literary production technique and style are often learned on the job. Cameron, ron carlson, peter carpenter, nina cassian, jonathan coe,Peter davidson, douglas dunn, brian follett, maureen freely, dana gioia, , david hart, miroslav holub, ted hughes, russell celyn jones, , doris lessing, denise levertov, emma mccormack, paul muldoon, , bernard o'donoghue, maggie o'farrell, melissa pritchard, al purdy,Jewell parker rhodes, jane rogers, carol chillington rutter, william scammell,Michael schmidt, jane stevenson, george szirtes, michelene wandor; and following institutions where thinking took place: the arvon foundation, sity of warwick, national association of writers in education and ia piper center for creative writing at arizona state university. Teacher, charles tomlinson, who taught me that the first cause of g is creative ts and versions of this text appeared in a slightly altered form in ne (edinburgh), the guardian and poetry review (london). Your end is your a 500-word introduction to your own imaginary collected poems te stories. Creative you wish to be brief, first prune away those devices that contribute elaborate style; let the entire theme be confined within narrow not be concerned about verbs; rather, write down with the pen of only the nouns . If we can think of the page as an open space, even as a space in play, we will understand that it is also space choosing to act, by writing on that page, we are creating another time; we are playing out a new version of existence, of life even. I mean the same when thinking about creative g a poem, a story or a piece of creative nonfiction, is to catalyse on of a four-dimensional fabric that is the result when space and event in the universe can be located in the four-dimensional plane and time. Writing can create personal universes in which this system within space-time operates for the reader; the reader is its g and reading are collaborative acts in the making and performance -time. Readers fill in the gaps for themselves, in essence, writing that small universe, creating that fifth dimension, and their experience dimension. A well-drawn character in fiction or poetry,Say, may find their actions and language imitated by readers simply the creative radiation of that fictional self, and the accuracy of the about the force and precision behind the creation of fictional or ters we admire or s, like dreams, have a way of taking care of people, by preparing them,Teaching them. I argue that, although there is an inherent simplicity to this, ucing creative writing not simple as a practice. So that become a part of the experience of the person who reads g can change people, for writing creates new worlds and ses, parallel to an actual. To some, writing remains an artifice, a game even, and it is - things are, as all of us are - something made or played upon. Certainly, the process of writing is often ing than the outcome, although, when you capture something luminous,That sense of discovery and wonder swims through the words and leaps in . There is a pleasure in precision; in solving and resolving the riddles syntax and voice; and in the choices of what to lose and what to r, while creative writing is no panacea, some writers find its eutic; and some teachers of writing believe that writing is a powerful various types of therapy, from the treatment of depression to social reha-. They can even lead to a sense of worthlessness and loss of , as the poet richard hugo advises writing students, 'isn't it better to inability to accept yourself to creative advantage? If writing subject to these tests and taut self- tests, then you cheat your devil of . This' to 'that' requires a process which is both creative and which requires work,Work that is sometimes euphoric and easy, and sometimes difficult, mes you will write for weeks as though your mind itself is even flying, independent of your ability and knowledge. Sometimes you as though you are stumbling through a dark forest; your thought is ucing creative writing . Any who fears that flow and ebb, who takes no pleasure or pain in it, who ble of studying their own flaws or the flaws of their writing too nearly,Must try to find their own balance. If one is afraid of it,The situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly,What one says is , for all that commitment or familiarity, creative writing is not a of the purposes of the academic discipline of creative writing is to without falsifying its intricacy. Creative writing can be opened and learned,Like any craft, like any game of importance. Writing is rewriting, and ter of the writer is rewritten by the activity of writing and you are interested in the energies of language, rather than 'being a writer',Then you stand a very good chance of becoming a writer. Yet not need to write creatively if your ambition is to be a great reader. Write this phrase in your notebook and, once you n it, keep writing for five minutes. There are only two rules to this game:You must not stop writing; and you must not think. As we shall see in , this 'free-writing' exercise is effective for warming up for writing, but it effective at creating unusual phrases, ones that possess a surprising personal linguistic energy. You should try to do se every day, not only to keep your writing mind limber, but also to create of original and unusual phrases from which you can draw when you g. There are as many energetic views on how to g as there are university writing programmes, writing workshops, sts, teachers of writing, books about writing - and writers. There are many literary theories of writing,But those theories are not within my remit. However, the quality of ucing creative writing so various can be confusing for a new writer searching for models, searching for some philosophy of practice they can lean against, or into,While they develop. Since creative writing is such an open space, whom do will do well to start with yourself - by refining your own ability to be able to trust your own judgement. There are many belief systems, and that leeway for the evolution of ideas for these viewpoints about teaching writing are all right so long as they their time, and so long as they are not disingenuous (creating cannot keep) or dogmatic (creating premises you, the new writer, ) . It is not empirical science; teaching and learning writing is not ng and learning are some cards; here is my table. I think creative writing can be effectively when its students have some talent and vocation for it. If r can shape the talent and steer that vocation, and the students enjoy g and steering, then i think creative writing should be taught as a whole point of teaching creative writing, however, is that students to make and guide themselves, for writing is mostly a solitary pursuit,Even when written collaboratively using electronic media. Also believe creative writing could be taught within other disciplines, as alongside science and social science, if students of those disciplines desire to try it, and can take the practice of creative writing for what : a possible second string, or a second chance at something from which pleasure. Creative writing 'commands' these different departments of self to ating, and they will, by stretching out synapses over relatively distances, wiring up. And provisionally) are capable of developing complementary senses - sight with sound,Taste with touch, time with hearing - or all senses simultaneously ucing creative writing h the medium of one line of poetry, or one paragraph of description. The imaginative synaptic complication are always are neurologically changedby our experience of writing as much as we reading. Creative writing is the art of defamiliarisation:An act of stripping familiarity from the world about us, allowing us to see has blinded us to. The same mechanisms of t used throughout poetry are present in our most common concepts:Time, events, causation, emotion, ethics, and business, to name but a few' (1980:Scientific, philosophical and artistic breakthroughs often go through of cognitive and creative process - attention to detail (of a problem) — >-. This interesting picture of the power and purpose of story, but is an either to prove or is important not to lie about creative writing. Conclude that same oscillating standard holds within creative could reason that it depends upon the position of the player; on a player of language; on their play of mind on mind, and mind in mind. Of writing lies in the way the cards of language are played; the voice the cards become your ering your e a door. Then put it away weeks, after which revise it completely into a short story or ucing creative writing 1 : we are making a new poem or story created from a combination of -state and a prompted imagination using a method somewhat -hypnosis. It is hard for them to know who they are; are a writer at all; or whether they are somebody who has never really audience, who is still lost in a students of creative writing know who they are already, and will this self-knowledge at some early stage of their lives. They are some extent editors of your character - as parents and teachers are - in the editor of the character who writes, for whom the creation of story, or, of played language, is already, unbreakably, a natural habit of need to possess a purpose for writing, and to learn to keep this an apprentice of writing does not have some genuine aptitude for , then their time may be better spent some other way. It has more with being trained, taught and encouraged in creative language and you were a child. I believe, however, you can 'catch up' without agement: many good writers were once autodidact teenagers, going , teaching themselves, or taking up serious writers as mentors in is, becoming their argument for aptitude (rather than, say, desire) would be accepted other profession, and creative writing is no different. It may you can take the lessons of creative writing into the world, and use them conduct creative lightning if you are lucky and talented, but that several factors, including your willingness to face failure. Is nothing wrong with being passionate or even obsessive about g; drivenness can oxygenate writing when technique is under ca tio n's pro vide on is important to many professions, including those of science ne. The poets john donne, george gerard manley hopkins were men of the church, although the ucing creative writing the writer as an actual believer is thorny and interesting since some to require a structured belief system in order to write (or their belief systems for their reader, as in the work of j. E that creative writing and belief are callings that sit all too shakily on of responsibility and guilt. If vocation is thought of as belonging to somebody who ance on acquiring and developing literary skills, then creative writing is. Readers are not congregations,Nor are they tribes for whom writers act as walking, talking you possess a vocation in addition to writing, you may wish to consider s on your time and mind before you commit to both. Very disabling tension, putting too much pressure on yourself, es of composition - the result is creative constipation. We make providence as writers, and there is nothing more spoiling to pomposity; or programmatic ideas about writing; or outlandish our importance. If about the business of writing in the mask of the professional, then most of the fun from the natural guesswork of writing, and chances at finding your luck or voice. Of course, in your dealings with the world of publishing, you should act professionally, but you can leave that persona,Along with your ego, at the door of your writing room and the . Like having a daily working job, which - lucky us - is to write what ve writing is a discipline with many apprentices, but one that respects that, at whatever stage we reach, in the writing game we are all apparent modesty of self-perception could seem otherworldly to . Know yourself better through failure and retrial, however tortuous s, and learn more about yourself than others would have you know, beyond your own intelligence in language and writing. You will ent and oscillating rationalisations for your writing: from jane austen'ucing creative writing urist conception of painting upon two inches of ivory, to franz kafka'ng to smash the frozen sea inside must never confuse literary vocation with literary or personal gh they wear a similar face, ambition is a mask and vocation is the writer cynthia ozick says, 'one must avoid ambition in order to ise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power ge. In the end,Much good writing is gained by practice, by knowing your objectives g how to achieve them in language. Your approach to the continent of writing, you may find g an audience, sometimes by serving their consciences on their behalf, creating work that is entertaining or consoling. For me the initial delight is in the remembering something i didn't know i knew' - robert frost (quoted ve writing in people believe there is something new or untested about the creative writing, and nowhere is this debate more volatile than in ments devoted to the study of literature. What is clear to many writers is that creative writing, and ng, never really left the university ions of creative modern version of the discipline of creative writing begins in 1940 foundation of the iowa writer's workshop, although there were precur-. Including george baker's '47 workshop' at harvard from 1906 to discipline can be seen partly as a reinvention of two great grainy wheels:Ancient dramatic teaching and renaissance rhetorical exercises in ve writing's tale begins in athens, with aristotle (384-322 bc). Before that because aristotle's poetics is an account of creative ed and used for years, and is no more than a fragment of the gathered for study. Aristotle's work goes further, for it has a moral aim, and creative ng inherits this aim to some extent. To creative writing; it is one of the reasons it troubles its detractors as its advocates. What does the teaching of creative to, or with, its small society when it goes beyond teaching mere technique? Creative writing about more than just new writers, streaming into their teachers like a self-invading squadron? It beaches itself ucing creative writing body of theory about literature and poetry that formed and informed sance. Speaking and writing were seen as art, and rhetoric (from rhetor, 'public speaker') taught the means to speak and write persuade an audience and bind a society. The practice is as old as it is aboard the time machine of this book, and travel back in time to ages to take part in a class taught in the thirteenth would you feel if your creative writing teacher asked you to write a story that personified 'the cross lamenting its captivity under and urging a crusade'? An ambitious masterstroke, de vinsauf teaches by what drives poetria nova deep into memory is its playful delight ctive and thematic creative writing. A stanza is a room, and a poem containing many lit rooms:If a man has a house to build, his hand does not rush, hasty, into doing: the work is first measured out with his heart's -line, and the inner man marks out a series of steps beforehand,According to a definite plan; his heart's hand shapes the whole before 's hand does so, and his building is a plan before it is an e yourself a student of creative writing in the thirteenth century. I would love to sign his creative writing class, but i am 800 years icians taught technique, style and rewriting using imitation and exem-. The most effective teachers of creative writing teach wide, g and the value of trying on voices, strategies and styles. Of, and skill with, language:For it happeneth verye sildome, that a man not exercised in writinge,How learned so euer he be, can at any tyme know perfectly the toile of writers, or taste of the sweetnes and excellencye of styles, wiser observations that often times are found in them of olde tyme. Aspects of the old to sleep in europe one century; they woke up in america in the next,In safer hands, in a newer form called creative writing. Back in europe, e came into its thin inheritance; ideas of inspiration rose to their ucing creative writing walked away pocketing notions of deliberation, intelligence and g gained an image, it even gained a kind of audience or celebrity, but the ability to hear part of its history with reason and clarity. The rise of creative writing has reinstated a reality to one aspect education and the writer's place within it. Their eness allows you a great deal of freedom of interpretation and may wish later to use these examples to create a story set in the , in which such a writing class took school of ve writing has been looked upon with intellectual suspicion, or a school for amateurism and wildness. Yet, the relation of ism and scholarship to contemporary writing and poetry has been the redevelopment of creative writing, and always has been. The wildness is on the prowl; it has new purposes and territories and a motto own: 'if i chance to talk a little wild, forgive me' - s in which creative writing is part of learning need not have e of only turning out better writers of poetry, fiction, drama, children's literature. Novelist, john gardner claims, 'strangeness is the one quality in fiction be faked'; its presence in writing reveals 'the very roots of the s' (1985: 57). Good writer can scent creative wildness and will know, from their ence, how best to develop and direct it toward a constructive target,Without taming. Writers make for sympathetic teachers of writing are familiar with the weird and wayward process of making know the differing cages of form that allow a new writer to draw the creature inside s are as diverse as things are various. Creative writing schools provide an open spatial which learning basic principles goes hand in hand with a certain wildness and invention. Many combine critical and creative a way that presents a distinctive opportunity for research, linking a writer'dge of literature, gained through practice, with perspectives criticism, theory and scholarship. Professions of have been mistakes made along the way, not least our allowing tion that creative writing is some adjunct or educational tool to s. There will always be theoreticians who patrol the approach roads ve writing, setting up signs and limit-markers in their own s. It is also icant error to suppose that creative writing needs to take place in ion when it already has a strong life outside it, in schools, libraries, als and communities. Neither does it matter greatly if some s create a parallax view of writing within the academy: a view judged ive laws and standards of literary achievement and craft, rather than ed by an academic's antennae for the lattices of power and history new work's language is 'performing'. The very finest practices in creative writing deliver strong ement and incisive critical reflection on the social and historical the new work; our best writers are our most incisive critics and ve writing rightly has its doubters among practising authors. A writing usefully teach a would-be writer that they cannot, and do not want to,Write creatively. As donald hall lamented, writing workshops sometimes trivialise the minimising that terror of total process. Although learning to write be fun, becoming and being a writer is a far more ruthless, wilder game,And creative writing teachers should make no secret of this or try to true nature of this endeavour. That level of es very good teachers, but it also requires us teaching methods for writing courses and degrees fuse critical discussion with concentrated practical work in a way that ssion. And progress is the main reason that literary practitioners should ve writing, and not be teachers of technique or theoreticians of presence of writers can lead to other outcomes just as valuable, such ve wins respect, widens and deepens the knowledge base of writers, create cultural centres of excellence in which new writers lves yearly to more experienced writers. One of the practical benefits of creative writing new and supportive communities and constituencies of writers are nurtured - real rooms with real writers in them. Teachers and students to learn from each other, look after each other, set up enterprises magazines, presses and web journals, and receive help for these that slightly apologetic patron of new writing: the impartial, supportive patron is worth more than the money that from that relationship. Used their experience to travel into other subjects, even into work usually associated with creative writing, such as science, technology with ambition (and risking both hubris and envy), creative teach us how to travel into our own potentialities; it can create . As i suggest in chapter ten, the discipline of creative writing is not e of humanities but can be multidisciplinary. It is our job to stress ance of practice, reading, criticism, drafting, as well as the av holub's liberating notions of 'serious play', and the oulipo school'tion and creation of 'potential literature' that cuts across mathematics,The sciences and writing in the same way as rhetoric. We are all wilder than do not burden other taught art forms with the first name 'creative'. Not talk of going to classes in creative music, creative painting, , creative film or creative acting. Writing provides a period of 'constant schooling', and the space to practise in language and form, for writers also stand in danger ng halfway. In chapter nine, i will demonstrate some ways in which g works with other art forms such as performance, music and the a group, visit a museum or art gallery, and spend at least half a day writing to several paintings or photographs. Or hand out postcards of art and paintings in class, and ly to them in : responding to art in this way is called ecphrasis, and is a ion in creative writing. You write something in homage to a piece of , or use visual art, sculpture or film as stimuli for ucing creative writing g and the individual g is a kind of rewriting but by many hands and eyes. And to remain, an original creative writer you must first become, , as original a reader, and pursue your individual taste with restlessness,Competitiveness and trust in your intuition. It is useful for research,Obviously, but is not only about research, for nonfiction will supply you for the subject of poems, for characters and situations in stories and creation of further nonfictional writing on subjects that excite you. If feel blocked as a writer, reading popular science, history and be certain to force you out of the corner in which you have placed tion is also a good space to relax, or to hide from the gravitational other creative writers' voices while you are working on your own stories g literary criticism and theory is less likely to lend itself to g, but can be a good way of lying fallow when, and if, you do not write in the open. If you want to be a writer, at least one hundred books of original g for every book about writing seems a minimum ratio - and ies will be your ures in to your nearest library, but make your way adventurously to a subject or that you have never previously visited. Repeat this process until the reading begins to become a habit,And/or the writing begins to feel easier or more : creative reading does not come easily to everybody; sometimes you have yourself to read work that is not familiar or useful. It is also vital to force yourself to read beyond what you know, to open ways of writing but also of perception; to begin to write what you do . I sometimes saw to get rid of this kind of 'hum', to brush it off and escape from ucing creative writing would toss his head as though it could be shaken out like a drop that gets into your ear while bathing. You may to hear your own writing, the soundscapes of your own poems and auditory hallucinations, or a musical phrase that then takes on a more clear-. After g, the other students should tell the reader how they felt about the the writing, and which qualities of sound they found attractive. It is the equivalent of playing bach in the style of duke : not only is reading aloud a good test of style; but it is also a good way aloud about writing and writers. Games are highly effective ways of establishing a small community of s with shared interests, meeting outside the times of their formal ve reading is the kindest favour students can do for themselves if to be a creative writer. Writing is a form of knowledge creation, and imitation is able and ancient tradition in writing, and the arts, as it is in science forms of knowledge. As socrates said, 'employ your time in lf by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what laboured hard for. Mary kinzie describes an active reading process , but her explanation holds for other genres:Reading is like writing in beginning in uncertainty and driving ation and experiment. To read this way keeps a ucing creative writing provisional and still in the making, which is how the process g absorbs the act of writing to their mutual improvement in skill and understanding. He checked his t his own experience, testing it in the light of his own ideas for writing, must learn to do. Writing is a type of unriddling g can help you solve local difficulties in your own writing while you g (it is a good idea to keep several books about you during your ns). The best way follow a curriculum of reading, a task to which the study and practice ve writing lends itself learn by example. It cannot be helped also that s our perception of writing (as it does with criticism or literary the-. Reappraisals rot into neglect; favouritisms deform into innocent, but as destructive to reputation or posterity, cultural ns most writing to oblivion:The name of the author is the first to ed obediently by the title, the plot,The heartbreaking conclusion, the entire suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard collins, 'forgetfulness' (na2: 3030). You are writing against the current ideologies, mores or fashions of and place, then you must be prepared to resist pressures to conform to this is the artistically honest path for your work. Many students creative writing because they are genuinely excited by what they ucing creative writing 3 enced as readers. To ise is to write in a creative the advice of henry thoreau: 'read the best books first, or you have had a chance to read them all. Creative reading is the engine for influence and imitation - and appetite to become, and be, a great storyteller can arise simply from to become, and be, admired; or even to protect oneself from mockery . Students and new writers also come to creative writing out of an impress or pose creatively. If you do not read, if you do not enjoy and fiction, then your time might be better spent doing something tive in another arena, for you will get nowhere in that competition do not read as competitively and as creatively as writers. Those of you ucing creative writing wish to write might truant from your abilities out of the fear you ly succeed, that you may have something to s, however minor, brings responsibility, even if it is only the respon-. Better still (and this is one of the best reasons for the discipline ve writing in education), ask a teacher or mentor to create a reading fits the way you, as an individual, write at this time. Have them extend this reading list as your writing changes and extends its them set work that begins, unhurriedly, to challenge your individual its precepts of composition. After all, you are not studying literature; you g it over, harvesting what you require and hopefully reseeding the same way that creative writing must teach you to write on your own,And beyond your own intelligence, so the lessons of creative reading must how to read on your own, and to read against your nurture and we find our voice, when our voice exerts its gravitational pull on g, pulling to it everything that is of use, it stimulates our progress as. Then, and only then, we must go about unlearning how to read,And begin striving for simplicity not allusion; for clarity not echo; for ves in our writing, seeing that those others we wanted to be, whose were echoing, were ourselves what you know: you as a around you. Situate your writing in the present day, using the ('i'), and use as many of the observed details about yourself as not make anything up. Once finished, put the writing to one side for three weeks, returning to it te the : in chapter seven, we will write about what you do: what you know, e, about work. You will learn to read people, are two particularly fascinating studies of the history and evolution ve writing as a discipline: d. Myers' the elephants teach: g since 1880 (prentice hall, 1995) and paul dawson's creative the new humanities (routledge, 2005). There are hundreds of books on the nature of creativity, but ucing creative writing 's creativity: theory, history, practice (routledge, 2005) is not only tively written text in itself, but also provides a beguiling synthesis t and practice, crossing disciplinary boundaries and making fascinat-. The reprint of dorothea brande's becoming a writer (tarcher penguin,1981) presents some of the most realistic ideas still on teaching and ve writing. This new edition carries an excellently provocative john gardner on some of the root problems of creative writing its teachers. Annie dillard's the writing life (harpercollins, 1989) bring the daily practice of writing and the purpose of reading as a writer. S beautifully concise writing and the writer (heinemann, 1982) ating material on the writer-reader contract, and the ways writers s. Writing in the form of compulsion seems to be far more important, in of a writer, than innate literary gifts. Historically, in the west at least, criticism and creative two phases of the same activity, and criticism illuminates most practical experience of writing is at the bottom of it. The best s new open spaces for ve writing and creative university creative writing courses place an equal emphasis on the literature and the practice of writing. Out of a belief that criticism in balance with creativity (or motivated by an unvoiced qualm that creativity numbs or softens critical intelligence), many writing asked to require that students submit for assessment a reflective essay, or tary, on the aims and processes involved in writing their portfolio a writer, you are a student of the world. Writing course to profit from writing critical, reflective self-interrogations,Creative writing in the world sistic as the process may appear at first. You also al attention to your own writing - for example, the affinities you it has with the work of other authors - and by placing your work in ectual, aesthetic, social or other context you feel it should be seen g lends you knowledge; knowledge offers you power; but self-. It allows you to think your way inside of writing in the that writing a poem or story helps a non-creative writing student to tand what they are studying. I want you to use statement as a measure of how far your creative thinking and reading ssed. G will form the basis for the literature that influences and excites knowledge you are translating into new writing may be non-literary; be experiential or drawn from non-literary is better to write about details than big, abstract ideas. You write a reflective essay, bear in mind that creative writers writing from a theory or to a big theme. However, in the same way ation theory has little effect on the practice of translation, so generally has little impact on the way creative writers go about ss. It has to be said that some writers find it creatively disabling to ry criticism; they find it stalls them in the act of making, or it alters ations of literature in ways which are simply false or destructive. Ve writing in the world s simply write for themselves, and reading about writing can undo 's useful selfishness to an extent. I always ask my writing classes not to read criticism' (herbert g yourself as a tive essays on the creative writing process tend towards being small, s in critical realism, what we might term here creative critical is because they possess personal and interdisciplinary awareness; a evidence, as well as argumentative coherence and consistency; and the act and action of writing. While the creative work submitted may be affectedly postmodern (or not), the account of how and why it n will be realist to the the heart of such an essay is an attempted illumination of two ons about your aims and processes, questions that provoke and prick s from whatever time. You may not be able to articulate it yet,But you know that when you are drafting your own writing (or even writ-. You read yourself as tive, critical writing of this type possesses at the very least: a sense nt and development of argument; critical thinking and self- reflection;. Of actual research for writing - for example, interviews with s; the critical context of your writing; the problems faced and over-. Or not overcome; and, to round it off- to show you've read in order - a bibliography of creative reading. Essay is to set up a literary problem and explore it using your own are ten titles with which to begin writing a self-reflective essay. In answering, you reflect on the aims of your writing and s by which it arrived at its final form; and you give critical attention to writing, for example the affinities you may feel it has with the work of al experience counts, and the foreknowledge that you do not place the work you write, but that you discover yourself there. Second, i would argue that experience informs and inhabits honest and enriching statements of poetics, as it does the most on the aims and processes of creative is vexing to trade with the labels of subjectivity and objectivity g with a writer's experience. Indirectly, of course, creative writers and artists pillage, use such ideas and their hermetic jargons at will. However, some the kind of language used in these discourses at best diverting and at ve writing in the world do you write? Criticism, like creative writing, is another for engaging an audience, and engaging with the world. Leading interpreters of literature have themselves had substantial experience ative writing at the deepest level. Sometimes imaginative writing and sometimes it is expository or critical writing, y there is overlap between them. As a creative writer (unlike, say, of an aircraft design manual), what you write about is far less how you write it: 'ah the fun is in how you say a thing' - robert is no magic key to this as such, but, as any professional burglar knows,There are different ways to unlock doors, and writers are good thieves. Later book, we discuss the importance of concentration and practice to y, and demonstrate how playfulness and cunning can be hugely yielding the unpredicted in writing. As we shall see, the qualities of fluency,Unpredictability and syntax are not far along the spectrum of writing ality. Of writing recognise this, which is why, when people sign up for a g course, they are often required to submit a folio of work, and selected, and sometimes self-selected, on its strengths. Whether a teach creative writing is another matter, and it is worth your knowing teachers might be there, rather than at home, or on the road, living the literary life. They want their aesthetic or ideology to survive, so they adopt ambassadors, as carriers of their message - a process vulnerable to the artist ve writing in the world some writers, teaching is part of the process of creating an audience ng them young - in this case, unlike public readings, an already ce. He gave and kept giving, even when the vital ated wildly, as they do when someone is young and thepoint: where teachingand writing intersect (shapiro andpadgett, 1983),A number of writers present the view, based on experience, that teaching into the making of writing, and certainly that is my experience. A well-paid executive or surgeon er teaching and writing relatively ence of the world is vital, but our classrooms are part of that lives can be as closeted and narrow, as a university or library can be remarkable. This is as important for the creative health of the t in to teach the subject as it is for the students. Creative writing has always had a wide practice, thriving in schools, hospitals, adult education and wherever s seek to make their temporary homes or residencies. Teeters one way or the other, but generally the writing gains a slight or us (often unspoken) preference. Creative activity could bed as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are the same individual' - arthur koestler. It electrifies, tens the way they approach teaching: those who can, teach, and they need to be in a seminar room to do are all creators of language, but to return to the prospectus offered by sity of life, although creative writing has rediscovered its historical-. Home within the academy, it is blindingly observable that you do ve writing in the world to pass through an academy to be a writer. In an interview, cynthia ted on this aspect of creative writing teaching:The point is that the self is limiting. Might choose to explore this process by seizing stories, characters and myths, lore and old tales, and using them as templates for a 'reality' writing. The ultimate exercise in 'writing what you do not know' is to write a poem or story on the subject of nothing. This is a quality which creative and exploits, as you will read in chapter seven. Sometimes we see daily work wasted to writing, but it need not be if you read it as a writer. Some ve writing in the world g courses incorporate work experience, but this provides a possibly illusory experience. Moments like this should fire you up for writing: g backand against those who have colonised your language.

As groucho marx would not join any club that him as a member, so the attitude of creative writers standing apart ( it is a pose) rubs off on others, on all of ve writing and freedom of of the most striking aspects of a creative writing workshop is that voiced with freedom. It lives by evolution,By being played with and by being hit at fresh r, creative writing's capacity for the creation of illusion-as-truth,And the precision of its language, makes it doubly dangerous to power depends on the formulation of illusions, and the twisting of language. Writers are the antennae for language,Creative writing in the world ers of speech, and you, as new writers, should similarly be alert to lan-. S abuse and cal regimes, even regimes whose ideologies oppose each other, cause to target creative writers and intellectuals, to bend them to of their ideologies, to use writers as apologists or celebrants of writers prove uncooperative, they are, at best, humiliated publicly,Exiled, marginalised, and silenced, say, by banning publication. The best writing of this type does all of these action of writing, as the poet and scientist miroslav holub put it, is of 'serious play', of wilful and sometimes wild experiment. Boisseau and wallace, speaking of poetry students, make a c point when they argue for the play of experiment in a writing class:A course called 'creative writing' might better be called 'g'. Faced with the daunting specter of a blank page, the poet intimidated by the injunction to be creative; create. Writing tutor who has shut out the world and experience as influences; mes his or her pips find it intimidating to 'play to order'. Play, however, can be deliriously find we are on a tightrope; we recognise where the tipping-points are ves, and try to stay on it for the rest of our lives, writing and balancing grand binaries: imagination and rationality, doubt and confidence, achieve-. Same way that the natural and seemingly rational magic of the simply gets on with things, so we as writers must simply get on with way in which the best writing workshops are conducted is to supply environment for a kind of rapid learning; what i would call a ion of talent, one that runs in phases and leaps of progressive environmental change forces species-evolution, so the environment of op causes a natural response and a progression in expertise: new our brain's neural networks. That is why it is important that we must learn to play at such play with our reading and writing, to play with language, even when of falling into pretentiousness or opacity or simple mediocrity, is control of the situation. The more practice we have of this, the more playful we , and the more confident in our ability not only to control - but also ve writing in the world 53. The afterword to his book on teaching children to write poetry, the kenneth koch addresses the question of teaching teachers to play language and creative ideas: 'such writing might begin with simple as writing a wish poem before they ask the children to ... One can be released back into ent of writing; there is no need to be scared of is no need to be scared because writing is ultimately pleasure. However, as g keeps growing as a discipline - as it becomes more and more accepted,Even respected - we must be careful it does not become part of a machine e more teachers of creative writing. In that sense, creative writing already stands in a sting place in the world, and possesses some interesting g with new a book of popular science, or a scientific textbook, and make notes on s that catch your attention, especially the scientific language that is names of species, concepts or equipment. Now, rather than showing this work r writer or teacher of writing, find a willing scientist or science student,Creative writing in the world share your work with them. Creative writing student and a creative writing department neglect and the business of publishing at their peril, for this is where we meet head-on. Books about creative writing rightly investigate the process of writing ignore the fact that, although writing can be an end in itself, for the purpose of writing is to communicate to as many people as possible,There are, of course, books that deal entirely with publishing (see 'recom-. Therefore, what we offer here can be no more c points, which are non-specific to their time and nation, but which some resilient you submit your writing to a literary magazine, or a book to a publisher,Be sure you are completely satisfied that your writing has reached a steady, a final, state. In , we examine how such networks develop through workshops; how under the pressure of shared learning, shared experience, or even a ry prejudice or is what i term a circle for survival, a half- visible network that writing industry in one of its directions occasionally. You will find these friends very willing to put your writing very tough, and often meticulous, critical reading, because it is in st also, and because they like you. It can give you luck; can make ve writing in the world se your chances for luck in writing and publishing. Although all writing is rewriting, there is a station reached in g process when you must be unburdened. Become friends editor and watch their craft carefully and ve writing and the publishing t the author, the literary industry would implode; its bustling world -. Agents, accountants, libel lawyers, departments of literature,Creative writing in the world ers - would suffer the equivalent of nuclear winter. You might the literary industry has made itself even more dependent on has happened is that we now perform three jobs - writing, teaching,Editing - where once we did one or, at most, is why some publishers and literary agencies help fund creative mmes. Some of those writer-teachers may belong to ry agency, or publish with that sponsoring publishing house, and able to make close comment on the talent and resilience of the student,And whether their character - watched and nurtured throughout the course ng - is that of a real writer who will produce further volumes of which the agent and publisher might ve writing programmes tend to produce novelists and poets can feel self-consciously literary. Publishers know that well-written creative nonfiction sells far literary fiction or poems (see chapter seven). Creative nonfiction creates an h their curiosity about a subject, and then (so writers hope) audience into other genres through their interest in the writer. They sign up new poets and novelists, capture e in one genre, turning it to other more lucrative ends by to write creative nonfiction. You create a physical or virtual open space writing, using print or the presses are small worlds, but they are the lifeblood of new literature,And most major writers have participated in them, or even created them. Half the ve writing in the world that authors will abandon a press if they become commercially successful,Even though commercial success is no measure, historically, of literary r, editing can develop into a passion. Far more rapid form of 'writing' than writing: 'no passion in the world to the passion to alter someone else's draft' - h. That teach you more in a year about writing and writers than staying arena, and hoping against hope that your talent will be recognised ed by those inside g up a publishing the editor for your community of writers or class. In the process, you will learn just how much bad writing is produced, not unknowns but also by known writers. Choosing, then casting, these als into shape will also teach you a great deal about editing and own work over the long distance of your first novel or collection of g the finance to keep this enterprise going and maintaining a list ibers or advertisers will offer you a rapid apprenticeship in the business writing and publishing. However, your enterprise must aim quality if a good reputation is the desired balance between the critical and creative is returning to the humani-. Ter's teaching literature (blackwell, 2003) contains fascinating the creative teaching of literature, and is positive about the role of g in universities. When writing reflective critical essays, it is essential critical context; to say what other writers think about the issues you in creative writing. Walter allen's on writing (dent, 1948) and sean burke's authorship: from plato postmodern (edinburgh university press, 1995) are thematically ogies of statements on writing made by mainly canonical authors. William harmon'n classic writings on poetry (columbia university press, 2003) ranges s from plato to laura (riding) jackson. The contributors to anna leahy's power ty in the creative writing classroom (multilingual matters, 2005) academic vigour the pedagogical debates and challenges in teaching cre-. Lynn freed's article 'doing time: in the creative writing gulag' in harper's magazine (july 2005) is a essential field-guide to the hazards of teaching writing. Two essays d carver's fires (picador, 1986), 'on writing' and 'john gardner: as teacher', are a generous corrective to those dangers, and a how creative writing lets in the world. That charity of spirit informs, , frank smith's analyses in writing and the writer (heinemann, 1982) he offers a wonderful synthesis of the natural histories of language g in the world. The point: where teaching and writing intersect ( writers, collaborative 1983), edited by nancy shapiro and ron padgett,Presents small and extremely persuasive essays about how a writer's the making of new work. Creative writing and freedom of expression finds its focus ation of writers, with 141 centres in 99 countries. The situation in publishing is dynamic, but clear guidance can be the writer's handbook, which is published in national editions for ve writing in the world ies and updated annually. Another annual, writer's market, will decide where and how to submit your writing to appropriate markets united states and canada. And literary agencies, used as much by literary agents as it is by nges of creative for women, i thought, looking at the empty shelves, these infinitely more formidable. Opportunities - that we might be able to bend to the purpose of our writing,Including cultural and social pressures, quality, translation, experiment, your own mind's nges to phrase 'enemies of promise' entered the language as the title of ly's (1961) compendium of circumstances that inhibit writing, and much of its time: self-centred, brimming with masculine concerns, nt to elite literature. An enemy to the sensitive male novelist, there are moments of ning the impacts on writers and writing of politics, conversation, drink,Journalism and worldly success. S real purpose: his precision and style rather than the subjects he s of promise is biography in disguise- creative nonfiction. Writing these books allowed s to send plumb lines into their own posterity and those of their allies. As we chapter two, writing such prose might seem self-regarding, but it is ary as a means to define one's self-purpose and practice: to think ds into the kind of writer you want to become (or to cease to be the have come to dislike). You then find other allies, such as mentors,Teachers of writing who are practising authors, your fellow student writers ops, and the circles for survival that grow around you as you edit world's indifference to your writing is remedied by the corrective producing and publishing only your best writing, and even then nothing teed. Trust to that life is short and art is long, and then just keep of the social and cultural constraints described by virginia woolf (ph) may have loosened, but others have arisen to take their place, a popular view of literary writing as an art form that offers far less or digital media, in social and political terms, and even in ence and technical daring. Make an ally of film and digital media,By either creating fiction that becomes (but challenges) film, or writing ts and expands new technologies for its transmission. Electronic performance' in chapter entality, or poet and critic mary kinzie has pointed out that it is difficult for s to recognise cliches of feeling in their writing such as:The idea that spontaneous reactions are the most trustworthy; ms should be shared; that trying is more important ding; that everyone is a winner; that the old regret not ; that the outward reflects the inward; that beauty is somehow. Things to avoid writing: tidying up, rearranging the files on your of it this way: only you can write your novels, poems and creative nonfic-. By allowing and aging distraction, you award yourself your own prize for writers prevaricate when they should act and, worse, new writers develop habit of 'talking away' their work, instead of writing it down. You will find you have many opportunities to nges of creative writing it afterwards; say, with your tutor during the revising process or become ism and are dozens of displacement activities; talking and self- distraction the most obvious. More insidious are those activities that simulate of creative writing but are actually its surrogates, such as writing reviews. These are fine for when you are fallow, or between projects, are disastrous forms of displacement when you are writing at full pitch. Other hand, maintaining a daily weblog or diary are excellent exercises ion and discipline, and provide a more enduring means for warming writing mind for the day. Take the craft and precision of creative criticism and journalism and remake them as creative y and writers do not fulfil their promise for a number of reasons, such as ion to a fantasy idea of themselves, spinning daydreams of success, comprehending that creative life involves exceptional levels of attention. Many creative writers strive for their work and working practice, but not enough of them achieve it. However, as auden said, 'poetry makes nothing happen', and cs generally make for etiolated writing, or writing that has, as keats said,L a palpable design on the reader'. Try to ight using some of the techniques in chapters four and five; use ation ideas in this chapter; or try the writing games in this book. The way to recover is to stop writing, to print the not look at it again for at least three weeks. After this period, it will iently distant from your creative mental processes, as if it were the g out of your depth is a common state of mind for many writers g, one of the reasons many of them find apparent certainties intolera-. Writing beyond your skill or experience is frightening and can make ve process slow or even static. Either you may feel that you do not about what you are writing, or the means for expression seem grasp. Writing out of your depth allows you and occupy further levels in your own character and your writing, mak-. He likens the challenge of writing of the inevitable splat to knitting oneself a helicopter while in nges of creative writing stephen king puts it, 'writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction,Can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the atlantic ocean in a 's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt' (2000: 249). It comes with the job, like perpetual grow used to the sensation of freezing up when writing, of proceeding of stops, starts, ease and block. As annie dillard says in the writing life, 'the feeling that the work icent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to ed, ignored, or killed, but not indulged' (1989: 15). Writing out of the muddle may supply us with material - ographical creative nonfiction, for example. One way is honest with yourself and those around you about what you want to n the demands on your time and your hopes for writing, then decide what is possible and achievable rather than what is idealistic. Sometimes, creative ts study the birth date of their favourite authors, calculate their age publication, and then vie to match them. This is destructive, not e you open yet another route to failure, and one that has nothing to finding your natural rhythms for writing. It is never too late to begin writing seriously, and there is no virtue published young, or before you or (more importantly) your work it is, some writers grow freer as they get older. Edward said believes the 'late style' of creative artists 'is what art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality' (2006: 9). Writing of poems of cavafy, said commends 'the artist's mature subjectivity, hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the nce it has gained as a result of age and exile' (2006: 148). For some writers, in fact, the incubation ion times for writing speed up with age, several books running cognitive assembly lines simultaneously. You write against it: its nges of creative writing ing your children is one of the deepest, toughest joys in life, but can odds with writerly discipline - both are justifiably needy. There is way around this, and that is to evolve a routine of writing around child-. Exhausting though this will be at first; and to ensure that you take up, , as much support for your writing time as is reasonable. That writing is your job, and that it is to be treated with the same any other form of work. As seamus heaney once said, 'the writing is that, if you have the impulse, you will find the time. As children get older, be sure to help them tand that writing is your work; and that it might be fun (and even edu-. Some writers, when they , miss the regime of discipline created by their presence, questions a list in your notebook of the factors that stop you writing: 'enemies e'. For example, if one enemies of promise is time, then think of ways in which you can increase of time available to writing. Some writers, for example, rise early t to get as much writing done before they go to work, or before wakes. If one of your enemies is prevarication, cheat yourself into resolving to carry out a writing game, some freewriting, writing in a set form,Imitating or : you will be astonished at how much time we waste through ties and distraction. Of writers use translation as a means for taking an internal vacation own processes; to collect ideas and borrow verbal energy from s; and to pay homage to writers in other languages whom they is also an effective medicine for fallow periods in writing, say when between major projects. This is not translation strictly; it is about taking the work of others sing it for yourself: is lost in creative writers, translation shares the continent of writing. Some charged with particular meanings in their host language, but that does their carrying those associations into another ng across a g is one thing, but we cannot ignore the importance of sound ge; of cadence and voice; and, in poetry, of rhyme or a line's inner nges of creative writing there a perfect or perfecting way to carry such cargo from one country r? As creative writers, you work across this spectrum by exploring it,Even exploiting it by going around it, although poetry lends itself more easily process than fictional prose. As wanger stated playfully in adaptations (1924), some creative ledge the debt to the host- writer by putting the little word 'after' name of the host-writer. Many creative writers argue that all writing is translated it is 'translated' from silence, but it is also translated through a writer' of influences and artistic sympathies. Aim is to own it, and this is a writing exercise you should try for own writing gains by this use of translation. For an inventive creative writer, 'translation' must seem a literary super-oxygen, reviving as it does the dead from the cells of writers fake this process entirely, fabricating an original work and 'translating' them into their own tongue (an effective creative writ-. It is a raid on will be more distance between the original text and your own than be were you imitating the voice of an author in your own nges of mes, the challenge to creative writing is not to make something final able, but to make something potential, a kind of audition with language,Or even a playful confection of words and letters - art for art's sake; play nges of creative writing 's sake. On the continent of writing, no citizens have as much fun as in y where the oulipo live. A positive, enlivening presence in the discipline of creative writing, ts and new writers are urged towards the oulipo compendium (1998),Edited by harry matthews and alastair of the best places for new fiction writers to start is queneau's tale exer-. Of creative writing bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;. Rewrite this story ten times over using different styles or points of is a selection of styles from which to choose:Insincere self-therapy st suicide book sional tv chat trable critical ations by : all writing is rewriting to :Degree and this game is a humorous student writers to do the sing the scales of their voice, as fitting a body of words within a. We design our writing by the form, of formal patterns and devices, and by various patterning, shaping ctive devices. The challenge to new creative writers is is there to be used by you with imagination and wit; you should not ctive is a powerful tool insofar as it can teach you how to break with it, it, once you have mastered it, but you master it first. Paragraph's design, or the design of a poetic line, should suggest possibility,Not cast-iron certainty - even though the structure may be as involuted as nges of creative writing c design of a rose, or eye. In stories and poems, form must also be near-invisible, ce in dialogue with the writing. A self-conscious creative sometimes over-emphasise their formal ability so that what the reader hears is 'all pattern'. If you follow this path, you risk becoming a cian whose work suffers through efficiency or technical form to design fiction or poems is often emancipating for new find it hard to surprise themselves in their writing, but, when faced by atical scaffolding of an exercise in style, or a sestina or pantoum, lves in the mental position of problem-solvers rather than what er a special mind-set that artists possess. To this day, serious and lively competitions mance based on the command of traditional welsh metres take place eisteddfods around provides a creative writer with simulation exercises, giving them of objectives and rules, such as rhyme scheme, metre and game-play can offer practice, but it also readies you for the times might write something more apparently immediate. Writing to a s you to create ways of saying things that would have not have you if you were left to your own netless game-plan. Form has therefore performed function in helping literature's survival and adaptation within is fundamental to the way we grow to perceive the world of baby in the cot may learn new words by listening to a nursery rhyme, nges of creative writing real delight lies in the way it is said: the pattern, the repetition, the rhythm,The rhymes, the metre - the form. Writers are composers: many begin writing a poem or e the music of it occurs to them first, and demands that words be fit that noise. Some creative writers, especially those new to writing,View form as artificial rather than elemental, human and organic. A creative writing student's reaction against formal writing result from an allergy to the word 'formal', in favour of the the end, the decision to use form is down to you. The challenge to creative writing is no different: it needs to made to be desirable, even when it is apparently without challenge of tion and creative writing students find it difficult to know how 'good' or 'bad' g is. However, times when the writing that is produced in these situations is quality, but the fact that it has been achieved through the discipline ops means that it is not treated, critically, in the same way as it had it arisen ex nihilo. Partly, this is because the media promulgate icised view of writing and writers, but also partly because they ia. The public are share these prejudices, despite the very high quality of some graduates ve writing. Literary quality, for them, has become the goal of their life, and they lly astonished when they find that this goal is not shared by the profession, and certainly not by the publishing industry, for whom line is exercise in perspective is to take the works of renowned s, and have the students type some of their works word for word: nges of creative writing s, poems and creative nonfiction. The magazine will sell more copies with a famous name than a of the ways to lift quality within a creative writing course is to lift of expectation in reception. Writing a poem, story or investigative article,And knowing it is being written to be marked as part of a course, is not an ment for writing out of your skin. If you, in fact, were to offer , young writer a contract with a major publishing house, it is possible would find themselves writing up to that higher level out of the sheer impress, or a fear to fail at that one shot at fame. Therefore, the creation hing opportunities around such courses should be encouraged, so they do not subsequently develop into closed shops, whose output is to creative writing students and their g your game, and raising the is a group game, requiring role play. Each writing is then 'damaged' in some way: ripped, burned, stamped upon red with stage blood. The workshop leader should be responsible for most of this damage, for this is what time does creative writing. The newspaper wishes to print a new short piece of want to print what they are writing today. Members of the group take on this persona, and have in them a piece of writing, by a minor writer, which they are going to pass off own for the sake of the newspaper's deadline. 1 0) the students piece to the best of their powers, writing up to the expectation of a and a major newspaper publication. This piece of writing is the final product, and is : this game works on three levels simultaneously: raising the quality g because of an increase in expectations; altering the terms of reception writing is seen as a cultural object sliding through the dynamics of time; g to grips with the spectrum that includes translation, imitation, literary theft. 1 ) if you raise the level of self-expectation ce-expectation, it is possible that new writers find themselves writing up to. The way in which we view somebody's writing can be affected view of the author, and this viewpoint may include all manner of matters,Such as the circumstances in which they wrote, how old they were, and s we know about their lives. 3) all writing is an act of translation, s, across time, and between author and readers. The students rewrite the piece better to reflect as an adaptation, and script a short story describing the nges of creative writing ing creative ve writing students as well as academic staff often ask the question as to assess creative writing, and how assessors arrive at a grade. Most teachers g would attest that it is a matter of experience and wide reading, and - as students, readers, writers and critics - 'grade' creative writing every the act of reading and the acts of criticism or writing reviews. As sed in the section 'reflective criticism' in chapter two, many s are assessed by a portfolio of creative writing and an essay or commen-. If a course does not carry formal assessment, you can be will be an eagerness in the group to find some other way of ss, and validating effort, such as publications or writer celia hunt argues thoughtfully that if students work ult, emotionally sensitive matters in their writing, then assessment er this personal dimension. She contends that creative writing is by literary criteria, and these criteria may fit the critical mind but always sympathetic to emotional and personal matters (hunt, 2001). In the early stages of the programme of study, to assess only and learning diaries, and not the creative work. The trained critic has ant to judge creative works 'in process' and reluctant to define the which student performance in learning to write may be judged. However,Wide varieties of assessment methods are used now within creative include the setting and assessment of creative writing exercises, reflec-. More emphasis is placed on the importance of drafting g, and student logbooks and records of how and why they have creative work are regarded as important aspects of the learning the end, the answer to how creative writing is graded is: it is graded out of. Her fied many of the social and cultural challenges to the writing process and,Like virginia woolfs l a room of one's own' (ne2: 2153-2214), is g about the circumstances that make writing possible (or impossible). How free is a creative writer something new out of another writer's work in another language? To gain a bigger nges of creative writing the issues and debates concerning literary design and writerly calculation,Fiction writers should turn to the excellent narrative design: a writer's structure (norton, 1997), which has the benefit of being written from st's insider point of view by madison smartt bell. Bell uses student writing from his creative writing classes to illustrate key points ive design. Cambridge university press, 2002) artfully examines designs of narrative ture (and usefully in film and drama). And creative r it is right or advisable to create beings like heathcliff, i do : i scarcely think it is. Have seen how the composition of fiction, poetry and creative mostly a matter of reading and practice. However, there are many ways ng on the open space of writing and working beyond your of mind, principles of practice. I suggest here broad brush strokes of ent that unite not only many teachers of writing but also many ition and creative writing of these notions emerge through their everyday practice, through instinct, and by els of e the fact that writers, as a mark of their office, tend to be of the same mind, it is surprising that so many of them agree on a ples when they are writing about the act of writing, or when they d in criticism of fellow authors. Many on to write novels and creative nonfiction, and bring precisions to novelists write nonfiction, and bring narrative to fact. You will begin to see quickly, however, just how many of these about how not to write, or they concern habits of mind or of practice might wish to acquire in order to accelerate your the writing game, we are all new writers, making it work might be more revolutionary an y is hard-won, and of first , above all else, is your aim, and it should show no sign of , in language, is eternal writing is best writing is best writing conveys truth, although it may not be the a second chance at life, a writer writes to improve on the truth, or liarise the world, to make us see things afresh, as if for the first by writing for yourself can you hope to please an audience ation does not exist; calculation and design bring more early interest in language is a mark that a person might have a talent g must appear inevitable, 'as easily as leaves to a tree'. Even if took years to grow or to make, art conceals g will make you a better writer, but reading-as-a-writer will even more fluent in style, teaching you technique and building ition and creative writing ion and influence are not anxieties; they are your early allies. Be influence and ready even to steal from other more you practise writing, the more likely you are to improve and often; write when you can by any means necessary; and conduct ce with as much ruthlessness and tenacity as your circumstances ter will s are born and l talents, and your ability to learn, play a strong role, but your ter and stamina will determine whether you endure as a g is more effective than telling, certainly among newer writers. Finding your voice' might be only one stage on the way to finding , or finding your writing voice must be distinctive; it must be differentiated from sors or your reader will stop is a useful tool of itself, since restriction lends itself to liberating is a useful tool in so far as it can teach you how to break with it, it, once you have mastered it, but you must master it ng phrases contaminate with their beauty; you should excise ives and adverbs are the first to feel the spotlight of s, archaisms and inversions must earn their place or be burned word or phrase that distracts the attention of the reader from the te language usually has more resonance for the general reader ces do not wait; you must create your audience; bore an audience and you will lose you know, can help you - but not g is one of the most joyful and playful activities for the human body. It is as physical as it is psychological, and the real rewards g lie within the process of writing, not in will learn more about writing if you give yourself the permission -. A passion, an enthusiasm, for writing provides some early iveness helps, but endurance works even more effectively, in the that genius is identified as a combination of talent, concentrated focus of hard work, and wrongly self-identified as the exhibition of e passion. This book is testing these principles in permutation, and you through your writing, rewriting and the writing games within job is eventually to create your own principles, and to test t accepted ones. Think of it this way: knowing some of the principles we have save you some time, although writing against such principles could something. Mistakes are worth making, and are even a necessary part of s (as they are in scientific research), and writing clumsily is a ng stone to writing are the rules by which you write? Put this list of for the next six months and do not read it, but put your creative piece ition and creative writing only two weeks, and return to it once you have read the rest of the e the piece without recourse to your original rules of engagement. In , i would like you to repeat this entire exercise again, again g your original set of : rewriting is as important as writing, but our frames of reference alter and practice. As and read more actively, not only does our writing mutate and to ourselves (and so easier to revise), but our frames of reference complex and dynamic. Clear writing can be made in this , but good style is tricky to write to order. Therefore,Do not seek to create astounding sentences the first time round; otherwise, spend an hour on one sentence rather than producing one hundred, one sentence may end up being self-consciously 'literary', or over- to cover pages with words, then later to cut them back to their essence,Than to write one sentence only to cut it back to one -writing, too, is a cardinal symptom, not a sin, of creative writing are trying to impress our audience, but we are also trying to impress our-. And rococo can come ve writing is a craft that requires continual learning; it is a long may feel, as a student of creative writing, that at some point you will. Either you are disillusioned to the point sm, or you possess a vocation, and should make a friend of stoicism, friend of the guidebooks on writing offer various writing strategies and games;. Ition and creative writing ence of making your own way through the river is likely to teach about endeavour; about error; about language's nature; about your ter; how to understand and balance all of these; and how to reconcile ulty of moving within the flow, the entirely natural forces, of n how-to-write books (which i have not listed or cited, but have read). Language is not a series of symptoms process of writing is far more chaotic, a mapless place, a zone for exper-. Schaefer and the creative writing guide acknowledge, 'as any writer knows - or er - writing is often a confusing, organic, unorganized process of explo-. However much this troubled me, i had to writers say about their er, for example, the importance writers place on developing their ctive habits of composition; of discipline; and even a personal , messy and provisional though this will be, at least throws a little light they are writing in the first place. Of the writing process, and how anybody who wishes to be a writer to live within the disparity between how writers and the writing perceived - say, by readers, filmmakers and, surprisingly, academics - unglamorous, serendipitous life creative writing actually of all of us does not like writing, or rather does not like effort. After , the mere act of going to that place will begin to trigger the routine the times of day that best suit your writing process, but bear in you will find this time changes as you get older: young night owls end middle-aged nine-to-fivers. Practise this daily, until it becomes ingrained, and you' it when you do not follow worked in your space for a fixed amount of time, it will be start taking breaks - ten-minute vacations from concentration (smokers ally culpable) - but such breaks disturb and corrupt creative novelist ron carlson puts it strikingly, 'if you want to be a writer, stay in ! One) is a strong attraction of creative writing courses in offer you a strict timetable for reading, writing and rewriting; t and criticism; and they force you to stay in the metaphorical 'room'. Both joseph conrad and graham d themselves a relatively low daily word limit of writing. Writing the origin s, charles darwin suffered a lack of discipline, so he set up stones in cairn on the sandwalk outside his study, the path darwin paced as ition and creative writing out his ideas. Within your working day, try to complete a section of a novel or of creative nonfiction, or take a poem through to its pre-final draft. Writers often find to warm up their minds at the beginning of a writing session by rewriting the work they have completed the day previously. As you get more experienced, you should word count, and include a substantial amount of rewriting time to working day. Dorothea brande believed g immediately before writing was a bad idea, and that you should time for what she called 'wordless recreation' (1981: 133). What they create may prove in the end to be good writing,But no writing is good enough to require other people to suffer for its creation. The corollaries of any inertia on your part are that g will get finished, and what writing there is will suffer in quality has received insufficient time and attention. Without a routine, the writing seems 'given' will decrease or become erratic as your rs from lack of practice, and submerged ition and creative writing any such creative moment arrives, should your discipline have been lax,Anxiety can lead to panic. At least you might write from oks and thing an 'abc of writing a book' does very well is talk of markets, that chimera for creative writing: money. However, since writing not always bring much financial comfort, one of its underrated merits beginner is that it is relatively inexpensive compared to other art stages of a writer's career are more demanding, especially if research ary. It has more to do r the writer possesses some key to the writing process, and thing with which you choose to write has some talismanic power. Knowledge they may find problematical to hear is that the n becoming a writer and not becoming a writer usually comes whether you carry a notebook; are prepared to work in it actively rly; and are willing to sit for hours typing and rewriting. The pressure, the responsibility, a record of life instigates much writing and, if you ignore this ic need, you must either possess a sponge-like memory or be a passive reading of your world. A notebook is an active tool; but it is an error e that by carrying this spear on to the stage of writing you become use it for writing regularly, but the main uses will be to record ideas ces while you are actively thinking about one hundred other matters; down interesting material while travelling; or to record sentences and dia-. In this way, a personal anthology, one that you can reread for ideas, illumination of problems in your own writing. Seemingly finished your day's work, but your mental processes will still ition and creative writing ring on their reel. The reservoir of your creative thinking needs time to - let your unconscious mind do all that filling and working. I am saying you should view wide,Indiscriminate human contact as a form of research for writing, and make ritual. Notebooks are rougher and readier than a claude you organize your notebook is important, but do not use the notebooks and files as a displacement activity for not writing. A simple form sation is to possess two notebooks: one for recording and collecting, for writing and for a walk with your notebook and collect the following 'data': two ard conversations; three species of birds; two brand names for food; from six signs; the name of one planet or star; the name of a lipstick; of day; the title of a book of fiction; the title of a painting; the name of politician; two types of onion and one type of potato; the names of in a hardware store; a make of gun; and the speech of a child. Revise this writing until the use of this data seems able, and neither random nor : force yourself to make connections between disparate things, and answers that pressure by making synaptic connections to make sense . Force becomes habit; ability becomes facility es of s can be ritualistic about when they work, and where they work, also goes for writing materials. Another excuse for ar helplessness of writer's ition and creative writing of our best ideas come when we are otherwise distracted, as when going to sleep or driving. You need these practices to test if they work for you (and to make sure you do them as excuses to stop writing). Try playing different sorts of music until something begins to propel the rhythm of your and prompts for from notebooks, pens and computers, a new creative writer needs t of a word hoard, such as the oxford english or chambers dictionary,To locate words and to use them precisely. Your style will be judged by the way you order and play with words, but also by your choice of ore, you also need an excellent thesaurus, such as roget's thesaurus, to find alternative words to keep your language lively, surprising dictionaries and thesauri that come packaged with ms are digitally tongue-tied when applied to creative writing ( are generally fine for academic writing or reports) . 1) play some music while you are writing, and musical style entirely every half an hour, but keep writing the same piece. Counting aloud from one hundred to zero, but keep writing all the : writing is as physical as it is psychological. 2) exercise vity in many ways, not least because it encourages creative n unconscious and conscious states of mind. E is to make different parts of your mind grind, metaphorically, other, and to block your conscious is writing and there is not writing, and writing is a 'zone'. Amis believes that 'much of the time you are writing the fiction people have in them' (200 1 : 6) . Margaret atwood says that it is not just the nature activity, it is also because writing carries a symbolic role:Composition and creative writing ne can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a latter takes a good deal more stamina and persistence . We need to assume that we are meeting these challenges, and can answer the silence around us with to focus on your writing as often as possible. The quickest and least for beginningto know the zone of writing is to practise freewriting . You can write what you like, but you ue writing without stopping writing and without thinking. Recovering in a clinic from opium addiction, u wrote his novel les enfants terribles in an act of extremely fast writing,About which he commented to andre gide: 'the real benefit of my treatment:Work has laid hands on me. Freewriting often enough, they achieve various degrees of fluency in sion (even though the words will need chopping and planing later dur-. In fact, when you have an idea for writing, it asks very little of ous attention. The creative process can be rather like going into a trance, in unconscious and unconscious minds talk to each fluidly if not eloquently,And much writing is achieved in a short time:It's wonderful, there's nothing else like it, you write in a trance. It's ition and creative writing a let/re- hurry ation of the body- mind and the dreaming-mind and ht-conscious-mind. Read back what says above and, by freewriting, try to induce the painless headache ng the painless a candle, and focus your entire attention on the point at which the the air. Begin writing or a poem while in this state of relaxation, and repeat this exercise it induces writing with which you are : active dreaming of this type, like freewriting, is one of the more rapid access creative ideas and associations, and to induce a state of ation and writers mistake the state of trance with inspiration. Way to find the physical and psychological drives of what we used to mes writers (in the main, poets) claim that they avoid writing in precipitate inspiration, as if apparently 'conscious writing' were forbidden to them as sex to a priest. Sometimes calculation works better than inspiration,And even humdrum daily practice can make a more conductive rod for ition and creative writing 109. Writing will seem physical in its insistence, e demand im6 his or her own birth/'. Workshops formalise this s, this need to move against something solid, against and with writing requires not only analysis, intelligence as well as intuition - es discussion; evaluations and feedback from our peers and mentors. Writing plays is, after all, one most collaborative of the written art you are not used to writing regularly, you are unlikely to be attracted desk by the sheer habit of writing, a habit that gives pleasure even ult. Duende is rooted in your own metabolism: of expression changes the metabolism of your own writing on the page,Making it more alive and urgent to a reader. Students should try is not about writing badly; it is about unravelling is even about making apparent mistakes in language. You might or three lines or sentences that, by sheer chance, are part of the story you were seeking to write (but did not consciously know), or ly uninvited poem or story that, by its sudden presence, raises your a misspelling or a misreading on rewriting can yield surprisingly ilities. When of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from , and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the t will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense ng or even changing your of the main purposes of writing workshops is to clear away verbiage language.

Practise of writing and you will find it easier to identify and eliminate verbiage own work and that of nce and writers who influence us are like heroic teachers. 14 creative within their time, and in mutation within the writing as it travels and before their is often a good idea to choose models of writing that are plain in style, few nervous tics; they allow you to play variations upon a fairly open moving on. This is when we mimic a writer's voiceprint slavishly, an error of g process that derives often from the character of the apprentice: challenging beyond an existing writer's linguistic territory, or unaware have remade a perfectly designed point of creative writing, as derek walcott has said, is to find out mean; and to find out what we mean, we must first find out who we writers imitate too cosily, they risk yielding their identity; their s anti-matter to the matter of the original. In paul muldoon's phrase, they have found each member of your writing class about the writers who have most, and also the writers against whom they have reacted. Bring copies s and poems by these writers, and ask the students to read examples , with illustrations of influence or imitation from their own writing. However, affected literary styles are useful for exercises in parody or pastiche; try them ition and creative writing ops as open of the jobs of a creative writing programme is to give new writers to develop themselves and their work. One of the ways to accelerate s and save their time is through the writing workshop, although other approaches that simply require the writer to be alone in a room,Remain there and get on with it. In creative writing, the function of op depends upon the intents and character of the tutor, and upon t of the event, such as it being a scheduled part of a university are of course workshops in other contexts. Whom a new writer meets in a writing well be their professional and personal friends for life. Workshops also loneliness of the writer, although one must be wary about getting too this palliation, since a great deal of honest writing emerges from the it. The best workshops have simple, rather than subtle, g workshops were born out of theatre writing which, like mance-based medium, is necessarily more collaborative than origin lies in the teaching of dramatic technique. They were open spaces; the ition and creative writing these workshops was not theoretical but practical, and that remains the writing g workshops emphasise the practical: in technique, in the devices for getting the desired ends, and in reading what best can methods and devices. Writing workshops often use writing, good bad, as starting points for discussion of technique, or for imitation, redrafting. You will find that if you for another person's writing, they will work as hard or harder for ops are places of cultural symbiosis, even for the tutor who will test own ideas, and pick up one or two new this in mind, for when you first encounter a workshop the feeling more akin to terror. The op groups ought to have a strict life span, lest their participants familiar with each other's critical and creative practice. They represent a n of reality: time wipes out a generation of writers and replenishes lly a workshop takes one of two tracks or, if there is time, both is the generative workshop, the purpose of which is to catalyse and writing, sometimes by creative writing exercises, and often by es for imitation or rewriting. There is the responsive workshop, e of which is to assist with a critical understanding of new these latter workshops, scripts of writing are distributed, read aloud sed. It might not even be the most in the group can agree upon, for that would lead to of the wintry criticisms of writing workshops is that they produce neity within a false democracy of tender critical standards, notions ness of subject and tone in writing, and back-slapping. You become s while remaining true to your individual generative a generative workshop, another cure for homogeneity is for a y of writing tasks to be set. The basic premise is to trigger a new ition and creative writing work, and that can be fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, performance . Improvising writing on the spot is an discipline but also in practising a certain degree of wildness. You learn the improvisatory and wilder modes to your own writing when you trigger for generating new writing is often a sample of exemplary a published author, whose style or subject you imitate. Restrictions on g may be introduced, such as a form, or a verbal or mathematical which certain words or patterns are imposed or excluded (chapter uced restrictive writing and form). Tive workshops benefit by beginning with freewriting, the very which helps create as much 'happy accident' as it does gobbledegook. In the list of 'recommended reading', i list other books most interesting or intriguing writing exercises i have read, or seen class. Ve writing teachers devise a series of 'recipes' for writing which for them, and they stick with those. The weather writing reads as if it was the same, and not of their making. In effect, -writer has written a new piece of work, or rewritten an old piece of work,Through an act of mass workshops fuse the two approaches of generation and criticism, workshops also engage in collaborative writing, in which students s a piece that has been written and devised by the whole group or r groups within the class. There is no better test the honesty and inevitability of writing, the precision of language naturalness of voice. If a student a speech inhibition (they may have a stammer or be simply shy), can elect to have their work read aloud by one of their friends or by without comment or introduction. All writing should be read undramatically, lest it elevate the quality of substandard work through sive a student reads, they are encouraged not to open their reading with. Qualification about the quality of their writing, nor should they offer te about its creation. Should not talk about the knowledge that went into the creation of ition and creative writing g, at least not at first; the subject of the workshop is like the visible the iceberg, the work that is above water level, the knowledge of . One of the least lines of resistance in writing, as criticism is concerned, is middlebrow humour: not extreme black tragicomedy, but an engaging, disarming and gentle writing that al scrutiny. It is wholly understandable that we are drawn to it; few more rewarding than causing it deliberately, and few experiences iating than causing it without a workshop, it is very tempting for a writer to play for laughs, and writing that performs and pleases. However, easy comedy etiolates a group,Starving it of serious purpose, allowing a writer to manipulate an audience and get away with murder or, at least, mediocre writing. If the writing group roles, because they make for a frictionless social ride, then those roles . However, salieri's duty to help mozart (as historically he did), not to destroy him (as the become what we seem, for it is far easier to play a character than to be selves - and we have spent considerable time creating fictions by live our lives - and to populate our writing with created people. Members writing group tend to play out caricatures: the clown or the cold fish; e or the iceman; the intellectual snob or the noble savage; the the perfectionist; the silent genius or the iron critic; the wallflower or ; the artiste or an etcetera. Criticism at this level is not an attack - it is not an attack on you; it even an attack on your writing. Your writing is not important enough t attack, and therefore it is not necessary to require defence. Constructed argument from an investigation of a piece of writing is your progress as a writer. Have i said anything that is these principles in mind when formulating your responses to new complete beginners, you may wish to use a slightly different recipe al thinking by making notes under the following headings while the reading the piece aloud to the group: (a) specify what works for you piece of writing; (b) specify what does not work; (c) make one tion that will improve the work; (d) contribute one suggestion as ition and creative writing reading might help the work or move the writer on from it. For writing poetry, literary creative nonfiction, fiction and drama in ve writing guide (addison-wesley 1998), as does paul mills in the rout-. Can be found in metro: journeys in writing creatively (addison-wesley,2001) by hans ostrom et al. A thorough introduction to workshop culture and practice can in josip novakovich's fiction writer's workshop (story press, 1995) bly's beyond the writers' workshop (anchor, 2001). Poetry workshop games should consult the practice of poetry: ses from poets who teach (harperresource, 1992), edited by robin chase twichell, and writing poems (longman pearson, 2004) by au and robert wallace. Of inventive generative workshop exercises by experienced writers ses of creative to the poetical character ... Creative writing courses mimic these stages,Especially long-term or residential courses where the focus is solely on writing,And you are not studying other subjects. If you are not on such a course formally,Then you must try to make your life imitate one, but one of your own life is a course to which writing lends creative process begins in preparation, which includes active reading, imi-. This is also the you are settling your project, deciding exactly what you are going to do,And researching ways to help you achieve it, including researching history factual data for fiction and creative nonfiction. If you choose this path, you must allow more incubation of the project, and for rewriting afterwards. They enter those lit cages of form, patterns, in order to hone the language of prose, or to invite new ways , or of approaching their the other hand, some poets turn to prose fiction and creative nonfiction,Not only for the money (a chimerical objective), but also because their may inhibit choice and exploration of subject in verse. All of them begin their preparation g, and some degree of conscious ses of creative writing ng of this type can include research, but can also include other factors,Especially acts of premeditation. Their books are an exploration, a journey without maps,Or one in which the map of events is a secret held by its characters, as novelist's perception of his characters takes place in the course of writing of the novel. In this sense, a writer is always at his novel old school tobias wolff describes how:The life that produces writing can't be written about. And writing badly; these are aspects of l a life carried on without dge even of the writer'. Get white' used to be maupassant's advice, and that is what you should s agree that getting started on a new piece of writing is the most all the writing processes. Begin by freewriting and free-associating sentences until some that begin to intrigue you solely for the sound they make, their is no forward march: begin rewriting some of these into lines of meaning, and begin the forward stagger into writing. This is the reason some creative , when looking for the living words within a student's draft, the student-author's intention by striking out the first few paragraphs have now begun to walk within the open space of the page. The process of creative writing is analogous to the 'blocking out' a painting before shaping the details of the picture, s to become clear within the murk of written ses of creative writing you keep to the discipline and habit of daily writing, then continuing present many difficulties, not least because you will begin to enjoy ation and actively look forward to seeing what happens next. Have suggested you maintain a steady flow of work, even a mechanical , putting in the hours, and writing quickly and uninhibitedly 'write as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing down on paper. A superfine focus in which the writer has clear goals but is writing at h: at the limits of their intelligence, in fact. This d, even when your writing pushes three steps forward and two , is the writer's natural rhythm and momentum, and you must find . Conversation with your emperor of ice ts on the present state of american ht and i'm not famous square metre of your worse than it is like to be hungry every you are ses of creative writing average word count for each day should be about 500 words. Try to number as best you can by writing : this game lasts a whole month, and requires you write every day for s on subject headings, some of which will make you 'write what ' (such as 'adolescence') or 'write what you don't know' (such as 'how a wild tongue'). The point is not to create the ations of free-writing, but to encourage concentration and one subject, and to engender the habit of fluency, a little like practising improvising your own melodies. You may wish to play a guessing game of s of the titles silence writing process is not unidirectional, but a total, an organic process. Writers the same artistic plane for a time, working through several pieces of writing,Or even several books. However, given sufficient fluency through practice, artistic breakthroughs and leaps while writing one particular piece - or short story, say. Be aware of this as you are writing, and such jumps and steps in the evolution of your talent. Feel like the book while you are writing will get used to all of this after a while - the apparent mystery of become clearer, and you will then want to set your objectives even from your new level. What does it do, sitting there on its own like a prince of your continent of writing? Like it or not, it may tip the balance between your work being read , and it might form part of what is graded within a writing course. A lazy or imprecise title can damn an entire applies to poems, stories, novels and creative nonfiction. Spend a of conscious time on your titles, and produce many maquettes of it:Processes of creative writing l versions and variations that you can trial on your fellow writers workshops, or your tutors. Writing it down is just the of what we write needs planing and pruning and, as all writing is rewriting,So all rewriting is another form of writing. Writing of musical composition, declared, 'it is not hard to compose, but it is wonderfully hard to superfluous notes fall under the table. In rewriting, you create new, knottier pressures,Holding the superstructure of your story or poem in place. And failing you ever ask yourself questions like this, then you have become too require some indifference: either the eye of time or somebody else to ses of creative writing over. Blank sheet and a savage sense of accomplishment gained by decisiveness: ng from error rather than rewriting versions of the same mistake. It liberating as form, despite the sensation that it makes time weigh upon of writing. Deadline is like a supervisor who tells you impolitely to get on with deadline pays heed to your writing; it does not pay heed to your life. Ne set for the submission of a student's portfolio of writing pays little the different ways that students write, learn and live. It may include promotion, sales, or the praise of a tutor, editor, the writing business, deadlines are a fact. We all know the ses of creative writing not having said what we intended; of not having communicated what was your version of a truth. However, writing gives you time for rehearsal,And time to get your words as right as possible. When we examine and fossick the world for our writing, we must be precise about what we really see, hear, touch, taste. When you have finished, to the place with your writing, and place it somewhere where it can be other visitors; or hang it from the branch of a : try being entirely self-effacing in this writing, as the best poets, scientists are, but also playful in how you 'perform' your work. Try writing a story or poem ns her finding that 'a steel globe of twenty equilateral triangles - st number of regular sides geometrically possible - could be five parallelograms and cut from rectangular sheets with negligible ' (moore, 1968:281). You are encouraged to you can from other writers, but the argument here is that you should what you can from other non-literary writers, whether they are scientists,Architects or even right names and terms give your writing greater power and show done your work. Sound' or voice to the writing (raymond carver and robert frost ary in this respect). Alert, evocative, precise writing of this standard is not too far best observational nature writing, or writing that arises from y. Obviously, an ethologist would not reach for the simile of ' the bubbles in champagne' while writing a scientific paper, but were they writing a popular nonfictional book on the life of fire-. You may wish to learn this precision, too: by observing the world,And making translations from the natural world into your own ses of creative writing is an extract from a poem about a snail by the australian les murray book translations from the natural world:By the gilt slipway, and by s as far back into time , a shore being folded interior,By boiling on salt, by coming uncut over. Of the benefits of a creative writing course is that you have a of who the audience for your work might be, even if it is only the ng the course. For many writers, the sheer habit of writing is what performance, which is why discipline is so important. Another the knowledge that 'not writing' makes one feel a great deal worse g, which, when the performance is going well, creates euphoria in ce within the writer. Confidence affects the quality and style of g, and writing in this frame of mind will become habitual and addictive,Processes of creative writing euphoria becomes familiar through practice. The action of writing can prove to be an art of writing, only there g phoney about it. Or: our body gets in the way of ce of writing with illness, depressions and mood swings. Moments like this itate artistic crisis: writing careers can fall apart, the language al or unravelled and worn-out. All the tricks show, and show the writer is not writing block; it is disaster. But your writing voice must be distinctive; be differentiated from its precursors or your reader will stop may seem mysterious not least because, in creative writing, it begins as. Is a three-way metaphor: for writing as you speak; for writing as you your best; and for writing with rigour, stripping away all the tus from language that stop you from speaking clearly, that stop what you mean, and say it without pose, equivocation or elaboration,And, believe me, you will find your voice. The reader will always be able to tell when you writing in your voice, since your syntax will sound inauthentic. G is often there to make a fiction of the world, and to convey fiction'r truth, the voice makes the writing honest and authentic, truer than its of the is a class exercise. The self we see in the mirror,And the selves we explore in the mirrors of our writing, are always different. They are i term 'placebo writing' often produces interesting work by have struggled to write anything with ease, energy or imagination. Idea of the other is only a metaphor for a state of mind while writing. Like negative capability, the other is a psychological notion, ses of creative writing ociation within the sensibility of the self: a controlled bipolar sense, allowed the poet arthur rimbaud to speak of an t that 'is an other': un autre. Sometimes that other feels disassociated to the degree that it e of you; in this case a creative daemon, a creature or person that , is tracked by you, but is part of you, a little like the figure of the devil hogg's novel the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner. However, do not take this role outside your writing is not a tone of voice so much as a tone of mind: the mind own mortality in a porcelain language, language that is firm, but conceal the inherent breakability in its making. You can learn to care less about the whole received idea of writing ing mystical. Write as though a dead line lay so near to you that what writing is the final thing you will write. By doing so many times, it one of the habits of writing, and one of many self-roles of the ae within you. Claims that he lets the 'first self go on living, so that the other self literature, and that this writing justifies the existence of the first self: ' is a flight and i lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him'. Paraphrase margaret atwood, in her book of essays on writing the dead (2002), a writer also consists of individuals whom they see or know. The person and the writer are invisible to each other or move between selves, characters of themselves, while they are , this facility is one of the engines for development of characters in creative nonfiction, or of voice (and voices) in writing more generally. When in the flow of writing, it is almost as if the ses of creative writing 149. Creative writers experience ion that somebody other gone native with their created personae or characters, like an actor role to explore their stage or movie character to its fingertips. For example, the fernando pessoa invented four writing selves, each of whom their own name and had their own style of writing (1974). Secondly, it gives complete freedom to write as you wish,Processes of creative writing e it removes responsibility for the work's reception from your y, it encourages you to explore different styles and voices, which can ed in any fixed combination to each of your heteronyms. Currer bell, george eliot, , all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, ctively to veil themselves by using the name of a similar reasons, some writers from minority cultures have published from the dominant culture in which they live. Some writers try to remove themselves,Or any of their selves, from their writing by self-effacement of voice. In non-literary forms,Such as scientific writing, impersonality of this type is taken to an extreme, active voice and the personal pronoun had no place until recently. Creative writers might take note that many now being encouraged to warm up the self-effaced passive voice of ications, and return to a more active, first-person engagement s who are, after all, their fellow scientists as well as members of the would be a challenge to write a story in which effacement of personality against its opposite in a twin style of writers suffer depression - the manic phase often delivers their writing,While the depressive phase that follows bouts of creativity is misinterpreted as e of creativity. Sigmund freud was wrong: writing is not ic activity, but a natural activity that takes pleasure in the relations, and associations and disassociations of form in ture is not by its nature destructive; the practice of creative writing,Like any art form, is on the side of life. Of writing as a confessional business, or a paper trail of suicide process is both more subtle and cleverer than to cut your wrist, and away from the arch deliberations of self-effacement. You become your may come to see that this apparently severe experiment in have the result of making our writing more honest. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this on with a strong, simple 'i must', then build your life in this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and erent hour, must become a sign and witness to this ses of creative writing ent states of mind are useful for writing; learn to engender the best suit your working rhythms. However, if a new writer cannot access one of the others lves who can perform these placebos of voice and self, and be the ce to that writing, then there may be no option than to stop writing change their life. If a new writer cannot take the steps of experimenting with of mind or practice such as 'suspension of belief, 'the other', '', 'playing and being others', 'translation', 'self-effacement' or 'writing cold',Then they must review the question of writing at the answer in the small hours to the question 'must i write? For some, it requires to abandon familiar surroundings and people and begin over; or give up writing altogether, although they may return to it later in life and experience have had their say on them and they have something about or a few, though, answering rilke's question signals the end of the your creative writing class has been running for three months, exchange of fiction in progress with other members of the group, handing over copy of this work and a version on disk. Strip it of any over-writing, and weigh ce and paragraph carefully by reading it aloud to yourself. Return the new version,On disk and paper, to its author, and explain why your changes were : one of the quickest ways to rewrite is to get outside your writing and,Obviously, it is easier to do this with somebody else's work. The novelist anne lamott's bird by bird: some writing and life (anchor, 1995) draws brilliantly and provocatively ence, and offers sensible instruction on everything from index writing groups. The notion of selves and others is ed by margaret atwood in negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing. Writing: self and reflexivity (palgrave, 2006) hunt and fiona sampson is an expert synthesis of the critical and cre-. I use the term 'story' throughout this chapter to describe your writing,Although i am aware you may write something that does not have a or structure. N is the customary objective for an apprentice to creative writing - of novels, novellas and short stories, as well as the modes of flash anti-narrative. The answer is that some writing schools do cial genres, and there is every chance that many more will follow: ng of children's fiction, after the success of philip pullman, and j. Like poetry, we value s of writing for reasons other than their price within the free market. Ron carlson comments, 'i'm all for writing with no sagging in it at all, but i'm also for good long writing sagging in it at all . The page is no less demanding an arena gh the marketplace for short stories is difficult, many new writers begin with writing them, almost as a rite of passage, a place for ge, testing their narrative nerve over a shortish distance and organising. Suggests in his introduction to the granta book of the american (1992) 'there's a rage for order in certain of us, a fury which nothing but. 1988) offer solid introductions to the modern notion of the form, and tanding of the form's possibilities will be further extended by stories by honore de balzac, anton chekhov, vladimir pushkin, ev, gabriel garcia marquez, guy de maupassant, jorge luis borges ng character in short 400 words, write part of a whole short story that takes as its subject porary news item. It allows you to get to grips with writing a story because you have given setting and, to some extent, practice of fiction new writers choose the novella form to find their voice before writing -length novel, gathering maybe three or four novellas together between as a means of setting out their stall. Thinking about counter-productive when writing a novella - 'an ill-defined and ry banana republic', as stephen king calls the form - although 40, seems a sensible target for a new as are similar in structure to short stories, in that they often open event, but may then move backwards in time to give background also frequently place a change of direction, such as a reversal of fortune or event, within the rising action. I suspect that most of us enjoy a story, and is one of the things that drew you to reading and writing as a child. Think about these issues, but then forget them while (but less so while you are rewriting). This game is also one way to begin creating a new story,'in dialogue' with a known chapter three, we introduced the practical notion that design leads surprises in writing than free expression, and that form, such as restrictions, liberates creativity and imagination. Writers use the terms 'form' and 'structure' interchangeably because almost impossible to separate them in the act of writing. As ailsa cox explains in writing short stories, obsession among creative writers about the classification of literary e of a 'question of status. For example, if you story is thorny with events, swarming with characters and powered by sion of conflicts, then you are probably writing a novel. It must in no way 'shape' the of your short : writing to these restrictions precipitates a controlled free fall. In chapter four, we les murray spoke of 'the painless headache' of writing as 'an the body-mind and the dreaming-mind and the three are firing at once, they're all in concert. Writing fiction may trance of composition, and of reading, but technique will maintain it , and for the reader. You should beware of cliches of feeling, or kitsch, in your writing, also be aware of cliches of plot, not that following a traditional ure is a bad thing. Finally, characters can simply be invented, but also find with practice that characters arrive in your imagination as have discussed the importance of rewriting in chapter five. Adapt your style of writing to the of this information; that is, let your character lead the way. As with character, you decide the point of view of your story before to write, and prewriting several points of view will help you decide them, singly or in combination, carries the story most honestly. In creative nonfiction, writers two aspects of life and lean them against each other so that they than the sum of their parts. That information may never even enter the text, will implicitly affect the behaviour and mood of your characters, just as explored rewriting in chapter five. If you find that some of the writing seems flat, ces and paragraphs around to see what sounds more true to character;. D in the writing life remarks, 'it is the beginning of a work that throws away . It is ary as a species of creative nonfiction, a novel-length reflective essay aims and processes. Ailsa cox's succinct writing short stories (routledge,2005) focuses on an important form for writing students, and does its reader. Fiction writers will also find a highly tration of formal craft in writing fiction by janet burroway (long-. While travelling the world's creative ments, the most common book i have observed is a well-thumbed what if? The seven basic plots (continuum, 2004) by is a fascinating introduction to the templates of universal plots, the writer in that they can copy or confound them. No creative writing classroom or new go without two great anthologies of modern short stories: the of modern british short stories, edited by malcolm bradbury (penguin,1988), and the granta book of the american short story, edited by richard permanent importance . Creative nonfiction reality as its origin, but that does not mean we dispense with the mind'l skill for story. Events, facts - yet the drive of the writing is the author's involvement story, and writers use every literary device in the book to tell that story bly offers a precis in beyond the writers' workshop: 'all you have to do truthful, tell things in your personal voice, and have your modus revealing your own life circumstances through anecdote or narrative ing the meanings you attach to those circumstances, rather than point' (2001: xvii). We then look at some of the more common projects that new writers ve writing students can carry out to get them started in this makes stories of us all; history rewrites us. Steady state of consciousness in writing, 'a state in which one has very darkness which before was the perpetual sign of defeat' (1986: 414). Such vigilant aims, you can see that creative nonfiction shares many of tual and philosophical possibilities of poetry and fiction, but it even further to readers: it teaches to some extent; it has a purpose ainment or art for art's to think of creative nonfiction as simply an evolved term for something been with us for some time, but that we called by other names such as 's', journals, memoirs and essays. Writing 'the new journalism', he largely kick-started what we now write,Read, teach and learn as creative nonfiction but which, until that point, you think about the normal nonfiction you have read, you will picturing books that place and explore the apparently solid world of books speak to you and at you, and this can produce an arid, and even. Writers of creative nonfiction try that distance between reader and writer while also dealing in the are not creating fiction, poems or journalism, even though the also be novelists, poets or ve nonfiction ve nonfiction draws general readers with the twined attractions cy and art. Ve nonfiction, subjectivity of approach is fine; the writing does not have structured for maximum information in minimum space; and balance is ed. Writing on nonfiction as literature, william zinsser contends has 'no patience with the snobbery that says nonfiction is only another name and that journalism by any name is a dirty word . You should hold that ideal mind, not so much when you write, but when you redraft and revise g creative ve nonfiction exercises an almost incredible gravity. If a story to share, you will use any device of literary craft to tell it well, the very least creative nonfiction, these devices will include many of the s of the practice of fiction. Reality must be transformed into literature, recognisable and grounded in life and vivid sly, the range of creative nonfiction is vast. And nature - by two young writers who are both writing close to , with absolute alamein to zem zem by keith l now instructed us: 'open fire on the enemy. In your own creative nonfiction, begin paying attention to the worlds to which you t, and maintain a logbook of your ve nonfiction will discuss topics later; first, we look briefly at a basic structure for ve nonfiction. In a creative writing class, it is simpler to concentrate r forms of writing such as a memoir, rather than a whole autobiogra-. Think creative nonfiction articles as simply creative essays - essays with e, essays that employ structure of essays depends on stylistic intention and the function of , but the first draft takes a straightforward shape. It offers your piece structural clarity; however,It is simply the starting ting the subsequent drafts, play creatively with the order of narrative, and writing with energetic details and devices. Try to replicate some of vonnegut 'ry and rhetorical effects in your own ng with the attitude of the work should not merely echo your writing voice; it your voice, even to the extent of it being your spoken voice, and an hon-. A matter of responsibility, and there is much to be said about writing the concerns of your time, such as social and political injustice or nment. Not to view memoir writing as a place for confession, since s 'confess' much more in being shown to the reader than you ever 'telling all'. In creative nonfiction is accurate and scrupulously researched, but creative devices such as narration, edited (but real) dialogue, character-. Writing type helps to reconnect them to both self-knowledge and of the reasons for finding difficulty at first in writing what we to be that we now gain so much knowledge in a relatively , such as the internet and television. It will a forgery of life, or simply under-researched, unless the details are real, have some experience of them (through travel or work, for example), or to find and interview people with real-life experience (see 'writing and the world' below). You do not need to have a 'story' within this piece; ive will be carried by the very physicality of your : this writing reveals itself in telling detail. This e practice for writing about subjects 'you do not know' and which ation and research. When nabokov was writing the first version of ography speak, memory, he claims he was 'handicapped by an te lack of data in regard to family history, and, consequently, by ibility of checking my memory when i felt it might be at fault' (2000: 9). Readers who do not care overmuch about art, the truth is always any fiction, too - dangerous, by writing down what you consider the first memories of your . In subsequent drafts, subvert the order of the scenes,And leave the conclusion : in chapter one, i mentioned that some writers find creative eutic. Some writers of creative nonfiction write essays as a direct crisis, especially their own illness or the death of someone close. Although point of this game is to create a vivid autobiographical memoir that an issue, you may find the process of writing about conflict liberating. Be serious: you are not going the answers to all of these questions and, if you did, it would not help your writing. The first business of one who practises creative nonfiction is to get self-conceit because it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that think they already you make notes on yourself, remember that you are open space. When you are writing about yourself, creating a story that tells one of several versions of the truth about your-. In ions of autobiography in creative writing (2000), celia hunt ch showing that writing fictional autobiography as part of an ticeship not only helps to extend literary skill and the finding of voice,But also benefits the writer therapeutically. They may appear to read your personal narrative out more about you, but what many of them are doing is trying to about themselves and their own flaws and do this well, you must get outside yourself during the time of writing,Looking at yourself as dispassionately as you dare. If we can learn clearly about ourselves, then we earn permission to explore more patterns and stories of the people in the world around g about real people: character with flash fiction (see chapter six), a character sketch is a tightly written focused form of around 500 words, and an extremely effective exercise writers of creative nonfiction. William zinsser declares that new writers ought to begin g lives with creative nonfiction because 'they will write far more will-. For creative writing students from academic backgrounds ve nonfiction the sciences, creative nonfiction comes into its own, and 'writing what ' might prove to be writing about your own studies or research (see. Project than writing about themselves ought to be relieved by the the style of any piece of writing is going to reveal as much about as it is about the subject. Again, test out its literary integrity by writing it as a scene, or a series of scenes. Tight scenes have much greater light and energy than this shift of focus in your creative nonfiction. Library databases for books and articles on the same or similar antly, check whether your subject has already been covered, and are left between subjects that are ripe for research and writing. If you are writing about local or family history, then you become acquainted with record offices. If you use quotations iews, especially if you have compressed or doctored them to fit , it is only fair to allow interviewees 'sight of copy' (the final draft sion), so that they can either corroborate the manner in which have been used, or request are writing during the silver age for creative nonfiction. Tion is now an international supergenre encompassing memoirs, history,Autobiography, biography, travel writing, nature writing, popular anthropol-. Film and music writing, popular philosophy, ethnic studies, journalism,Writing on religion, literary studies, and more. S the continent of creative writing, presenting complete pictures of t and fresh ways of looking at the world around us. Discussed in chapter five the metaphor of an invisible audience behind poets and novelists while they are writing. Remember that your creative lly has a less phantasmal relationship with its audience since it often real world as its subject. And the importance of a creative nonfiction writer's fidelity to reality, m's the journalist and the murderer (granta, 2004) remains indispens-. This early guide g nonfiction (first edition, 1976) carries introductions to writing e, technology and sport. Uk, the best international creative nonfiction is published in the ; and the granta book of reportage introduced by veteran editor ian jack. Within the time constraints of a creative writing course - you will learn amount about the different available styles, and gain by their imitation,Through reading nonfiction and essays by writers such as martin amis, , truman capote, bruce chatwin, richard dawkins, joan didion, d, maureen dowd, louise erdrich, martha gellhorn, stephen jay gould,Ian jack, ryszard kapuscinski, barry lopez, john mcphee, norman mailer,Janet malcolm, blake morrison, john pilger, steven pinker, oliver sacks, ir, lewis thomas, hunter s. Wilson, tom wolfe and tobias several theories of what happens to a poet during the writing of - eliot's escape from personality, keats 's idea of informing g another body, yeats's notion of the mask, auden's concept of becoming someone else for the duration of the poem, valery's a self superior to the self- lies the implied assumption that the self is inadequate and will not do. It is to to see writing poems as an activity worth your time and attention, so may eventually feel like reaching into flames on a poem's behalf- you find one day you are also that poem's author. Other forms of compensation arrive eventually; and nowhere else experience of creative process, especially drafting, more of a place value on language above every other literary consideration. The flow in language can create a sense of continual crisis when writing these conditions, you will have to get used to feeling that you will know when you have got a poem 'right'. Best short stories, writing poems is one of the few open spaces in you have the opportunity to make something resonant, complete ndent, even if that happens only a half a dozen times in your . Think of the object or word as a cause for celebration that asking somebody else to share, and do not stray off the : an obsessive and concentrated effect using something concrete isable allows greater flexibility than writing about something abstract. Prison, and to write in free verse well is often harder than writing in 'free' in 'free verse' refers to the freedom from fixed patterns of metre , but writers of free verse use poetic devices like alliteration, figures and imagery. Can try writing in syllables right now by creating a haiku - a three-line seventeen syllables in which the syllable count of the lines is this poem by the author about a bird called a 'redpoll':From cherries, from holly, from. Commonplace books' to collect pieces of writing that impress them, show ing new, or speak to them emotionally and to their own need to you have assembled at least 200 poems of these types, make copies , and begin looking at them all with the view of creating your ogy.

Ones you are capable of writing well; and, if you want to become a than a 'writer of poems', to find poems which nobody else could do this, you practise several modes of writing poetry, until you reach a writing where subject and form 'click' together, as robert frost put it. Or archaic writing; prosaic, dishonest or forced expression; inelastic opriate form, however 'free'; or just common-or-garden dullness. You may then feel compelled uce your first excitements about poetry within your own work, since s a wholly natural progression that readers who are wakened in this poetry wish to try writing it. If we were to replay anatole france'y between carpentry and creative writing, the space around this poem -high in wood-shavings. Notes as a starting point, begin writing about this experience from -person point of view, breaking the narrative into rough lines. Currency, and a quite different set of technical demands, especially of the sounds and rhythms of language, and its rich and various you possess a vocation, then you follow that calling but, if you do not,There are other significant incentives for writing poems. You do not have to 'fake it' in writing, even if you write from behind. Yet, if this quality of creative ts you as a reader, then poetry may possibly suit you as a writer e it will suit your character. Then, attempt to wipe your mind of ence of poetry or writing, and write a recollection of a ence of language or reading. Small exercises attempt to remind the writer how individual and strange relationship with words and language, and how a writer's personal reading,Listening and writing are intimately linked within any with fiction, there is a glittering hoard of handbooks about writing poetry,And the finest are written by good poets. In my experience, the leading michelle boisseau and robert wallace's writing poems (longman pearson,2004), and mary kinzie's a poet's guide to poetry (chicago university press,1999). The former provides an excellent and thorough introductory text not confuse the would-be writer with mystification or false latter offers a bracing and beautifully written introduction to cal matters. Taken together, they provide a penetrating explanation ation of every facet of writing poetry, and a sense of progression in art. Penguin, 2002) are lessons in writing economically, clearly and yet poetry, as well as having the effect of making the reader feel like they g the possibilities of the craft for the first time. S companion spider ( wesleyan university press, 2001) and richard hugo' triggering town: lectures and essays on poetry and writing (norton, 1979). You are ever short of writing games, you will find an open mine of them practice of poetry (harperresource, 1 992) edited by robin behn and ll. Writing games based on form and design can be derived from , not least the making of a poem: a norton anthology of poetic forms. Paul fussell's poetic meter form (random house, 1979) is a strong introduction to historical practices with distinctive examples. This 'l' of writing, performing and publishing is as much about self-belief as it is about the validation given to your work by fellow writers,Readers and audience. Like the world of writing, the world of performance seethes with workers, drones and guards. As we usly, teaching writing can also be performative, but the best teaching g workshops is more centred on students' writing than on the teacher'mance, although being effective in performance may prove useful to in the course, published creative writers return to their published work to pro-. Live performance renders your writing into something spoken performance of your language escapes books by this means ces read you as the messenger, not the message, of your writing. So: although live readings can promotions, they are also entertainments, or an art form in may also be one means for holding together a community or social h the codes of performance, as in a mushairas or a concert, the music comes first; in a performance of writing, the come first. We can prepare as carefully for a reading as a ming writing es for a concert. We should aim, first, at clarity (as in our writing), at bringing the listener into the work (as we would a reader, by sleight ) . This can of course be funny,But also awful; the poem or story is itself what gets lost in this must learn to trust writing and realise it is not some sorry- faced drama. If they choose not to go to g, then we should do everything in our power to open creative them. Some creative writers and promoters have written and argued the into a closed room where it is not permitted to entertain. New creative writers need to reinvent the world where ture drew its audience to it, and did not look down on of the problem with literature promotion is that we may have the imag-. There is with these, but consider this: your work might well be extending ory of writing, but the territory may prove, culturally, a small pond other new writers. If writing in performance seems like a direction for you, then the n shows you some of the basic things you can do to help you make all likelihood, you will perform standing rather than sitting. The voice will spring of its own impulse - like loosing and stream of creative writers use the page of a manuscript or book as a screen to hide. Tongue, teeth and lips must all be brought into play, allowing clarity ry, for clarity and intelligibility exceed expression in work for creative writers has the same purpose as for actors or profes-. You learn by going to new writing, and to live readings, and watching, hearing, then imitating,Writers in performance. You will begin to ming writing reading your work aloud to yourself and your friends in a workshop is , while reading to an audience of strangers sets the bar is a group game. Choose to perform in venues that are harsher about and purpose of creative writing; or create a situation in your real life s such a performance (the more surprising of these appear to neous but need thorough planning). Your task is to create such a place for yourselves, and extend expectations of creative writing in performance in your g techniques and ch your own event with as much calm seriousness as you can muster. Sift the work you are going to read and what say about it by way of introduction. With a novel or book of creative nonfiction, read short excerpts on a reader's curiosity, or which are playful, relaxing the audience. You might even improvise poems s on the spot, freewriting them aloud from prompts solicited from ce. You could even make the audience do some writing, way you can begin improvising with creative performance tactics is 'the cold open'. For performance poets this would be a routine ming writing audience; for literary writers it is something to which you might aspire. Should a mushairas poet deliver a stunning ghazal line or one cal sting, the audience rises to its feet and acclaims it, calling it back poet, who then repeats it before proceeding modestly, knowing they seen, and seen by the ear creative on a performance of writing, with all the participants in your class or . Choose a director for this performance; then, as a group, decide on to be used, and think of ways to increase the impact of individual pieces ming writing reading them aloud, and improvising different approaches. Try a creative blend of approaches:Straight readings from the page with improvised gs from memory direct to g among the audience while audience ising to challenges made by the visual background material such as slides or overhead al music accompanying work or interwoven with g with two or more g work in different tones of voice, such as offering directions performance should entertain or intrigue as much as it eave your own work with short excerpts from writers whose work ant to you. The project provide you with good practice should work become successful and you to do readings, or you decide to pursue a career allied to writing such ture promotion, arts programming, publishing or t as is a book anyway? Writing can perform as a spoken l art, as a species of visual art, or as a form of electronic art. Their existence means there are more concepts writers willing to exploit another open ming your writing as visual a poem on a kinetic subject, such as 'hard rain then light rain', 'the flight ', 'cloud movement in storm', 'panther's attack', 'a clock'. Past, these were displayed in public ways; they were even sewn into french poet apollinaire created 'calligrammes' that performed the same blending the visual with authors will not commit to writing at all: their poems and stories sed for oral delivery. Some of these subversions have become so successful (graphic for effective hollywood movies) that they are part of the might think about concepts of your own, using the traditional a book as a starting point and subverting your reader's oarding and digital the cells of a comic strip on a page, and try to break one of your poems stories into small visual scenes as if they were storyboards for a film of ming writing . This is also the routine by which any novel, story, play is prepared for filming: a director must be able to visualise the action of ive ming your writing as public an artist blends different art forms, the result is a hybrid, as if ent species of flower or fruit tree had been cross-fertilised. If you are working with a particular space, such as a sculpture, increases the restriction within which you work (as time would, writing for film or radio). You develop an eye for placing, as well as an the language of a poet ian hamilton finlay transformed his garden, little sparta nd, with emblems, word sculptures and conceptual art, writing of s that 'certain gardens are described as retreats when they are s'. In , poets who sought 'a place to stand' assumed the role of gardener, ing was seen as an act of composition, analogous to writing. In so far as gardening is an art,All these may be taken under the one head, composing' (quoted in abrioux,This kind of approach to writing can make you think and work using larger compass than a page's four points. Your writing project might 's-eye perception, like walking the plot of james joyce's ulysses, super-. Might involve using any, and more, of the following:Performing writing a colossal poem on the sand of a beach, or in snow in a the windows of a large building as spaces for individual letters or ast poetry through your local radio or cable tv h a fake poetical manifesto during an election and post it around ti a poem on walls or sidewalks, using chalk (hose it off) or packed a cake on which creative text is the icing, and hand it a removable tattoo poem on yourself or e for the crowd at a sports event to hold up the letters of your poem raph, and then make a montage of, public signage, such as street quantities of naturally occurring objects to form words, such as pebbles,Twigs, ice or the same using unnatural objects such as the garbage on a street (t slides or overhead projections of poems on to the walls in your city plant-bulbs in the form of letters and words of a poem, so that they an unusual place next e for a one-line poem to be a poem from the phrases of interviewed people you meet, taking from each : although entertaining, these games widen your writing's franchise ce. Projects such as this are very open to civic e sponsorship should you wish to make public and conceptual art part working life as a onic creative writers, the internet is another open space for the creation mance of our writing, or the digital or kinetic performances of stories that are first written for the page. There are several kinds of g including weblogs, hypertext fiction and poetry, kinetic poetry, , and writing that takes advantage of the programmable nature of er to create works that are interactive (see 'recommended reading'). Programmes also generate text, or involve sound, or use e-mail forms of network communication to build communities whose collaborative writing and onic performance allows huge room for experiment, especially in logical melding with writing in live performance of other art forms,Such as film, visual art or music, a phenomenon margot lovejoy explores esthetics (2004: 270). The result can sometimes be seen as a new creative writing, inasmuch as writing and the spoken word are at its these performances take place directly in cyberspace, such works thought of as electronic literature, somewhat like the oulipo's idea ial literature. Creative writing begin with something as simple as an e-mail list for the class to all contribute new work and criticism, before developing a website ms the same function more publicly. Using computers to produce anthology of writing using a desktop publishing programme is an which most classes should aim, but you should also publish it online. Natural step is a website that performs the role of an online journal of writing, and that of other writers. Believe this form of writing is a huge ally to creative writing, and a ming writing space for creativity and cross-art-form practice. The difference is that of experience, imagination and observation is online and public, and the way you write, even though the audience is invisible, as when writing. Other positive aspects of blogs are that they need to be written entertainingly - they require the inevitable spices of art and ecomony very good - and they assist fluency and variation of expression, are in effect highly visible performances of writing. They are beginning to face of literature - especially creative nonfiction - and the speed at write, read and respond to what we are reading, for many blogs allow n interaction from and with the reader. All students of creative writing should ; teachers of writing may consider setting up a blog for any course g to which tutor and students universities, such as the open university in britain, teach creative writ-. Of the process of writing is open to all its participants regardless y or time zone. In these situations, the writing process itself is performative,An open space into which you step before an audience of your fellow students,But one in which you find them stepping up beside you, all bearing . Obviously, you could use your own blogs to set up a virtual or workshop for yourself and your fellow g up a writing workshop the e-mail addresses of everyone in your class or workshop and set up an. Visits include the peggy guggenheim museum in venice, fine examples of writing as carved or as illuminated sculpture; and millennium centre, which carries inscriptions on its copper portico,Side by side in welsh and english by gwyneth lewis: 'in these stones / hori-. A stimulating exhibition of finlay's writing and public art is ian : a visual primerby yves abrioux (reaktion books, 1994). And forward-looking ideas for writers and artists about hybrid and transaesthetics, read margot lovejoy's digital currents: art in ming writing onic age (routledge, 2004). That are generated by computers; collaborative writing projects that s to contribute to the text of a work; and online literary develop new ways of g in the community and of us who write work out of a conviction that we are participating sort of communal activity. And when we as individuals pass on, is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release someone will take the time and the care to unlock carol oat e s , paris review interview (plimpton, 1989:Made well, shaped well, writing ceases to feel like artifice and becomes alive, moment that happens it ceases to be your own and becomes are creative writers who argue that you cannot be a good writer conducting your life with a degree of care, with a kindness, a kind ting for oneself within a larger community. William carlos so far as saying that one reason to write was to become a better d hugo reads this statement as a private understanding 'that a writing was a slow, accumulative way of accepting one's life as valid . How a writer reaches a balance between these private points of always revealing: it reveals itself in their work, and in how they lves and their writing within public arenas. Writing is solitary of the time, but even writing can be a social process through the regular life, discussions and workshops. Engenders community; and a creative communication implies ened regard for community, however unknown (or unknowing) ity may be. Creative writers might even prey and spy on a material, but they carry its message forwards even if the writer is under-. After all,Isn't one of the principles of creative writing that writers write for themselves,And that only by writing for themselves can writers hope to please an their own writing room? It is why the discipline of creative writing an open space, and asked you to think ture as a continent that contains many countries, languages and of view. They seek guidance from creative writing, even they find is art and artifice, symbols and patterns. Writing is a way of saying you and the world have ' - richard hugo (1979: 72). For many people, books are lights in their dark,And creative writing is a means by which to see, hear and stay in touch. Up for creative writing courses to learn literary style, but many also because they are seeking a quality of perception that we used to call have found it through reading, and they wish to discover it again g a community's an extended work of creative nonfiction about a community for whom the 'carrier' of its story. But creative writing thrives in many open spaces, and s are often to be found in less visible spaces in which writing thrives openly, if less spaces include public libraries, schools, community groups, , prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, refugee centres, ymca organisa-. Versions of writers working as graffiti and installation ly the most super-official version of writing in the community is laureate consultant in poetry to the library of congress in the . The poet laureate's job is to raise national awareness of the writing of poetry, and some of the projects are exceptionally dove brought together writers to explore the african diaspora; she ted children's poetry and jazz events. Maxine kumin set up writers are drawn to community writing because this is simply out of which they work. Leaving their physical community would g their reason for writing, and being dishonest as artists and as . In some cultures, the idea of a writer not being of a community simply bizarre, since the writer is the carrier of their community's h history and times of change: its maker of tales, its memory-banker, ures in the a class or writing group, devise a project for your local community. Allow the project to one week at least, and work with as many people on their writing as a site that is open and accessible, such as a public library. The process will , too; it will make you think even more clearly about your own writing and of audience you might need to create for grassroots of creative r, some people work as writers in a community because, unless very lucky or very ruthless, many find themselves needing to. A freelance writer earn so much by their writing, and working in schools and the allow you to earn time for your writing. However, teaching g will feed you, in more ways than you might expect, including your ve work, a matter exemplified by the many contributors to the point:Where teaching and writing intersect (shapiro and padgett, 1983). That is creative writing programmes present opportunities to develop a e college, with a community group or in a workplace. The success projects is assessed as part of the degree ity writing also returns creative writing to one of its first causes,Pleasure. It will open your eyes to things you may have missed own experience, or to matters you can expect to meet yourself, as a poet kenneth koch taught creative writing regularly to schoolchildren,But also to older people in a nursing home in rhode island. He knew les of such a project, but he 'sensed possibility': he sensed how the writing could itself be 'a serious thing for them to work at, something well and that engaged their abilities and their thoughts and feelings'. Koch, working with an assistant poet, arrived with no preconceptions an idealistic view that, since he loved writing poetry so much, and much pleasure from the process, he imagined everyone else would: 'it a pleasure to say things, and such a special kind of pleasure to say is not a writing project; it is a means to several projects. Try writing the poem that emerges from any writing game in this book, but write it ent places within a single morning. Attempt to bring elements of the place into the poem or : you will discover that some places and locales suit your writing ate your creative practice from the places you expect it to arise: the , the studio, the bedroom. Serendipity is an important aspect g, and writing in an unusual place can bring unexpected mes you need to leave home to find a home for your writing. A seminar room can be helpful of course,But a housing project, a foreign city or a walk in the woods can be and writing houses too. Writing needs seminar rooms, but it also rooms of its own outside the arena of formal education, in the of society. Find these zones yourself, and write in them, and from the community to these spaces, and 'occupy' them for this end, i suggest that creative writing students and teachers begin gn for every major city in the world to create a writer's room, a low-cost,Writerly version of a painter's studio or atelier. The room's walls will be covered with assist teaching and writing, as they are in some institutes of mathematics. Society needs to make more space for its creative writers,Especially writers from non-traditional writing backgrounds, and we need them young. As a discipline, creative writing provides open spaces for order to explore that engagement, and how academies become such , i need to talk a little more personally about why i wrote this ng writing in the creative academy. Began my working life as a scientist, one who also wrote creatively, and say that if what you do requires you at best to write clearly, then we writers. Creative writing as a discipline may help to shift the a more constructive set of engagements. This topic offers you a few ng their ve writing across i said under 'why we read' in chapter one, reading nonfiction is as vital g fiction or poetry. In my own university, ts take a three-year honours degree in creative writing, balancing of literature with its practice. In their second and third year, students specialise in a genre, such as poetry, fiction, drama or creative lisation is a necessary prison, given the structures of the academy, but it is. Falsification of how writers work in the world: it prizes focus above open prison needs to become open ore, these students are also encouraged to take or audit courses ties and creative writing - for example, in philosophy or psychology,But also in medicine, physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry or logy. Obviously, they need to have some interest and experience of ts first, but what they are doing is ploughing a subject for language al they might use later in creative writing. And they are acting as ambassadors for creative thought and students of science and social science; they gain experience of ideas they otherwise may not is two-way traffic. They understand that the industry of 'business games' akers, creativity exercises and meeting energisers is close in approach of the generative writing workshop or writing game. Just like ve writing with is a fair, if flawed, perception that, somehow, the hypothesis-making part scientific process is creative, and the testing and experimental stage from art. Repeated experimentation and the process of ination are precisely analogous to the processes of rewriting, criticism. Furthermore, not enough now for a talented scientist to be content with publication in ationally refereed r science writing requires the same creative and technical skill writing of creative nonfiction. In fact, it is creative nonfiction, and with which it is composed has been responsible for melting many falsehoods that have iced up between the arts and sciences, not least that scientists cannot write. Scientists, such as the popular science et boden, max perutz, steven rose, steven pinker and richard dawkins,Are creative writers. An example - writing on the discoverers of dna, max g in the community and academy leonardo, crick and watson . Just as many writing students do not s writers, so not all students who sign up for science degrees ists, but many could become clearer and more energetic their disciplines, as journalists, or as mediators between the public scientific endeavour. In the same way that many of our best creative also been among the more insightful critics, many of our best scientists best communicators and critical exponents of science. Discuss their them every day, and write a story, poem or piece of creative nonfiction response to that conversation. Share your work with the scientists, and to respond with their own creative writing at the end of the : there is an atmosphere of experiment-at-play in a laboratory which encounter anywhere else, except in a theatre company -throughs and rehearsals. Tune in to this play of thought, and use ge of your scientists innovatively and precisely within your own ve writing as a crossover my own university, creative writers and their students now work undergraduate students and postgraduate researchers in the medicine, business, biology, computing, engineering and physics. What is striking is that, although some initial scepticism about ments in teaching and learning came from the scientists, they ed that students were doing better in their writing, communicating gs more clearly, and benefiting from human contact and creative researchers. Any residual scepticism was much more likely to reside ts and faculty in the work was informed by an important movement called 'writing curriculum'. Students often use logbooks and journals,And the idea, as in creative writing, is to become an active participant in t and that practice can create fluency. All this is coterminous with line of creative writing, although it has to be said that, at some institu-. Creative writing occupies a much more privileged position in terms status of both students and faculty. At my own university, we using many creative writers and creative writing games to deliver of the curriculum, and to do so with creative panache, teaching though they were performance art. External teaching tests have shown ss, and a side-benefit of increased recruitment at a time when science ing in this britain in the early twenty-first century, the royal literary fund went r, and organised residencies for hundreds of creative writers to work uk universities. The ' little brain' bequeathed more than what might have been expected of him,For in this way creative writing and the teaching of advanced rhetoric other through a bold experiment. The purpose was not to teach g, but to work with students on their academic and expository thinking was rooted in the notion of not burning up the creative g in the community and academy creative writers on teaching poetry and fiction, but on focusing their clear language and argument. It is arguable that creative writing g some new, unusual, maybe historical, rooms of its own (some of explored in chapter one). However, although the uses of creative creative reading are important for these new open spaces, sometimes a space where language runs ve recognitions. I ed science at this level as a form of creative and collaborative physicist niels bohr observed, 'when it comes to atoms, language can only as in poetry. Have never felt closer to that balance of perception and imagination i am writing creatively, or watching students in a creative writing discoveries for themselves among the swarm, noise and dance of lan-. When i claimed earlier that in the discipline of creative writing we beginners, some of that tone of mind informs the natural process of sci-. The repercussions for the role g in the community and academy ve writing as a discipline speaking across disciplines could be that interdisciplinary genie is out, we can seed a few y as open space. Wish that the discipline of creative writing saw itself even more as a idge to a far wider community of readers and writers. Writing in the community is not some worthy cause, neither some claude glass reflection of real life from which to compose. Maybe more university writing workshops could take place , community centres and places where people work and live. Community projects within writing a small and necessary means universities can use to make these first steps. Needs creative writing more than creative writing needs higher es want student fees for one; they wish to answer student demand r. However, higher education also desires the social, cultural and nce, and understanding, that writing and writers bring to higher edu-. Wish we allowed ourselves to recognise that all good writers are creative,That even, say, textbooks of philosophy or zoology, when written clearly ainingly, with an eye on the audience, are acts of creative writing. Have come to believe, reluctantly, that 'creative' is an abused word, abused point where it has become divisive. But do we really mean writers are creative and the rest of them are uncreative? Isn't the n creative and non-creative at this level largely the difference , thoughtful writing and bad, thoughtless writing? The opportunities of 'self- inclusive scholarship' (see chapter seven) ought extended to our g across the disciplines is a hugely important movement; a lot energy for it came from people who cared about writing. Across the disciplines' seems a natural step; the interdisciplinary focus might come from the discipline of creative writing. Writers between desire and achievement, between promise and ic insecurity emerges from that friction, and feeds the desire to keep ve writing territory free of competitors from other non-literary fields, from younger writers. Taking creative nonfiction teaching into science and business is the to get inside their respective troys if that is where one wishes to create a drama out of a aloud glengarry glen ross by david mamet (na2: 2509); try to perform a group. Yet,If all colleges of writing vanished, we would not find ourselves suddenly utions protect themselves, and protect their captured icons. As we discussed in chapter two, sometimes teaching and writing vely into each other, falsifying natural, intuitive practice; and a program-. Developing a wilful amnesia towards the dreary language of administration,If some creative writers are in, then it follo writing about campuses . The a salary can lead to worst thing that can happen to the writers is their teaching begins with their own writing. Packard continues, 'our present era has been characterized by smith as filled with a lot of 'creative writing writing' - competent, passion-. Who have attended courses suffer the same caricaturing and censure , for there are those for whom the creative writing industry is a , a cloud-cuckoo-land of fantasy accomplishment and is evidently much more open-ended. Provides a moving edge for literary evolutions and language's more we practise attending to language in our reading and writing, more we practise attending to the world in which language lives, the enced we become at translating our individual senses and our percep-. Into writing, and being believed by readers who, it is worth remembering,Live in this world, and whose attention we have to earn. An open book of possibility, the creative academy is an open space,But it sometimes needs rewriting. If nothing else, i book demonstrates that creative writing is above all a natural ve writing can be taught. Once upon a time it was taught writing and speaking exercises embedded in rhetoric and the . I possess this of creative writing because of moving a long distance from a position cism about it. I originally chose to be a scientist and, as somebody from literary matters, i have felt a starvation for creative permission, i was standing outside a lit house with no permission to enter. Let us explore a new level for writing in education igates any false borders between community and academy. We seek creative writing's franchise in education, and also extend our work communities, workplaces and schools outside the academy - to write door open on the g in the community and academy 253. Are those for whom the creative ry is a cartoon world, a fantasy accomplishment and y, again who are you? Use these questions as headings to write quickly and without too much : compare your answers with those you wrote in the writing game on in chapter two. By all means, go into yourself; climb down invisible abyss from which your writing rises. Writers are nobody, and they are light of writing allows us to find our way through, and recall lawrence's. As students, writers and teachers of writing, work and write within and educational communities - we are those communities. Our lives can be ic, not least because creative writing is a discipline that slides and knowledge, thereby cutting across conformity. They their very presence to make it a better space for creative thought and s work in education at all levels but, without being precious, do so on their own terms, and not just out of necessity. Teach because they can, so the first and best thing you can do lf, as a new writer, is to apprentice yourself to a mentor who is a , one who understands the fact that writing gets you lost, and who you sense the guide ropes that lead through the inferno's circles to and abyss. As an academic discipline, creative writing strange but life-changing carol oates said, 'by honoring one another's creation we honor some-. We learn creative e we can, remembering that learning, like writing, is also an act of com-. Creative writing throws open the world, and even to other worlds within us and beyond our own. Can make a unique contribution to the teaching of writing and heroes of the cambridge introduction to creative writing. This important a book for new creative writers wishing to adventure into ity as it is for teachers seeking new ways to get children contains games, poems and practical advice. A number of creative writers explore this tradition ce in fiona sampson's creative writing in health and social care (ey, 2004). David morley's the gift: new writing for the national e (stride, 2002) brings together creative writing by authors and health-. Workers in a unique community writing project coordinated by the author,The purpose of which was to explore 'the art of medicine and the medicine '. Analysis: by scientists who take a serious interest in creative writing; literary analysts who have made evolution their explanatory seems clear to me, as a scientist and as a poet, that the synthesis of ties and what steven pinker calls the 'new sciences of human nature'. An open space in which the discipline of creative writing finds g in the community and academy your beginning is your a 500-word afterword to your own imaginary collected poems, s or the final edition of your creative nonfiction. Porter, the cambridge introduction to narrative, cambridge:Cambridge university press, x, yves, ian hamilton finlay: a visual primer, london: reaktion books,Addonizio, kim and laux, dorianne, the poet's companion, new york: norton,Allen, walter, writers on writing, london: dent, z, al, the writer's voice, london: bloomsbury, , martin, experience, london: vintage, on, linda (ed. Creative writing: a workbook with readings, london:Apollinaire, guillaume, caligrammes, berkeley: university of california press,Attridge, derek, poetic rhythm: an introduction, cambridge: sity press, , margaret, interview bbc 4, /bbcfour/audiointerviews/. Atwood, november , margaret, negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing, cambridge:Cambridge university press, , elaine (ed. Robert frost on writing, new brunswick: rutgers , richard, x20, london: flamingo, , robin and twichell, chase (eds), the practice of poetry: writing poets who teach, new york: harperresource, , julia and magrs, paul, the creative writing coursebook, london: macmillan,Bell, madison smartt, narrative design: a writer's guide to structure, new york:Bernays, anne and painter, pamela, what if? Writing exercises for fiction writers,New york: quill, , cicely, your voice and how to use it, london: virgin books, , elizabeth, the complete poems, new york: the noonday press, , carole, from pitch to publication, basingstoke: macmillan, d, peter, the book of leviathan, london: sort of books, rative bibliography , harold, the anxiety of influence, 2nd edition, oxford: oxford , harold, how to read and why, london: fourth estate, , carol, beyond the writers' workshop, new york: anchor, , margaret a. The creative mind: myths and mechanisms, london:Boisseau, michelle and wallace, robert, writing poems, 6th edition, new york:Longman pearson, , christopher, the seven basic plots, london: continuum, ry, malcolm (ed. New york: tarcher penguin, , peter, the empty space, harmondsworth: penguin, , reuben, mirror on mirror: translation imitation parody, cambridge, ma:Harvard university press, , clare and paterson, don (eds), don t ask me what i mean: poets in words, london: picador, , renni and king, dave, self-editing for fiction writers: how to lf into print, new york: harperresource, , sean (ed. Authorship: from plato to the postmodern, edinburgh:Edinburgh university press, aw, stanley, the poem itself, harmondsworth: penguin, ay, janet, writing fiction, new york: longman, ay, janet, imaginative writing, 2nd edition, new york: longman, , nigel, the magic universe, oxford: university press, , raymond, fires, london: picador, , mandy and sprackland, jean, our thoughts are bees: working with schools, southport: wordplay press, ly, cyril, enemies of promise, london: penguin, revised edition , ailsa, writing short stories, london: routledge, , tony (ed. Dublin: poetry ireland, , paul, creative writing and the new humanities, london: routledge,Dillard, annie, the writing life, new york: harpercollins, an, clayton, companion spider, middletown: wesleyan university press,Fenton, james, an introduction to english poetry, london: penguin, , richard (ed. The granta book of the american short story, london:Freed, lynn, 'doing time: my years in the creative writing gulag', harper'ne, july 2005, pp. An, diane and frey, olivia (eds), autobiographical writing across lines, durham: duke, s, carlos, this i believe, london: bloomsbury, 2004. Illustrative l, paul, poetic meter and poetic form, new york: random house, r, john, the art of fiction, new york: vintage books, r, john, on becoming a novelist, new york: harperperennial, , philip, creative nonfiction, cincinnati: story press, hall, jonathan and wilson, david (eds), the literary animal, illinois:Northwestern university press, d, lee, the art of creative nonfiction, new york: john wiley & sons, den, john, viewpoints: poets in conversation, london: faber and faber,Hamilton, ian, robert lowell: a biography, london: faber and faber, , william (ed. Classic writings on poetry, new york: sity press, , seamus, finders keepers: selected prose 1971-2001, london: faber t, w n. Jablow and lieb, julian, manic depression and creativity, : prometheus books, der, john, the gazer's spirit, chicago: university of chicago press, der, john, rhyme's reason, new haven: yale nota bene, , miroslav, the dimension of the present moment, london: faber , ted, poetry in the making, london: faber and faber, , ted, winter pollen, london: faber and faber, , ted, by heart, london: faber and faber, , richard, the triggering town: lectures and essays on poetry and writing,New york: norton, , celia, therapeutic dimensions of autobiography in creative writing,London: jessica kingsley, , celia, 'assessing personal writing', auto/biography 9 (1-2), 2001,Hunt, celia and sampson, fiona, writing: self and reflexivity, london: palgrave,Jack, ian (ed. And gioia, dana, an introduction to poetry, new york: longman,King, stephen, on writing, london: hodder, , mary, a poet's guide to writing poetry, chicago: chicago university press,Koch, kenneth, rose, where did you get that red? New york: vintage, , kenneth, i never told anybody: teaching poetry writing to old people, : teachers and writers collaborative, , kenneth, wishes, lies and dreams: teaching children to write poetry, : harperperennial, rative bibliography , kenneth, the art of the possible: comics mainly without pictures, new york:Soft skull press, er, arthur, the act of creation, london: picador, a, milan, the art of the novel, new york: firstharperperennial, , george and johnson, mark, metaphors we live by, chicago: university , anne, bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life, new york:Le guin, ursula, steering the craft, portland: eighth mountain press, , anna (ed. Power and identity in the creative writing classroom,Clevedon: multilingual matters, d, john, the poetry handbook, oxford: oxford university press, , david, the art of fiction, london: penguin books, , david, the practice of writing, london: penguin, , william, the undiscovered country: poetry in the age of tin, new york:Columbia university press, , barry, arctic dreams, new york: scribner, , barry, about this life, london: harvill press, y, margot, digital currents: art in the electronic age, london: routledge,Maccarthy, fiona, byron: life and legend, london: john murray, , derek, collected poems, loughcrew: gallery press, m, janet, the journalist and the murderer, london: granta, stam, nadezhda, hope against hope, london: collins and harvill press,Mandelstam, osip, the noise of time: selected prose, trans. Clarence brown,Evanston: northwestern university press, ws, harry and brotchie, alastair, oulipo compendium, london: atlas,Mills, paul, the routledge creative writing coursebook, london: routledge,Moore, alan, writing for comics, urbana: avatar, , marianne, complete poems, london: faber and faber, , david, the gift: new writing for the national health service, exeter:Murray, les, translations from the natural world, manchester: carcanet press,Myers, d. The elephants teach: creative writing since 1880, new jersey:Nabokov, vladimir, speak, memory: an autobiography revisited, london:Novakovich, josip, fiction writers workshop, cincinnati: story press, , joyce carol, the faith of a writer, new york: harpercollins, , mary, a poetry handbook, san diego: harvest, , tillie, silences, new york: the feminist press, 2003. Illustrative , hans, bishop, wendy and haake, katherine, metro: journeys in vely, new york: addison- wesley, d, william, the art of poetry writing, new york: st martin's press, t, ron, (ed. The new princeton encyclopedia of poetry s, princeton: princeton university press, n, philip, 'introduction' to paradise lost, oxford: oxford university press,Queneau, raymond, cent mille milliards de poemes, paris: editions gallimard,Queneau, raymond, exercises in style, paris: editions gallimard, d, john, how to write a poem, oxford: blackwell, urg, patsy, the right to speak: working with the voice, london: methuen,Rodden, john (ed. Creative writing in health and social care, london: , peter, writing poems, newcastle: bloodaxe books, er, candace and diamond, rick, the creative writing guide, new york:Addison-wesley, t, michael, lives of the poets, london: phoenix, , james (ed. The divine comedy, 3 vols, new york: sity press, , frank, writing and the writer, london: heinemann, lman, art, maus: a survivor's tale, new york: random house, uller, francis, cocteau: a biography, boston: atlantic/little brown, , timothy, all the funs in how you say a thing: an explanation of versification, athens: ohio university press, , sol, stein on writing, new york: st martin's press, , mark and boland, eavan, the making of a poem: a norton anthology forms, new york: norton, , william and white, e. Cooling time, washington: copper canyon press, r, william, on writing well, new york: collins, ies, higher education open space 247— patrons of writing 23, 82, ng and learning e 44, 46, ty, displacement es, literary r, honesty of on, literary 15, 30, , writing from -narrative 89, naire, guillaume tle 16-17, 33, , margaret 41, 104, 142, 148,Auden,w. Commonplace books' 100, itiveness 31, 32, 57, ities, creative 22-23, 115,Enemies of promise , joseph 96, ve nonfiction 37, 59, 177-193,And interviews 185, point of view a literature of reality orkfor 189, g a topic l writing strategies uctory structures for ies of accuracy and art ng with the reader using ting the structure of 181— experience to passion to create g about people and the g about travel g about yourself g an investigation g family history g in scenes academic assessment academic standards business studies 242, composition dangers of professionalism freedom of expression 16,And interdisciplinarity 8, 23, 39, knowledge 2, 28, 37, 38, 183,And neural development 8-9, 26-27,And other art forms 19, 23-24, rhetoric 17-19, science 28, 242-243, the academy 16-17, 30, 85,And the community the publishing industry 55-59,And the self 1, 7, 46, 142-153, value 156, 197, a crossover discipline an academic discipline 1-33, 54,Challenges of 50, 64-87, -creation 85, ce learning 23 al programmes ve writing (cont. Developments for oots of self-development 3, the world 36-63, 188-191, le disciplinary origins principles of practice 88-93,Teaching 7-8, 41-44, 52, 216, vity 1-5, 9, al activity promoting development of creative a complement to creative a negative influence on s 21, 38,40, a group of writers 56-57,117, 121, 122-123, divine comedy 73, 85, vinci, leonardo 42, balzac, honore liarisation 9, maupassant, guy 128, sion 143, 146, 152, vinsauf, geoffrey 1,s, charles 50, 149, son, emily 30, d, annie 32, 69, line 69, 95-99, indiscipline tive forms of 96-97, s, keith 178, n to zem zem ss, frederick ng 57, 86, 91, 174-175, 199,Drama 16, 18, 109, 217, 221, 2, 45, 100-101, , t. Enemies of promise', concept of , reflective 38, 65, ation, raising the level of ence, writing from 40, 44-45, 47,Writing against your mental writing e 14, 134-135,ance of 68, 69, 134-135,Faulkner, william 45, wanger, lion n, practice of conflict 166, verisimilitude 155, 163, 'storymaking' ter driving story 166, ter development 168, ter history ng a fictional fiction and structures porary literary of view and cons of writing ch for 160, 167. Free verse' 81, 196,iting 105-106, , sigmund 54, , robert 15, 41, 72, 80, 200, 202,Fuentes, carlos 30, -playing 76, 80, 110, r, john 15, 20, 38, 41, 43, 90,Goethe, johann wolfgang inations, auditory 26, , thomas 102, rne, nathaniel , seamus 14, 41, 71, way, ernest 2, 3, 11, 66, 121,122-123, 133, 136, , miroslav 23, 49, y 69, 90, 120, 140, 144, 152, 186,Hopkins, gerard manley , ted 36, 41, 46, 69, 103, , richard 4, 194, 197, 234, triggering town 194, ation, writing from ation 8, 45, 91, 142, 160, 167,Imitation 32, 73, 91, tion see writing, erence 64, 65, 134, ability 50-51, 79, 90, nce, literary 32, 89, 91, 113, rity 101,248, ation 79, 90, 103, iewing 39, 185, writer's workshop 1 , henry 7, 159, gs, elizabeth , russell celyn , ben 16, 22, , structure of , james 60, 158, 166, , john vii, 21, 41, 51, 68, 76, 106,King, stephen 32, 69, 159, 164, , mary 28, 65, concept of kitsch 65, , kenneth 54, 199, 226, er, arthur 30, 44. Makar', concept of stam, nadezhda 26, stam, osip 26, 29, y to armenia stos, literary eld, katherine 93, place, the literary 30, 59, 82,Marquez, gabriel garcia atics 40, 52, the natural world 2, 52, g using concepts from 52, 75,Memorisation 27, 28, , writing for 42, 99, , marianne 5, 138, 206, , wolfgang amadeus 42, the salieri complex n, paul 41, 94, , les 41, 107, 108, 141, 163, v, vladimir 66, 177. Pagefright', concept of on, don 74, , international tionism 67, 69, ming writing audiences for live a conceptual art form an oral art form a public art form 227— a visual art form literature promotion 216, orative performance a mushairas 216, 224. Placebo-writing' , writing using 14, 49-50, 52, 68,Poe, edgar allan 157, , writing 134, ng your own experience ses for formal design poets 125, 199, qualities of language 194, 199,And slams 18, 212, ble strategies for g the language for 198-200. Found poems' 140, pentameter sing several modes of ms in writing poems tion devices ing poems 199, ces and collections 207. Strangeness' of poetry ting form of poems les 195,ng the techniques of s, developing a , ezra 21, 38, 41, 60, 74, ion 136-141,-writing, concept of ett, v. 41,s, creative 22, 39, 55, 70, 91,'promise', concept of 64, hing 55-61, 83, the small presses 58, n, philip 11, 156, 171, n, vladimir u, raymond 75, 76, ses in style 27, 83, 120, 133, fashion 29-30, learning to write 31-33, 159,And taste 30-31, 33, a writer 39-40, instruction 187, 209, d, john 80, creative nonfiction fiction 125, 160, writing 25, 44, ng see ing 133-134, 135, 199, 72, 80, 194-197, a mnemonic device 80, , rainer maria 152, -taking 43, 68, 113, e, theodore g, j. 156, literary fund ssness91,97, sky, viktor of wildness, the 20-21, e 40, 140, 151, r 25, 54, 182, the language of 54, -belief 15, - consciousness 13, 79, entality 65-66, 164,peare, william 20, 109, 138,And the writing of frankenstein y, percy bysshe 9, 41, 90, 119. Showing not telling' 166, , sir philip 4 e, and writing 72, , christopher , william jay , qualities of human 27, 101,Steinbeck, john 129, elling 31, 80, a variety 77, tivity 40, 46, a relative value in writing 155,Syllabics 138, 195, rska, wislawa 8, 11, 12, 24, 36-63, g, hazards of a performance art distance learning 23 'o, ngugi wa 41, , dylan 79, u, henry david 31, 66, 178, , or life in the woods t-experiments 77, 119, 147, 'otherness' 72, 74, the practice of variation a cure for writer's block 72, a form of stealing 72-73, 46, 90, 137, 144, 169, 202, cultures, the 241. A room of one's own' 64, 65, 86,'word-blindness', concept of , meaning and history of orth, dorothy orth, william , physical 43, ter of 5, 11,31, 69, 91, 97, 126,Writing across the curriculum' 's block 72, 102, people and the yourself chance 26, 52, 77, 111, childhood 15, 54, 80, 81, 105,And choosing a genre confidence 141-143, confusion 95, design 78-81, friendship 56, identity 114, impersonality 136, 146, intuition 126, 160, playfulness 14, 77, pleasure 4, 49, 54-55, possibility 78, 111, 128, 142,And silence 72, 74, surprise 79, 92, 110, 127, 164,As a form of teaching 42-43, ng 66, 108, ing a piece of ve nonfiction 177—ifying the processes of 5, onic forms of g a rhythm for 4-5, 70, 96, ing 131-132, yourself 15, 25, 39, 90, 160, 192,Improving skill at 52, 57, 68, different states of mind performance 215— the community your 'zone' 104-105, 126, tion before 127-128, ations of choice during 75,Planning as part of the process ation for and prompts for 103-104, s and motivations for 3—4,14-15,25,38,95,s for not writing 32, s for creating the ions for g away your writing heteronyms to assist g games xiv, 68, 163, ales for xiv, 163, 242. Writing what you know' 34, 45-47, 91,Writing workshops 56-57, 115-123,And the danger of homogeneity dynamics in 117, ising writing in 119, 129, 130. Responsive' 118, g up an online , william butler r, william 179, about sales, receive special offers & can unsubscribe at any by title, author, isbn, heart of giving llerschristian livingspanish productsmp3svbssunday schoolchurch suppliesbible coversfamilygift  cambridge introduction to creative writing. Cambridge introduction to creative writing by: david dge university press / 2007 / paperback write a stockstock no: ve writing× (187).

Inches)isbn: 0521547547isbn-13: customers also cambridge companion to shakespeare and popular shaughnessy robert shaughnessy cambridge university press / 2007 / trade for christian higher d t. M the author/artist and i want to review the cambridge introduction to creative would you like to know about this product?

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