A Companion to Creative Writing

Graeme Harper, Graeme Harper

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118325773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Méthodes pédagogiques pour la lecture

A COMPANION TO CREATIVE WRITING

A Companion to Creative Writing is a comprehensive collection covering myriad aspects of the practice and profession of creative writing in the contemporary world. The book features contributions from an international cast of creative writers, publishers and editors, critics, translators, literary prize judges, and many other top professionals. Chapters not only consider the practice of creative writing in terms of how it is "done, " but also in terms of what occurs in and around creative writing practice. Chapters address a wide range of topics including the writing of poetry and fiction; playwriting and screenwriting; writing for digital media; editing; creative writing and its engagement with language, spirituality, politics, education, and heritage. Other chapters explore the role of literary critics and ideas around authorship, as well as translation and creative writing, the teaching of creative writing, and the histories and character of the marketplace, prizes, awards, and literary events. With its unprecedented breadth of coverage, A Companion to Creative Writing is an indispensable resource for those who are undertaking creative writing, studying creative writing at any level, or considering studying creative writing.

Part I
Creative Writing

1

The Architecture of Story

Lorraine M. López

Many writers compare stories to dreams, and though this analogy is especially apt, it is nevertheless certainly worth revisiting. Like dreams, stories enable people to synthesize lived experiences, longings, and emotions, distilling the intensity of these through symbolic representation. Also, stories that are well told work the magic of dream by immersing readers in the fiction so effectively that this imagined space, its objects, and inhabitants feel convincing and true to life. But unlike dreams, which happen in spontaneous ways, fictional narratives are deliberately fashioned. With inspiration from Alice Munro’s short story “Post and Beam,” wherein a historic house provides the central metaphor for a character who discovers her life has been erected upon a faulty foundation of compromise and sublimation of self, perhaps composing story is more like constructing a dwelling than experiencing a dream. In fact, creating a narrative shares much in common with building a home with many rooms, closets and cupboards to intrigue and astonish both inhabitants and guests.

Stories, while inspired by dreams, are the products of an intentional process of many steps – from blueprinting to final touch-up – and like houses, well-constructed stories invite readers to live and breathe within their walls, traveling from room to room, or scene to scene, as they inhabit and experience, along with the characters, their distinctive architecture. Similar to a designed structure, story imposes a certain vision and order on what is initially imagined. In so doing, fictional narratives suggest that particular patterns define what we experience, know, and dream about, and that we can interpret these patterns meaningfully. Early storytelling, such as mythology, folktales or biblical stories, often functioned as proto-science to explain natural phenomena – such as the genesis of life or arrangement of stars in the sky – imaginatively and memorably. Storytelling also worked as a nascent philosophical framework, wherein cultures could speculate about the meaning of existence as well as work through ethical dilemmas by deploying imaginary characters and situations to enact and resolve these. Additionally, cultural values and historic occurrences have been preserved through narratives. Furthermore, stories offer hope by insisting that human beings possess sufficient agency to interact significantly with destiny – whether by altering its course or by comprehending it in illuminating and life-changing ways. Beyond this, storytelling provides entertainment, offering some shelter against the hardship and monotony entailed in daily living both in the past and now.

The need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our collective psyche and enmeshed with linguistic systems that generate and acquire language. Just as we process the world by telling stories, we produce knowledge through engagement with imagined lives. Furthermore, stories inscribe their tellers into larger cultural and historic narratives, an assertive act that often gives voice and agency to the marginalized and vulnerable. Writers sometimes construct stories in order to synthesize and comprehend personal experiences, fantasies, and emotions in an indirect and symbolic way. Fictional stories simultaneously provide both a protected space and a window view for writers and readers to examine what is challenging – even threatening – to contemplate, let alone process through firsthand experience. Whatever the specific impetus for fictional narratives, the drive to create stories is universal, while the methods of storytelling, just like the styles of building homes, have changed with the passage of time and vary from culture to culture. For instance, early fictional narratives in the English language tended toward great sweeping epics rendered from an omniscient perspective, whereas contemporary fiction focuses more on personal drama, often filtered through a limited and controlled point of view. Despite such changes, the traits that identify story have remained more or less recognizable over time.

To Build a Story

In fictional stories, a character or protagonist is beset by a particular problem that occurs because of some interference in attaining a particular objective. The narrative then traces an uphill trajectory as the character pursues satisfaction of this goal, despite various obstacles. The incline traversed crests at a moment of self-defining choice. Generally speaking, this is the site where the protagonist must decide whether to fulfill or sacrifice the driving desire, but it can also be the juncture at which the character discovers an underlying truth about the self and the object of longing. The resultant crisis moment forces choice that is followed by either change or recognition. Whatever the main character decides results in profound and fundamental transformation, usually signified by an action or a resonant image that clearly demonstrates to the reader how things will be profoundly altered for – or at least perceived differently by – the character in the aftermath of such crisis.

Exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, and resolution are terms familiar to most students of fiction writing as they describe the progression summarized in the previous paragraph. A nineteenth-century German novelist, Gustav Freytag, famously charted this trajectory, forming a triangular shape. Exposition and inciting incident introduce the character and situation, the longing, as well as the impediment complicating satisfaction of such yearning. Rising action inscribes that upward movement made by the protagonist toward his or her goal. Climax, marking the apex point, is the crisis moment, wherein the self-defining choice occurs. Falling action and resolution, or denouement, reveal the change or illumination that results from the decision made at the climax. While story form entertains seemingly endless variations, it is recognizable for these features to readers across a broad spectrum. Even children can perceive when storytelling falls short of form, and many will complain about narratives in which “nothing happens.”

But what we know as readers, we sometimes forget as writers. Emerging writers tend to rely on autobiographical material to compose their first narratives, and often they have insufficient distance from their experiences to shape this material meaningfully, or else they are unwilling or incapable of adapting the facts of what happened to allow for what could have occurred. Such narratives can have the same effect on a reader that a windbag conversationalist has on even the most avid listener. And then this happened and this happened and this happened, the windbag drones on, while the expectant look quickly withers on the listener’s face. Sophisticated storytellers know that personal experiences, if used at all, must be significantly mediated for successful retelling as story. They understand that lived experiences are not usually structured as narratives and that restricting stories to the facts of what transpired curtails imaginative possibilities. Successful stories are usually produced from three sources: memory, imagination, and inspiration from other works of literature. With these raw materials, writers structure stories so that they provide the trajectory – in one way or another – that defines them as fictional narratives.

Drafting the Blueprint: Prewriting

Once a person develops the desire to write stories, he or she must embark on a rather long and repetitive process that begins with the flash of a sustainable idea. People frequently have ideas for creating narratives, and these occur anywhere and at any time. Imagine sitting in a rural clinic’s anteroom, waiting to see a doctor, and glancing about at the various occupants of this room: a rude child, his oblivious mother, an elderly man feigning sleep, a middle-aged woman of working-class background, a silent and brooding farmer, and that farmer’s judgmental and superior wife who – affronted by the incivility of the others – stands while her injured husband claims the last available seat. Soon enough, and if one observes closely, a discernible dynamic among such characters emerges, and with these ingredients, a spark for story can be ignited. This may well have been the case for Flannery O’Connor, as suggested by the opening of her well-known and often anthologized short story titled “Revelation.” O’Connor, who lived in the rural South and suffered from lupus, no doubt spent considerable time in waiting rooms similar to the one she describes in “Revelation,” and there she may have gazed upon people who inspired the characters she created for this story. Such inspiration likely provoked the curiosity that O’Connor managed to sustain throughout the long process of drafting her story.

Students of writing sometimes complain of having too many ideas and not knowing which to pursue. Sustainability is an effective litmus test for ideation in fiction writing, and ideas will often self-select by persisting in the writer’s thoughts and refusing to go away. But writers can wear out their curiosity for even the most worthy and time-resistant of ideas. They diminish the psychic energy for pursuing flashes of inspiration by discussing these too often with others, verbally telling and retelling the story they ought to be committing to paper. Writing instructors become wary of students who invest too much time and energy at this stage of prewriting, and many experienced writers will abstain from discussing stories they intend to write in order to preserve the drive to explore their inspiration.

Another problem related to expending too much time and energy in the inception and planning stage of developing a story results from overthinking the idea, so the story is fully mapped in the writer’s mind before the first paragraph is drafted. This can result in a predictable and unsurprising story, rather than the journey of discovery that it should be for both writer and reader. Unfortunately, professional writers – especially when applying for grants or residencies – are often required not only to explain the writing projects they intend to develop, but also often to explicate themes that will emerge in such work. For most fiction writers, this kind of directive is akin to demanding a person provide interpretation for a dream that he or she has not yet had, or – in keeping with the building analogy – insisting on a structural inspection before the blueprints have been drawn.

Thematic considerations, by and large, are not the storyteller’s concern when conceiving of and even when composing the work. Just as interpretation cannot occur before a dream has been experienced, theme should not emerge until after the story has been fully drafted. Nevertheless, many inexperienced fiction writers begin with thematic abstractions, rather than character or image, and this inverted process often dooms the narrative to work as a soapbox or pulpit from which the writer can espouse various beliefs and theories. As one might expect, the end result is usually about as exciting as a sermon or a speech. Stories are an art form, and art that serves a particular ideology or agenda risks becoming propaganda. Even so, emerging writers are often filled to bursting with many deeply felt principles. Such writers long to convince others of their beliefs, but for various reasons, ranging from the unpopularity of the form to the effort entailed in properly researching and presenting rhetorical argument, they eschew drafting philosophic essays. Mistakenly, they may believe writing creatively, and packaging abstract theories about life as fiction, is an easier way to persuade readers of their viewpoints.

Though the phrase “creative writing” may suggest that anything goes, drafting fictional narratives, like erecting any structure, involves protracted and deliberate effort. Many formal constraints – such as the aforementioned shaping of story – must be negotiated in producing a recognizable work of fiction. However, freedom to explore and experiment occurs for most writers at the outset of drafting a story. In prewriting, the writer ought to feel uninhibited and unconstrained by convention. Free writing – committing a random jumble or free association of words to paper – is sometimes a useful strategy for getting started on a fictional narrative. Some writers doodle, diagram, or list random-seeming items. Others may prefer prewriting strategies that appear more organized and intentional, such as outlining, plotting scenes, or making checklists of events they plan to include in their narratives. Again, with more involved planning strategies, writers should avoid investing so much creative energy in the blueprinting phase that they have little in reserve for completing the project.

One strategy that can be especially helpful is a mnemonic map, or a progression of concrete objects to guide the writer through the story, much in the way remembered images allow the dreamer to reconstruct a dream. Though it may appear that generating items for such a map is a somewhat random activity, usually the objects that surface in conscious thought are the striking images that writers remember experiencing or imagining. Like elements of dream, these “things” tend to embed themselves in the writer’s memory because they have symbolic value. Often writers are unaware of what these objects mean, and this is optimal since understanding a symbol too well and deploying it too deliberately compromises its efficacy. When rendered in fiction, such items enable the writer to penetrate the depths of the affective filter – bypassing the psychological constraints that prevent writers from tapping into the well of imagination – and to dive deeply into the unconscious, developing story in intuitive and imagistic ways, thereby achieving outcomes that often surprise and delight.

Such objects can also anchor the narrative to the physical world in a recognizable and convincing way. During the course of a day or week or even a month, we collect a vast array of images and most of these are forgotten over time or pushed from the forefront of consciousness by new impressions. Only a few especially tenacious mind pictures remain to provoke the imagination and cause enduring wonderment. William Faulkner claimed the sight of a child wearing muddy drawers while climbing out of a window tr...