Critical Approaches to Creative Writing

Graeme Harper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317395003
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What is creative writing? In Critical Approaches to Creative Writing, Graeme Harper draws on both creative and critical knowledge to look at what creative writing is, and how it can be better understood. Harper explores how to critically consider creative writing in progress, while also tutoring the reader on how to improve their own final results. Throughout the book, Harper explains the nature of 'creative exposition', where creative writing is closely and directly examined in practice as well as through its final results. This book aims to empower you to develop your own critical approaches so that you can consider any creative writing situations you face, develop creative exposition that can be applied to writing problems, provide you with more creative choices and assist you in building your creative writing strengths.

Writing with imagination

One

As a creative writer, you are logically committed to two fundamentals – writing (that is, specifically here, ‘words inscribed’) and to the active use of your imagination. Your commitment to these fundamentals is the primary context of your creative writing. In that respect, it is around these fundamentals that all else is built and to which all else relates.

You could, of course, write but not do so with a heightened imaginative approach – that is, choose to write other forms, and to ultimately produce other kinds of results that would not be considered works of creative writing. You could, of course, apply your imagination in other ways, to other activities, to other things, using a platform other than writing (in the arts, or sciences or social sciences). Creativity, taking that word to mean specifically here acts of creating, actions of “bringing into being” and also to refer to its more general meaning of being creative (imaginative, inventive, original, innovative, new) is a common human attribute. We invent (tools, for example, the invention of which has long contributed to humankind’s success) and we seek to be original (to highlight our personal identities, perhaps sometimes to improve our chances of career success, perhaps to contribute to the world in an identifiable way) and we often enjoy the new (perhaps because it embodies renewal of our lives or engages our intellectual curiosity or adds to our wealth of experiences). Our worlds are composed of what we sense around us in the immediate environment, at the immediate time, and what we have in memory, not necessarily in a linear way but in a condition of re-composition as much as recalling. Memory, like the imagination, informs our impression of the world around us and of worlds composed of a combination of sensory information and our remembered thoughts, feelings and experiences. That is, worlds that might be like that around us, but that might also be worlds of the mind, drawing from observations or responses past and present, and in some cases re-working these, or combining them or having them transmute in some way. We are therefore moving between different cognitive activities, in which the imagination, the intellect, our senses, memories, feelings, all play a role. Other creatures might indeed be similar, but what we refer to as creativity, as being creative, is in the most part referring to a higher order human achievement, drawn from the idea of ‘creating’ having an association with the divine, the transcendent and representing a high level of cognitive function too.

If seeing creativity this way recalls that it is an ability of a higher order, this notion also interestingly relates directly to writing, in that writing too is a higher order activity. The ability, that is, to turn a thought or feeling into a communication that can be recorded and shared with others, and in being recorded can gain some longevity if not necessarily permanence. Writing, as a method of doing that, and a method that has involved the creation of tools of various levels of sophistication that assist us to do that, draws on a vocabulary that represents the nuances and understandings and cultural conditions of our languages, and turns a system of inscribed symbols into a method of exchange within our species. Writing as a method that frequently transcends space (that is location, distance), transcends time (that is, in being an enduring method of exchange as well as a relatively immediate one). Writing as a method that has evolved, through processes of translation and transmission, and through the considerable value we have placed in the practice and its outcomes, into a global mode of communication, as well as becoming an art form (that art form we know most frequently, of course, as ‘creative writing’).

The two fundamentals in creative writing – writing and the imagination – brought together by your decision to be a creative writer, are therefore, certainly significant in themselves. They have value because we have valued them personally and culturally for their contributions to human life and human engagement with what is observable to us, and what is perceivable by us, and we have done so over a considerable amount of time. But they also have identifiable value in their distinctiveness and in the ways in which they are associated with our human distinctiveness – in other words, in the way we use and view them they are what we might call ‘species specific’, they are distinct to humankind. And yet as significant in themselves though they are, these two fundamentals of writing and imagination are even more significant when combined, when we consider their combined actions and interactions, and the reasons behind your choice to combine them, how you go about combining them and the potential results that then ensue from your choices and your actions when combining them.

To critically consider the context of these two fundamentals of your creative writing we can think about what they actually involve. Forms of writing and forms of the imagination can be starting points to explore the functions of these fundamentals, to put these functions in individual and holistic contexts, relating them to your individual practice as well as to how forms of writing and forms of the imagination are generally considered in the world. We can likewise consider if both writing and the imagination have systems and structures, or perhaps if writing does but the imagination does not. Or if the imagination has a system but has limited or no structure. Or if in fact writing and the imagination share a few or many functional, structural and systemic characteristics. We can look closely at how both of the fundamentals are represented and whether those representations impact in any significant way on how we utilize these fundamentals. We can consider if (and if so, how?) writing has evolved over time. And we can consider whether the human imagination has evolved over time too. Whether such change has been systemic, and perhaps evolutionary, or whether in the case of the imagination (say) how the human imagination operates is much the same as how it has always operated, with events in its history only providing focal disruptive points in an otherwise perpetual, unbroken story. Whereas with writing (say) change has indeed been evolutionary and constant as human languages have evolved and how we use language, based on societal evolution, has impacted on such things as diction and style of address and viewpoint, punctuation and grammar.

Writing

Inscription is clearly fundamental to creative writing in that it refers directly to the act of preserving an utterance by engraving, imprinting or indeed by writing (the Latin origins of the word ‘inscribing’ specifically refer to writing). How we define writing today has been impacted upon by the technological changes in the writing tools at our disposal, changes that we have brought about over thousands of years. If we talk of writing in the contemporary world, we need to incorporate figurative uses of the term ‘writing’, words typed into a computer, words appearing on a smartphone screen, writing ‘inscribed’ in pixels. Imprinting today therefore can be more a case of ‘making appear’ than it is a case of ‘etching’. For some time, such virtual versions of writing have also included the recorded voice. The use of other parties to do the physical labor – amanuenses – has been practiced too, and for a great deal longer than we have recorded voices. Although the act of writing is physical, it is therefore not necessarily you, the writer, who has to do that primary physical work. Not only what appears but who makes it appear is part of the constant of creative writing. Practical implications emerge from what and who is doing the writing. That is, many creative writers prefer to write (make their inscriptions) with specific writing tools. Some enjoy the physicality of certain methods of composition – the tactile responsiveness of touching a writing instrument or the sense of order or organization created by a responsive computer program, or the aural stimulation of hearing recorded words out loud. Some creative writers utilize the critical eyes of others, of casual readers, or editors, to make the labor more interactive. How these creative writers transfer draft documents, receive responses, transmute those responses into their further drafting, into revising and into editing, all have a physical presence and pattern, and an impact on the writer – perhaps bringing about a sense of achievement, perhaps releasing something from sight in order to return to it anew, perhaps providing a satisfying emulation of the act of exchange between you as a creative writer and your largely anonymous future readers. Some creative writers find the movement between ways of inscribing useful in critically assessing their progress on a work (for example, a creative writer who prefers to sketch notes by hand but to type a draft into a computer; or the creative writer who writes directly into a computer but prints out work in order to edit it). All this involves individual decisions about modes of writing and your preferences relating largely to the physicality of writing.

Leaving such individual decisions to chance, and our responses to the physical appearances of writing to our entirely personal assessment, is not generally the case. For much of the world, learning about writing, and about how to do it, has been part of the core educational experiences passed on from one generation to another. Literacy, as it relates to understanding writing and to reading inscribed words, and to being able to write in ways that are understandable and therefore exchangeable with others, has for some time been considered an important personal, communal and societal skill indicative of advanced cultures. Whether this perception of the ability to inscribe being a sign of advancement is entirely true or not does not make it any less the wide perception. Therefore, when we are talking about inscription we are talking about a commonplace and observable feature of human life, occurring and often respected in much of the world, and having been this way for many generations.

Writing can refer either to an object or to an action (that is, the actions of inscribing). ‘Creative writing’ is similarly a term used to refer to the objects of the creative writer’s practice (that is the poem, the short story, and so on) or to the actions of writing creatively. Thus, someone can be said to be ‘doing’ creative writing, ‘producing’ or ‘undertaking’ some creative writing as well as to having produced, done, undertaken or, most commonly, written those material objects identifiable as the poem, short story, the novel and so on. This dual identity is a feature of writing, given the concept can always refer to either or both an action and a material object. Critically considering this assists in us recalling that writing’s key feature is its ability to record with a degree of durability the things we discover, think, observe, feel and speculate upon in what would be an otherwise ephemeral way. It is not that we have thought or felt or observed them as such. In fact, we have a great many other ways of expressing ourselves, not least in the wider communication of our social groups and in the ways we create modes of exchange based on knowledge, and the sharing of knowledge about the world, about humankind, about our personal and communal experiences. It is the ability of writing to offer a recognized and often revered record of these things that makes it so significant.

To critically consider creative writing from the point of view of that fundamental of writing, we can examine the features of writing and how these relate to the practices and outcomes of creative writing. Writing, then, includes:

• The symbolic – inscribed words are of course not the objects or actions themselves but rather they are representations of them. This means that while words have meaning, their meaning or meanings are also dependent on symbolic reference, the effect seen when combining these symbols, and the wider context of the reference. For example, the expression ‘a big cat’, combines two relatively simple words, but in one context could refer to a jungle animal and in another to a large domestic feline! The word ‘big’ is comparative, so it suggests some kind of comparison, made directly or one automatically made by the reader of this word, and the word ‘cat’ is related to a species of animal but not all of them look the same so even just the visual representation is therefore dependent on context and also on our experience of cats. What these words represent carries with it symbolic choices, relating to a creative writer’s desire to create an impression, depict the voice of a piece of writing, support a prevailing viewpoint (from the point of view of a mouse all cats are ‘big’!), and conform to or challenge or advance an impression, a reach out to a reader or audience that is as much visceral as it is intellectual. Because creative writing is by definition a form of communication and art that is inventive, original and new, the symbolic dimension of writing is in this way intensified. It would be fair to say, based not least on the fact we use education to enhance this, that readers and audiences are encouraged to respond to works of creative writing with this in mind, that it is to creative writing’s underlying suggestions, references, associations that we often turn. The symbolic nature of the constant of writing is therefore deeply embedded in how we practice creative writing, as well as in how we respond to works of creative writing.

• Longevity – with the durability of writing providing one of its most significant contributions to human life, longevity or the ability to sustain and exchange and contribute to intra-generation and inter-generational understanding is notable here. Writing in this way forms a bond, a narrative of human existence, over time. If this core characteristic of writing is that it has longevity or the ability to impact over time, then a core characteristic of creative writing is also that it is a creative art that has durability. Were we lyrically inclined, we could therefore say that creative writing is a practice of ‘etching in time’ our thoughts, feelings, observations and ideas, and exchanging these with other humans, some we can know and many through time that we can never know. While we might point to some of the visual arts, including public material arts, murals, installations, architecture, landscaping, even monuments as similarly based in durability, we can equally point to art forms (theatre, for example, music, some of the media arts, dance, material arts using perishable or unstable materials, ice, sand, living flowers and the like) where the predominant characteristic is momentary, immediate and much located in the live event itself. Some art forms sit measurably between these, as durable as their technologies or only as durable as the ability of our technologies to preserve them. With creative writing, alternatively, by and large (though not always) we can talk about the event of writing and the post-event of the texts that remain well after that event of writing, supported by technologies that have been relatively successful in preserving these texts for long periods. So the practice of creative writing has been common, over time, and the results of it (the objects, the works, the artifacts) persist, and they have persisted over time.

• What the longevity of writing also means, therefore, when it comes to writing generally and as it relates to creative writing, specifically, is that works of creative writing represent historical moments. Writing, put simply, is also a historical record, taking into account the tools available for writing, the uses and styles of language at that time, and the occupational and cultural context of the creative writer. Critically considering these things in relation to our own writing practices, we can use durability, and the inscribed evidence of it, to assist us as creative writers in determining the distinguishing features of our contemporary relationship with and use of writing.

• Being transportable – writing, in many of the material formats we have delivered it, is most often transportable. It is movable. We could even say that it is ‘nomadic’. That is, certainly creative writers themselves are able to (and have often) worked in different spaces and places. The art form is itself portable, and often has been easily so. The works produced are frequently designed to be carried with their consumers – certainly in the case of books, and in the case of other venues for creative writing (the theatre, the film set, the video game studio) it is accurately not the creative writing that is fixed but the production processes that incorporate it. Our inscribed communications, the art form we work in, is based on movement – even though we frequently find the critical inclination to talk more often of the public performative arts as those occupying discussions about movement and motion. And yet, think of words being written across the page, of the gathering momentum of lines and sentences, the decisions made in different cultures and the orientation of a written page, as words are inscribed left to right or up and down, the flicking of pages, the eye traveling across a paragraph, an entire page. The practice of creative writing, the inscribing of it, is motion; creative writing is movement.

When works of creative writing are complete, and at times even when they are not, they become items of exchange, sometimes via commercial means, sometimes between members of a community, friends and social groups of many types. This of course can happen in a physical sense, books bought and sold, books lent and borrowed (here occasionally fraught with stories of absentmindedness, avarice and shame), or via electronic means, works distributed by digital media technologies. It can happen by occasional fortuitous circumstance, or it can happen with an orchestrated regularity. The written becomes nomadic, in this way; and, when it is creative writing, already embodied with the movement between the creative and the critical, the imaginative and the inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Writing with imagination
• 2 Creative writing influences
• 3 Creative writing practices
• 4 Exploring creative writing evidence
• 5 Developing creative exposition
• Checklist
• Index