Writing Fiction

Creative and Critical Approaches

Amanda Boulter

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781350309265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Exploring writing as a practice, Boulter draws from the work of writers and theorists to show how cultural and literary debates can help writers enhance their own fiction. Negotiating the creative-critical crossover, this is an approachable book that helps students develop practical writing skills and a critical awareness of creative possibilities.

Part I

Foundations

1 Establishing Practice

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.

Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Longman’s Magazine

Turn yourself into a stranger in your own streets.

Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer (Palgrave Macmillan)

When we write fiction, the ideas, actions and characters don’t just spring from our minds fully formed. Writing fiction is a process that takes time, perhaps even years. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, inspiration conforms to cliché and strikes us like a thunderbolt (this, of course, being a cliché writers do welcome), but normally inspiration glimmers and flashes in more haphazard ways. Fiction begins, as both Dorothea Brande and Henry James have suggested, in our creative and critical responses to the world around us. Being a ‘stranger’ on our streets means that we try to rub away the grime of habit and see the physical, social and emotional realities of place in new ways. Being someone ‘on whom nothing is lost’ means that we absorb the nuances of character and conversation, whether that be on the bus or in Henry James’ own fiction. The imaginary world grows slowly in our mind’s eye as we explore the people, setting, and possible events of our story. We muse, we read, we research and we plan, building upon the fragments in our head until we begin to shape those glimmers and flashes into fiction.

All this and we might not yet have put pen to paper. But we are writing. Because writing is not simply an action, it’s a practice. And the practice of fiction writing does not only involve typing on a keyboard or scribbling with a biro, it involves the creation of an imaginary world. We begin to write our fiction long before we set down the first draft, and even when the draft is finished, the practice of writing continues as we review and revise. In this way we might see writing as having three faces: three faces that Frank Smith, following D. Gordan Rohman, has labelled Prewriting, Writing, and Rewriting.¹

Prewriting, Writing, Rewriting

Put simply, Prewriting is the time of incubation, when ideas are frothing in the deep recesses of our minds. This stage can involve charts, plans, copious notes or simply endless musings in the bath. It is the ‘muttering before the uttering’,² what I like to think of as ‘deep drifting’ when, lost in the depths of imagination, we allow our minds to drift over ideas and experiences. The Writing stage produces the first draft, and the Rewriting stage transforms it in a process of literary ‘shape shifting’. Scenes and sentences are cut, changed and re-created until the true shape of the story begins to emerge.

This three-faced model of writing is useful because it provides a way for us to talk about writing as a practice, and acknowledges that we are not writers only when we sit down at our desks. But it also has its problems: not least in the implication that by dividing writing into prewriting, writing and rewriting, we set up three separate and discrete stages to be worked through one after another. Smith himself recognises the difficulty and acknowledges that rather than being separate, ‘prewriting, writing, and rewriting frequently seem to be going on simultaneously.’³

This is certainly my experience of writing. The three faces of writing might offer different perspectives upon the process, but as a writer I can inhabit each face as I please, slipping from prewriting to writing to prewriting to rewriting in a continuous loop. For as Smith points out: ‘ “rewriting” of the draft just completed becomes “prewriting” of the draft to come.’⁴ However, in this chapter I want to hold prewriting apart from the others stages so that I can think about how it works to establish the practice of fiction writing. Prewriting can continue throughout writing and rewriting, but here I’m thinking about it primarily as the time before the actual drafting begins, a time of freedom and possibility when we can engage in that familiar feeling of distracted potential that I call ‘deep drifting’. There are many activities that we might think of as constituting this prewriting phase, but I want to focus on just four of them: musing, reading, researching and planning.

Musing

I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart

W. B. Yeats, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (Palgrave Macmillan)

The organized and intelligent dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind begins as a largely mysterious dream in the writer’s mind.

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (Vintage)

Fiction begins with a spark in the writer’s mind, a vivid fragment of an idea, a character or an event that will eventually flare into a story. This is what John Gardner calls the ‘mysterious dream’ at the root of all fiction, a dream that needs to be shaped and focused by the writing process. But in this early stage, all we have is the patchy sense of possibility. The musing phase of prewriting is a time of distraction, when as writers we find ourselves absorbed into the imagined spaces of the story world. It’s a time when we must listen to ourselves to ‘hear and reflect upon the ideas that come to us’.⁵ In previous centuries these ideas might have been seen as coming from the Muses, the Greek deities who presided over the arts and sciences and inspired mortal men. For thousands of years the Muses were invoked as a way of suggesting that the writer’s work was the result of divine inspiration, beyond his own self (it was normally men writing), and this has reinforced the sense that creativity has nothing to do with the critical mind of the writer.

In the twenty-first century, we use more scientific language to sustain the same separation between creative and critical, revering the mysteries of the unconscious just as the poets once revered their Muse. But I want to argue that the invocation of the Muses has always contained an invocation of a critically creative inspiration, a plea for, in contemporary terms, the conscious and unconscious mind to work together.

The Muses

Originally only three Muses were worshipped. They were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (whose name means memory) and were called Melete (meditation), Mneme (memory), and Aoede (song). When the poets invoked their help, they were invoking ‘memory’, asking for reminders – these were after all the days of oral tales, when poets needed to remember hundreds of lines from their own or others’ work. The Muses helped poets to remember their songs, to re-create them. So, it is not the English word ‘muse’ that we get from the Greek Muses (that comes from a different source), but the word ‘mind’, which used to mean memory, a meaning we can still hear in ‘remind’ and ‘reminder’. In other words, the Muses weren’t invoked to bring inspiration from the outside. They were invoked to stimulate the critical-creative work of oral composition, remembering and embellishing the traditional lines and phrases of the great tales. In the twenty-first century, we can call on the same muses to enhance our prewriting, asking for ‘meditation’ (to listen to ourselves and reflect on our ideas), ‘memory’ (to recall experiences, emotions, and expressions) and ‘song’ (to develop the art and craft of storytelling).

Meditation, memory and song fuse the creative and critical elements of writing, and take us from the conscious to the unconscious mind. We might begin by musing, or meditating, on a particular idea, and find that we are no longer directing our thoughts and emotions; our thoughts and emotions are revealing new directions to us. The muses do not separate the critical from the creative. Instead they show how each aspect of storytelling involves both critical and creative activity.

The rag-and-bone shop of the heart

To think about how this process of meditation and memory might work, we can turn to Yeats’ image of the ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’. For Yeats, all writing begins in the filthy detritus of living, in the emotions and feelings that have been discarded and repressed. But it is the mind, not the heart, that produces ‘masterful images’. Yeats uses the simple image of a ladder, a ladder of imagination, to connect the ‘foul heart’ of experience to the ‘pure mind’ of art. This ladder, which I see as the link between the unconscious and the conscious, between the creative and critical imagination, is what we must build, rung by rung, with memory, meditation and craft as our tools.

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.⁶

It takes time to make new things out of old rags, and the sense of slow transformation in Yeats’ poem, as sordid experience is transformed into high art, is also found in other metaphors of the creative process, such as Natalie Goldberg’s concept of ‘composting’. In Writing Down the Bones she argues that experience must be sifted through the body and mind:

[F]rom the decomposition of the thrown-out egg shells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once.⁷

For Goldberg, we can enrich this compost by writing every day without fear or judgement. The act of writing itself is enough, no matter what we produce. And many people recommend this as an exercise for writers, ensuring that we spend some time each day writing anything that comes into our minds. This is a very useful exercise, but if I’m honest, it’s not one that I’ve ever managed to do for more than a few days. Instead, I prefer to see my prewriting as ‘disposable writing’, to use Frank Smith’s term, a kind of back-ofthe-envelope thinking that clarifies my musings. Once I’ve grasped the idea or character that is born out of this writing, then my actual scribblings can be thrown away, because the work is still taking place in my head, in the ‘mysterious dream’, rather than on paper.

The blooming buzzing confusion of life

Disposable writing can involve writing letters to yourself from your characters (as a way of getting to know them), or charting the fragments of story so far, or following idea bubbles to see where they take you. It’s writing that is loosely focused on the fiction you want to create, but writing that allows long notes to yourself about how you are feeling or why a certain character or idea will never work. It begins to focus the mess and mulch incubating within our unconscious and responds not only to what we see and hear, but what we have read, what we have learned, and what we have experienced in our life. It is a way of drawing from what William James called the ‘great blooming, buzzing confusion’ of life and bringing it into our fiction.⁸

To do this, writers need to muse not only upon the work they’re doing, but upon the world they’re living in. Walt Whitman called this loafing: ‘Have been loafing here deep among the trees, shafts of tall pines, oak, hickory, with a thick undergrowth of laurels and grapevines … no two places, hardly any two hours, anywhere, exactly alike. How different the odor of noon from midnight, or winter from summer, or a windy spell from a still one.’⁹ This is more than just observing the world around you, which every writer must do, it’s being part of that world, experiencing it as a writer, experiencing it with the sensitivity of a poet.

There are other ways in which this idling time of prewriting have been described. The French poet Baudelaire saw the writer as a flâneur who wandered through the city, part of the crowd and yet distant from it, able to give it a new voice. This kind of prewriting, which we might call, after Clifford Geertz, ‘deep hanging out’, is a way for the writer to absorb the places and people of a story, to really see the world around them.¹⁰ For, as John Gardner says: ‘Getting down what the writer really cares about – setting down what the writer himself notices, as opposed to what any fool might notice – is all that is meant by the originality of the writer’s eye.’¹¹ What any fool might notice is what our eye is first drawn to, those features or incidents, gestures or expressions that we see every night on TV as a shorthand to emotion (ones I’ve used myself but now know better!): the shuffling with cigarettes, the hands twisting through hair to show anxiety, the feet on the desk to show cockiness.

When we are loafing like Whitman, we train ourselves to look beyond the obvious and smell the difference between midnight and noon. We train ourselves to climb down to the foul rag-and-bone shop of our hearts and recast old iron into new art. Dorothea Brande puts it most simply: ‘It is well to understand as early as possible in one’s writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us.’¹²

This is the power of literature, to break the moulds of habit and recapture the freshness of perception. Victor Shklovsky, who was writing in 1917, and was one of the first literary ‘theorists’ of the last century, argued that this was the dominant purpose of literature: to break through conventional ways of seeing the world. He wrote: ‘Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.’¹³

Musing allows us to feel the stoniness of the stone and to dwell upon its significance, ‘to guess the unseen from the seen’, as Henry James said, and ‘to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern’.¹⁴ Musing also allows us to dwell upon the words we would use to convey our perceptions, to try them on the tongue. But musing alone will not teach us technique. For that we need to read.

Reading

The books you read are like the clothes in your wardrobe, they define your identity.

Overheard remark at a writers’ conference

The more aware we are – as readers, critics, or artists – of the fullness and breadth of the narrative tradition, the freer and sounder will be the critical or artistic choices we make.

Rob...