Creative Writing and Stylistics

Creative and Critical Approaches

Jeremy Scott

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137010667
• eBook ISBN: 9781350309159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this innovative fusion of practice and criticism, Jeremy Scott shows how insights from stylistics can enrich the craft of creative writing. Focusing on crucial methodological issues that confront the practicing writer,
Creative Writing and Stylistics:
- Introduces key topics from stylistics
- Provides in-depth analysis of a wide range of writing examples
- Includes practical exercises to help develop creative writing skills
Clear and accessible, this invaluable guide will give both students and writers a greater critical awareness of the creative possibilities of language.

1Seeing through Language

1.1Overview

It will useful to begin by stating the obvious. The literary text¹ is, inescapably, built from two essential materials: language, and the world that language creates in the mind of the reader. Of course, to encompass the creative process from both ‘ends’, we should say that the creative writer creates a world which he or she attempts to express through language; the reader reads that language, and creates (or envisions) a world in response. It bears clarifying that these two worlds are extremely unlikely to be the same; that is part of the beauty and mystery of the process. And, of course, the worlds created will vary from reader to reader, even though the language from which they are built is identical. This is why reading is a performance; no two readings are ever the same.² Reading is, inevitably, an act of rewriting. Communication is taking place (as stylistics terms it, a discourse world ensues³), involving the creative writer and the reader, who are (usually) unknown to one another, and not in direct face-to-face contact. The situation is portrayed (by Rimmon-Kenan 1986; see also Booth 1983) as follows:

Real author – implied author – narrator – (narratee) – implied reader – real reader

The real author (you, as you write creatively) writes text which the real reader reads (can also be you, as you re-read your own work or this book, or it can be the person who reads your work once it is finished⁴). The real reader sees you as the implied author. You see the real reader as the implied reader. In other words, both of the agencies that participate in this discourse world have an imagined, conventionalised idea of each other; the creative writer writes with an imagined reader in mind, a reader reads with an imagined creative writer in mind. The crucial point is that, right across this cline, there is interactivity between its various agencies, and the literary text cannot exist or function (despite the protestations of structuralism and what followed it) without all of these agencies being in play. There is little point (some, perhaps, but not very much) in writing a story that no one else will ever read. You can read your own work with (it is hoped) pleasure, but surely it is possible to argue that the true literary experience, the experience of what Keith Oatley (2003) has christened writingandreading in all its messy, vivacious glory, must involve both a writer and a reader.

‘Writingandreading’ is not an English word. It should be. We tend to think of its two parts as separate. Pure writing is possible. One may just write an email, careless of syntax and spelling, then press a key, and off it goes into the ether. Pure reading is also possible: one can absorb, if that is an apt metaphor, the information in a newspaper article with almost no thought except what the writer has supplied. More usually, we writeandread. As I write this chapter, I am also reading it, and I will read it again, and re-write and re-read. Even in my first draft I have made four or five changes to the previous sentence, though only two (so far) to this one.

(2003: 161)

So, writers are also readers. During creative practice, writers engage in the act of reading, prefiguring the subsequent reading practice of their eventual readers, and so on. And readers are also creative writers. The two activities are, to all intents and purposes, inseparable. A stylistics-based approach to creative practice must have an appreciation of this notion at the forefront throughout. The reasons for this are quite complex, but sit at the heart of this book in its attempt to make what for want of a better term we could call ‘stylistic self-awareness’ a central aspect of creative practice, part of the act of writing, and not just a ‘post-event’ editorial mechanism.

Now for a less obvious point. To return to the writer side of Rimmon-Kenan’s cline: it is not strictly (or not always) correct to say that the creative writer imagines a world and then expresses that world through language. Indeed, it is possible to argue, as Derrida (1976) has done, that the text refers to nothing at all outside of itself: that its ‘meaning’ resides at the centre of an unattached web of words with no external anchoring. Contrary to this, Abrams (1953) proposes that we can mediate both material and interior (mental) worlds through language, but that this is not the primary purpose of art. Rather, verbal art focusses and directs attention. Unlike Hamlet’s ‘mirror held up to nature’, it should not reflect; nor should it simply ‘imitate’, a function of verbal art that Plato disparages in The Republic. Rather, it should illuminate like a lantern. Joyce’s fictional alter-ego, Stephen Dedalus, pronounces as much in Stephen Hero (1991), appealing for a ‘transparency’ of mediation, and an end to the medium’s transfiguration of the message:

The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties; they transform and disfigure. The modern method examines its territory by the light of day.

(1991: 190)

It is easier, probably, for most writers to accept the assertions of Abrams and Joyce than those of Derrida. However, while it is self-evidently useful for the creative writer to reflect upon the representational aims of the text that she or he is writing and its essential interrelationship with the ‘real world’ (wholly fictitious, semi-autobiographical, science-fictional, fantastical, objective, subjective, self-aware), it is also an interesting thought experiment – if nothing else – to dwell for a moment on Derrida’s infamous pronouncement that ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’. The process of translating this phrase into English has (appropriately enough) proved to be a contentious one. ‘There is nothing outside the text’ is often used, but disputed (see, for example, Deutscher 2009). For our purposes here, it will be sufficient to render it as ‘There is no such a thing as out-of-the-text’, or, more arguably, ‘There is no such thing as context’. I introduce the concept to build on our previous discussion of the ways in which creative writing uses language to mediate between an imaginary world and a reader. Creative language use need not always spring from this process or from an imagined context; creativity can arise from within language itself. The two processes of imagining a world and mediating it through language are not necessarily antecedent one to the other. Often, it is in the very act of writing (and, as we have already hinted, reading), that is, through creative practice, that the imaginary world is created. The process of world creation can take place as part of creative practice, and need not be a priori or, indeed, a posteriori. It is through the (oftenplayful) use of language that verbal art emerges.

It is possible to learn a great deal about the relationship between language and creativeness by devising writing games in which language itself provides the creative stimulus which we might normally expect to come from an extra-linguistic source. … Some games reverse the ordinary supposition, that a context of reference is mapped onto language, and invite the player to infer, from the rudimentary linguistic map, a plausible terrain.

(Carter and Nash 1990: 176–7)

And if literature is a verbal art (which it is, inescapably) then, surely, the insights of disciplines which make language the object of their study (such as stylistics, drawing as it does on linguistics) will be invaluable in understanding how the process of literary creativity functions. Language is at the base of all that we do as creative writers, even to the extent that the worlds which we create can arise from within it rather than in some sense from beyond or above it. Creative writing ‘happens’ in the interplay between language and world, but also within language itself. From the one, we gain access to the other, and the two are interdependent – if not one and the same.⁵ To borrow again from Carter and Nash (1990), we see through language. Crucially, and obviously, this happens whether we are writers or readers. Those who are hoping to read through this book are presumably – inescapably? – both. We think in sentences. And the way we think is the way we see.

Of course, the process of seeing through language to the fictional world contained within can take place in many different ways, and exploring this assertion opens the door to a range of available techniques within fiction and poetry. It will be useful now to focus on some examples.

Here are three texts, through which the reader ‘sees’ in fundamentally different ways. In keeping with the ambitions of stylistics as discussed in the introduction to this book, I have provided no information about the author or the title or the genre (although this information appears in the notes and bibliography). For now, just read these texts and think about the various ways in which the language that they use and the worlds that they create in your imagination are related – inextricably, inexorably – to one another.

Text 1

No sweat, we’ll never win; other choirs sing about Love, all our songs are about cattle or death!

Fionnula (the Cooler) spoke that way, last words pitched a little bit lower with a sexyish sideways look at none of the others. The fifth-year choir all laughed.

Orla, still so thin she had her legs crossed to cover up her skinniness, keeked along the line and says, When they from the Fort, Hoors of the Sacred Heart, won the competition last year, they got kept down the whole night and put up in a big posh hotel and … everything, no that I want that! Sooner be snogged in the Mantrap.

Know what the Hoor’s school motto is? Fionnula spoke again, from the longest-legs-position on the wall. She spoke louder this time, in that blurred, smoked voice, It’s ‘Noses up … knickers DOWN’!

The Sopranos all chortled and hootsied; the Seconds and Thirds mostly smiled in per-usual admiration.⁶

Text 2

It was when she ate that Lin was most alien, and their shared meals were a challenge and an affirmation. As he watched her, Isaac felt the familiar trill of emotion: disgust immediately stamped out, pride at the stamping out, guilt desire.

Light glinted in Lin’s compound eyes. Her headlegs quivered. She picked up half a tomato and gripped it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands while her inner mouthparts picked at the food her outer jaw held steady.

Isaac watched the huge iridescent scarab that was his lover’s head devour her breakfast.⁷

Text 3

(listen)

this a dog barks and

how crazily houses

eyes people smiles

faces streets

steeples are eagerly

tumbl

ing through wonder

ful sunlight

– look –

selves,stir:writhe

o-p-e-n-i-n-g

are(leaves;flowers)dreams

,come quickly come

run run

with me now

jump shout(laugh

dance cry sing)for

it’s Spring

– irrevocably;

and in

earth sky trees

:every

where a miracle arrives

(yes)

you and I may not

hurry it with

a thousand poems

my darling

but nobody will stop it

With All The Policemen

In The World⁸

Text 4

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.⁹

These texts all illustrate, with various methods and through various genres, different ways in which we see through language into the imaginary world beyond – or, in the terms of the discussion earlier in this section, how creative writers create worlds from language itself. Before you read my own comments on the differences (and similarities) between them, take the time to note down your own thoughts on the matter.

•Who is ‘witnessing’ the imagined world in each case (i.e. from who’s perspective – if anyone’s – do we see the world)?

•Whose voice is telling the reader about the world? Does that voice have any idiosyncratic qualities?

•Some of the texts draw more attention to their use of language than others. Which ones, and why do they do it? What is the effect on the way you see the imaginary world depicted?

It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss each of the texts in detail. However, I will talk about them briefly to illustrate the kinds of observations you could have been making about the language of the texts, and about how this language influences your ‘ways of seeing’. Compare these notes to your own.

When reading text 1 (the opening of a novel), presumably you envisaged a relatively quotidian situation, something one might see every day: a group of schoolgirls (members of a school choir about to enter a competition) sitting on a wall, talking together. Note, however, that none of this information is ‘told’ to you directly. So how do you know it? There is no descr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Style, Composition, Creative Practice
• What is stylistics?
• The structure of this book
• 1. Seeing through Language
• 2. Building Blocks I: A Grammar of Creative Writing
• 3. Building Blocks II: Narrative and Structure (Story Narratology)
• 4. Through the Looking Glass: Who Sees? Who Tells? (Discourse Narratology)
• 5. Writing Voices: Presenting Speech and Thought
• 6. Creating a World: Text-world Theory and Cognitive Poetics
• 7. Creative Writing: Figurative Language
• 8. Meaning and Play: Metaphor
• 9. Creating Soundscapes: Rhythm and Meter, Sound and Sense
• Appendix: A Stylistic Sandbox
• Notes
• References and Selected Further Reading
• Index