Get Started In Creative Writing: Teach Yourself

Stephen May

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444129311
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenplays

Get Started in Creative Writing is an indispensible guide to unlocking your creativity, finding your voice and choosing a genre of writing that suits you best, whether fiction or non-fiction, short stories or novels, children's books or travel writing. It features guidelines for do's and don'ts along with suggestions for crafting a distinctive style.With tips from some of the best-known writers of fiction and non-fiction, you will receive loads of helpful advice to enable you get your own work published.
NOT GOT MUCH TIME?One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started.
AUTHOR INSIGHTSLots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience.
TEST YOURSELFTests in the book and online to keep track of your progress.
EXTEND YOUR KNOWLEDGEExtra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of creative writing.
FIVE THINGS TO REMEMBERQuick refreshers to help you remember the key facts.
TRY THISInnovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.

1

Why write?

In this chapter you will learn:

• some motivations for writing
• how writing helps make sense of living
• how to begin
• what you will need.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Tennessee Williams

Writing is easy

More or less every adult in this country can write. Despite what we read and hear, teachers are not doing so bad a job that many pupils leave school illiterate. Most of us can fashion a sentence, however clumsily. In addition, many people who would never consider themselves to be writers can use words very well. Think of the people you know at work, or among your friends and family, who are natural storytellers – people who can hold a group enthralled with a vivid account of something that happened to them, or who can get a room to explode in laughter with a quick one-liner. There is every likelihood that you know many people who are famed among their peers for their skill with words, and not one of them would consider themselves to be a writer. There are people whose emails or texts are a joy to read because they have a special colour with which they use language, even if it is dealing with something really quite dull.

The famous Czech writer Franz Kafka had a day-job as an insurance clerk but by all accounts, his reports and minutes were eagerly awaited by his colleagues because of their dry humour and elegant phrasing.

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Insight

Maybe you are one of these people too. Maybe you are someone who enjoys telling stories, or who gets a buzz from putting words in the right order; someone who delights in entertaining, informing and surprising friends, family and colleagues with words.

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Exercise 1

Write down in one sentence (no more than 30 words) why it is that you want to write.

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Writing is natural

The philosopher Socrates said ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ and his words, as transcribed by Plato, have survived for several thousand years, so he knew what he was talking about. We live busy lives at a frantic pace. There often doesn’t seem time just to ‘stand and stare’ as the poet W. H. Davies put it.

We spend so much of our time firefighting – reacting to events – that we leave ourselves little time to investigate the causes of all the small blazes in our lives. Why do we do the things we do? Why do we often feel hurt, neglected or sad? How can we be better parents, children, companions or lovers? How can we make sense of a world that contains 6 billion people? What is the point of it all?

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Insight

Surely at least part of the point of life is to decide who we are and then to try and become that person? And how can we do that if we don’t try and express our own unique way of seeing the world?

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For some people their natural mode of self-expression will be one of the other arts. They will form a band, or join a choir. They might take photographs or paint. Others will want to act or make films or create conceptual art. Still others will find that the extraordinary advances in digital technology will lead them down pathways to self-expression that didn’t even exist ten years ago. But more and more of us, even in a digital world, want to use one of the oldest and simplest forms of self-expression. We want to tell stories. We want to tell our own stories or make up new ones. We want to transform our own existence into words that will delight, entertain, amuse or even horrify others.

The great English poet Ted Hughes believed that all these words had value. He believed that they all added to the ‘sacred book of the tribe’. Our individual attempts to make sense of our lives contribute to the way humanity itself discovers its nature and purpose. In this sense at least, everyone’s story has equal value.

The beauty of the written word, as opposed to the spoken word in film and television, is that it invites you to linger. Film and television writing moves on at an ever faster pace, as the techniques and technology of editing develop. But a book or a poem allows the reader to choose the pace at which a story unfolds. We can immediately revisit passages that we especially like, take our time to unravel anything that we find obscure or difficult. But plays, films and television have their place in making sense of the world and we’ll cover those art forms too, later in this book.

Creative writing is good for you

Writing is a good way to reduce stress and relieve depression. Simply writing troubles down makes them seem more manageable. Reliving past traumas on the page can reduce their power to haunt. Writing is a way of taking control over your life. Therapy might not be your primary motivation for becoming a writer, but writing is certainly an effective way of keeping anxiety at bay. In fact, I can say that if you write regularly you will look and feel better without even needing to get up from your chair! It is that powerful a magic.

CREATIVE WRITING IS SOCIABLE

This might seem an odd thing to say: the usual image of a writer is someone who is solitary, a hermit. And it is true that in order to write successfully you need to have the ability and the discipline to shut yourself off in a room on your own. But writers also form a community and as we begin to take our work more seriously, the more important that community will be to us.

Of course a lot of writers work with others anyway. Film and television writers are working with a whole army of collaborators from the director to the stylist, from the producer to the gaffer’s grip-boy (whatever that is)!

Playwrights work even more closely with the directors and actors. But even for poets and novelists the need for peer support can be incredibly important. As you become more confident with your writing you will probably want to join a local group of fellow writers. You will want to find supportive but candid friends who can act as first readers and trusted guides. You will also find personal benefits in providing this service for other people. You might want to attend intensive residential courses like those run by the Arvon Foundation. You might even end up deciding to undertake an MA in Creative Writing. But whatever paths writing leads you down you are bound to end up meeting like-minded people who are stimulating – sometimes infuriating – to be around. I’ll write at greater length about the writing community in Chapter 20, ‘Moving on’.

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Exercise 2

Using the library, the internet or the local press, find out if there are any writing groups nearby. Get the contact numbers and call them to see how they work and whether they would be suitable for you to join.

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CREATIVE WRITING IS CHEAP AND ACCESSIBLE

If you want to be a top sports pro it is unlikely that you are going to be able to get one-to-one tuition from the very best players and coaches. Even if you could afford it, how would you persuade someone like Andy Murray to give you a series of private lessons? He’s a busy man! And the same is true of many other arts too. But in the field of creative writing your perfect mentors are always around, always available. If you use your public library then your favourite authors are there, they are free, and they are present for as long as you need them. There is absolutely nothing to stop you spending weeks locked up alone with Tolstoy, or with Philip Roth, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Jackie Collins or Woody Allen.

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Insight

Whoever your inspiration is then they are waiting for you. Dead or alive, mad or bad, the greatest writers are available as your guides. You don’t have to rely on YouTube or on grainy footage of long-lost champions in order to study technique; you can bring their work home with you and focus on it in microscopic detail in your own home and in your own time. How-To books like this one are useful but by no means essential.

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Exercise 3

Make a short list of the writers whose works you have found most inspiring. Now make sure that you fit in a trip to the public library when you next go shopping and take out some of their work. Reacquaint yourself with your heroes.

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Exercise 4

This is about trying to find some new heroes. Ask around among your friends, family and work colleagues for examples of writing that they have found particularly impressive. When you return your heroes to the library, make sure you replace them with some writing that has been recommended to you. Reading, more than anything else, is what will help you to improve as a writer. Reading good work carefully is the fastest way to see visible developments in your own writing life. And it helps to have an open mind and a willingness to experiment in your reading tastes too. Try not to be too dismissive of work you see being championed in the press or on television. On the other hand, reading something and then thinking, ‘I could do better than that’ is a perfectly legitimate response. It can be very inspiring to find some writer who has legions of admirers but who you think is not actually such hot stuff. That’s fine. I’d keep it to yourself for a little while, however!

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CREATIVE WRITING IS A FAMILY AFFAIR

Writing creativel...