9780415317856_the_routledge_creative_writing_coursebook

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www.ATIBOOK.irWriting as art 7poems appear to have been written all at once, in one sitting, with few corrections,whether they have or not, while others show a formal care that seems to rule against asense of such immediacy. When Sylvia Plath in the title poem of her book Ariel writesthe line ‘The child’s cry/Melts in the wall’, was this a response to the real thinghappening in an adjacent room as she was writing the poem? Do her poems carry a traceof being written ‘Between five in the morning and the milkman rattling his bottles’ as sheexplained in an interview? Was an alertness to sound in the predawn winter of 1963 aconditioning influence on her poems in Ariel? Or was she aiming, for the best of reasons,to give us that impression?The English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt in the sixteenth century wrote under constantthreat of imprisonment, possibly even execution, in the court of Henry VIII. Does hisverse betray such conditions, or attempt to conceal them? Would a judicious degree offormality guarantee his survival, or should he adopt the disguise of careless spontaneity?In plays and films we expect physical and social conditions to influence the waycharacters speak. In David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross, a real-estate salesman’sloss of confidence leads to abusive, sexist slang, deformed, unfinished sentences. This isa voice under pressure:LEVENE: I tell you why I’m out I’m out, you’re giving me toilet paper, John. I’ve seenthose leads. I saw them when I was at Homestead, we pitched those cocksuckers RioRancho nine-teen sixty nine they wouldn’t buy. They couldn’t buy a fucking toaster.They’re broke John. They’re deadbeats, you can’t judge on that. Even so. Even so.Alright. Fine. Fine. Even so. I go in, FOUR FUCKING LEADS they got their moneyin a sock. They’re fucking Polacks, John. Four leads. I close two. Two. Fifty per…WILLIAMSON: …they kicked out.LEVENE: They all kick out. You run in streaks, pal. Streaks. I’m… I’m…don’t look atthe board, look at me. Shelly Levene. Anyone Ask them on Western. Ask Getz atHomestead. Go ask Jerry Graff. You know who I am… I NEED A SHOT. I got to geton the fucking board. Ask them. Ask them who ever picked up a check I was flush.Moss, Jerry Graff. Mitch himself… Those guys lived on the business I brought in.(Mamet, 1984:7)In his book on writing plays, The Crafty Art of Playmaking, Alan Ayckbourn notes theimportance of punctuation in speech: ‘Sometimes the speeches are broken up (quitegrammatically incorrectly) in order to give an indication to the actor of the preferreddelivery’ (Ayckbourn, 2002:62). He then quotes a speech from his play Woman in Mindas an example, and adds—the speaker is Susan—‘her pattern is breaking up like herpersonality’.A huge advantage of bringing the voice and voices to the fore in any piece of writingwill be that readers engage with a text more sympathetically; also, they are going toconnect with its verbal energy. If a character in a poem or play says something—to themselvesor to somebody else, tells a story, reports or records an experience in their ownwords—there is a sense of human fragility, of excitement, danger, possiblemisunderstanding and risk. And it could well be that in creative writing this sense of risk,far from being a fault or a weakness, is the very stuff that makes us sit up and take notice.
www.ATIBOOK.irThe routledge creative writing book 8Orality and LiteracyOne final thought about voices. This sections title above repeats that of Walter Ong’sbook about the differences between words as sounds (orality), and written words. As Ongexplains, ‘Writing… was a very late development in human history. Homo Sapiens hadbeen on earth perhaps some 50,000 years’ (Ong, 1995:83). The visual field of the writtenword (writing has to be seen, spatially mapped) differs fundamentally from soundsensations. We can only read print as individuals, while we hear collectively as anaudience. Voice is produced by, and resonates with, the body, it ‘vanishes as soon as it isuttered’, while writing ‘separates the word from the living present, where alone spokenwords can exist’ (Ibid: 31–3). I hope it’s clear, even from the few examples I’ve chosen,that writing as speech, writing about speech, adds vital qualities to a text, and we mighteven claim that creative writing, developing as it has done from an oral tradition, not onlyreduces the separation between writing and voice, but thrives on their proximity. Ifspeech ‘vanishes’, creative writing keeps alive the traces of its vanishing.WORLDWhenever writers create credible worlds, each of these imagined spaces holds theattention of readers and audiences by making us share, care about and appreciate theactions and events that happen within its borders. Such borders might be close to the realworld, adjacent to it, or far away from it. The distance is less relevant than the convincingrepresentation of this space as authentic, consistent, believable, so that we feel ourinterest will be rewarded. Cinema audiences watching films whose setting iscontemporary, respond to shots of cities, highways, deserts, rivers, streets and homeinteriors. These spaces connect with spaces they feel they could travel to and from.Fiction writers have to do this through words. The novelist Margaret Atwood remembersbeing told early on in her career, ‘Respect the page—it’s all you’ve got’! All forms ofcreative writing, including poems, need to persuade readers to keep attending, becausethe world of their invention has a distinct reality. A basic element of this hold on thereader is the skill of verbal realisation.Stories can’t happen without places made real to us as we read. As the writer JohnBerger explains, ‘When we read a story we inhabit it. The covers of a book are like a roofand four walls’ (Berger, 1992:15) But this feature applies just as much to other creativeforms, as in this poem by the Canadian poet Gary Geddes:‘Sandra Lee Scheuer’ (Killed at Kent State University on May 4 th ,1970, by the Ohio National Guard)You might have met her on a Saturday nightcutting precise circles, clockwise, at the Moon-GloRoller Rink, or walking with quick stepbetween the campus and a green two-storey house,
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