Jesika ( 2114026076 )
Class D
Summary about Challenges of Creative Writing
In this chapter, we look at some significant challenges and opportunities that we might be
able to bend to the purpose of our writing. These include cultural and social pressures,
quality, translation, experiment, design and your own mind's workings - and how you can
apply them to your work.
Challenges to writers
1. Indifference
Change the scale of what you expect. Think locally in the hope of being prized so: small
worlds link, making greater worlds. Your creative class is world enough to begin with. Try to
answer their indifference for new writing. Trust to the notion that life is short and art is long,
and then just keep practising.
2. Rival media
Make film and digital media your allies, by either creating fiction that becomes (but
challenges) film, or writing that exploits and expands new technologies for its transmission.
3. Sentimentality, or kitsch
The poet and critic Mary Kinzie has pointed out that it is difficult for new writers to
recognise cliches of feeling in their writing. Kinzie labels these lame notions as kitsch:
‘suffused with sentimentality and linked to moral corruption’. She cites Nabokov’s
suggestion that such cliches ́of feeling are the basis for advertising. However, many writers
pull against sentimentality and cliches of emotion, knowing that they lead to platitudinous
expression.
4. Displacement activity
Hemingway believed, tough-mindedly, ‘there are no alibis . . . You have to make it good and
a man is a fool if he adds or takes hindrance after hindrance after hindrance to being a writer
when that is what he cares about’ (quoted in Phillips, 1984: 59). Even the gentle-minded
Thoreau advocated focus: ‘Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the
recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot
inflame the minds of his audience.”
, 5. Talking it away
Conversation is expensive oxygen. Do not talk about your work beforehand; write it, do it.
You will find you have many opportunities to talk about it afterwards; say, with your tutor
during the revising process or should it become successful.
6. Criticism and journalism
Talking and self-distraction are just two examples of the various displacement activities;
there are many more. More insidious are those activities that simulate the act of creative
writing but are actually its surrogates, such as writing criticism and reviews.
7. Fantasy and perfectionism
A parallel enemy is perfectionism. Many creative writers strive for perfection in their work
and working practice, but not enough of them achieve it. That is because they are striving
rather than practising, and because perfect writing does not exist, only provisional versions
that you revise until they have their own life. If your writing reached perfection, it would read
as if it were dead. ‘The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection’ –
George Orwell.
8. Politics
‘Politics is the enemy of the imagination’ – Ian McEwan. Or is it? Politicians campaign in
bad poetry and govern in worse prose. Politics outside of an official party is a different
animal: writing engages with politics by default. A writer’s imaginative freedom can be a
cause of envy or marginalisation (commercial success relieves them of that freedom).
9. Pagefright and word-blindedness
There are moments when new writers think they have writer’s block. Part of this is a kind of
page-fright, aversion to the empty stage of the page, incomprehension of their role in filling it
and performing to an invisible audience. A writer may also become word-blind. This occurs
when a fluent apprentice has produced a large amount of work in a short period of time and is
unable to read themselves as a writer; they are blind to that perspective.
10. Out of depth
Writing beyond your skill or experience is frightening and can make the creative process
slow or even static. Research and playful invention will cure the first of these. The graphic
novelist Alan Moore argues that you should risk everything by setting the level of every story
higher than your last.
Class D
Summary about Challenges of Creative Writing
In this chapter, we look at some significant challenges and opportunities that we might be
able to bend to the purpose of our writing. These include cultural and social pressures,
quality, translation, experiment, design and your own mind's workings - and how you can
apply them to your work.
Challenges to writers
1. Indifference
Change the scale of what you expect. Think locally in the hope of being prized so: small
worlds link, making greater worlds. Your creative class is world enough to begin with. Try to
answer their indifference for new writing. Trust to the notion that life is short and art is long,
and then just keep practising.
2. Rival media
Make film and digital media your allies, by either creating fiction that becomes (but
challenges) film, or writing that exploits and expands new technologies for its transmission.
3. Sentimentality, or kitsch
The poet and critic Mary Kinzie has pointed out that it is difficult for new writers to
recognise cliches of feeling in their writing. Kinzie labels these lame notions as kitsch:
‘suffused with sentimentality and linked to moral corruption’. She cites Nabokov’s
suggestion that such cliches ́of feeling are the basis for advertising. However, many writers
pull against sentimentality and cliches of emotion, knowing that they lead to platitudinous
expression.
4. Displacement activity
Hemingway believed, tough-mindedly, ‘there are no alibis . . . You have to make it good and
a man is a fool if he adds or takes hindrance after hindrance after hindrance to being a writer
when that is what he cares about’ (quoted in Phillips, 1984: 59). Even the gentle-minded
Thoreau advocated focus: ‘Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the
recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot
inflame the minds of his audience.”
, 5. Talking it away
Conversation is expensive oxygen. Do not talk about your work beforehand; write it, do it.
You will find you have many opportunities to talk about it afterwards; say, with your tutor
during the revising process or should it become successful.
6. Criticism and journalism
Talking and self-distraction are just two examples of the various displacement activities;
there are many more. More insidious are those activities that simulate the act of creative
writing but are actually its surrogates, such as writing criticism and reviews.
7. Fantasy and perfectionism
A parallel enemy is perfectionism. Many creative writers strive for perfection in their work
and working practice, but not enough of them achieve it. That is because they are striving
rather than practising, and because perfect writing does not exist, only provisional versions
that you revise until they have their own life. If your writing reached perfection, it would read
as if it were dead. ‘The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection’ –
George Orwell.
8. Politics
‘Politics is the enemy of the imagination’ – Ian McEwan. Or is it? Politicians campaign in
bad poetry and govern in worse prose. Politics outside of an official party is a different
animal: writing engages with politics by default. A writer’s imaginative freedom can be a
cause of envy or marginalisation (commercial success relieves them of that freedom).
9. Pagefright and word-blindedness
There are moments when new writers think they have writer’s block. Part of this is a kind of
page-fright, aversion to the empty stage of the page, incomprehension of their role in filling it
and performing to an invisible audience. A writer may also become word-blind. This occurs
when a fluent apprentice has produced a large amount of work in a short period of time and is
unable to read themselves as a writer; they are blind to that perspective.
10. Out of depth
Writing beyond your skill or experience is frightening and can make the creative process
slow or even static. Research and playful invention will cure the first of these. The graphic
novelist Alan Moore argues that you should risk everything by setting the level of every story
higher than your last.
