The routledge creative writing coursebook

Miroslav Holub, ‘The Fly’, from Poems Before & After, translated by Ian and Jarmila Milner, Edward Osers, George Theiner, Bloodaxe Books, 1990. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. ‘Funeral Blues’, copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W.H.Auden, from Collected Poems, by W.H.Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd. Excerpts from ‘February-Not Everywhere’ by Norman MacCaig, from Voice Over, 1988, Birlinn. Reproduced by permission of Birlinn, Polygon and John Donald. Excerpts from ‘Swami Anand’ by Sujata Bhatt from Point No Point, Carcanet Press, 1997. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. Paul Mills, ‘Alex Kidd in Miracle World’ from Half Moon Bay, Carcanet Press, 1993. Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. Excerpts from ‘No Legal Existence’ by Anne Spillard from Stand 21 (3), 1980:63, reproduced by permission of Stand. Extracts from The Complete Short Stories, by V.S.Pritchett published by Chatto & Windus. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Mark Haddon, excerpts from ‘For adults: for children’, The Observer, 11 April 2004. Reproduced by permission of Guardian Newspapers Ltd. Excerpts from The Weir, Copyright © 1997, 1998 by Conor McPherson. Reprinted with permission of the publishers: http://www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/ Excerpts from the programme notes for Skellig, May-June 2004 at the Young Vic Theatre, London (http://www.youngvic.org/). Reproduced by kind permission of Trevor Nunn. www.ATIBOOK.ir CHAPTER 1 WRITING AS ART Writers build up worlds, make them real, emphasise and illumi-nate them through images. Through voices they hold our attention, remind us of the varying tones of speech. Through stories told and heard they show the way our thoughts are shaped by narrative, how we shape the thoughts and lives of others and ourselves. From among the features by which we identify writing as an art form, in this first chapter I have selected four that produce a consistently powerful impact for writers and readers. These are voice, world, image and story. Without these elements our practice as writers would become disadvantaged. Creative language would not be as it is, neither would we read with the special attention and pleasure it generates. Story implies structure, and structure meaning. Stories are told by voices creating images; voices also build and inhabit worlds. A writer staying close to the voices of characters has more chance of crossing over into their rhythm of living, of involving readers in that rhythm, so that as readers we feel we know it for ourselves. The use of speaking and thinking voices in writing seems to be a key quality, perhaps the most important skill of all for a writer to learn. But then, if we think about it, the voices that most hold our attention are those that tell stories, generate images, make their world as real to us as our own. In this chapter I shall begin my exploration of how these quali-ties interact. Not one of them stands alone as the central foundation. But it may be that each of the five genres I cover in this book—memoir or personal narrative, poetry, fiction, chil-dren’s writing and drama—typically favours one quality above others. We might see image as the domain of poets. We might expect voice to be the foremost interest of any dramatist, while story dominates every instance of prose fiction or memoir. It will help, however, if we don’t make these assumptions. A successful poem can be written as dramatic story. A piece of short fiction might have very little in the way of narrative. Voices might not always be appropriate. Obviously there will be differences within genres, between writers. While Alan Ayckbourn writes by devising a carefully plotted story, Harold Pinter describes a play as ‘an evolving and compulsive dramatic image’ (Pinter, 1976:12). The emphasis may change from writer to writer, but to value their impact we need to experience voice, world, image and story as strengths, qualities, amazing creative inventions. What is it that they do? How do they work? This chapter will be the first step in discovering some answers to these questions. VOICE Writing as art helps us to recognise the voices, images, worlds and stories we inhabit— and which inhabit us—in other words, our acquired culture. But it usually does this not www.ATIBOOK.ir The routledge creative writing book 2 through explanation or analysis, but by encouraging us to listen and see. In the following passage from her novel The Bluest Eye, the black American writer Toni Morrison paints a picture of weekends in a family household in Ohio. The child narrator remembers the impact of her mother’s voice. She recreates her singing, her idioms of speech, the actual words spoken in the house. The picture has been painted for us in sound: Saturdays were lonesome, fussy, soapy days. Second in misery only to those tight, starchy, cough-drop Sundays, so full of ‘don’ts’ and ‘set’cha self downs’. If my mother was in a singing mood, it wasn’t so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me-times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without ‘a thin di-i-me to my name’. I looked forward to the delicious time when ‘my man’ would leave me, when I would ‘hate to see that evening sun go down…’ …Misery coloured by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet. But without song, those Saturdays sat on my head like a coal scuttle, and if Mama was fussing, as she was now, it was like somebody throwing stones at it (Morrison, 1994:25–6) This last image (of the mother fussing at her children), even without mentioning voice directly, represents it to us as something terribly uncomfortable: we see hands going up over ears to block it out. In the passage we also hear the narrator and catch a sense of her own speech-rhythms. Morrison has got right inside this child’s voice. The story at this point is being told to us through a distinctly spoken language: ‘lonesome…fussy, soapy …starchy, cough-drop Sundays.’ This narrator is inclined to speak very much in her own fashion—independent, awkward to handle, yet also sensitive, sympathetic. Other voices come through to us: the first line of a lyric from the black jazz singer Bessie Smith, ‘I hate to see that evening sun go down’. Exploring the voice has uncovered a rich field in contemporary writing. In The Bluest Eye Morrison describes a conversation like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop’ (Ibid: 15). Yet a fascination with voices and speech has been present in fiction for over two centuries. The personal letter, a form where writing comes closest to natural speech, made its appearance in one of the earliest examples of fiction. Pamela by Samuel Richardson (1740) contains a series of letters written between women on the subject of love. Authentic, spontaneous, as if close to real, unedited experience, it was partly through its use of the letter (we call this an ‘epistolary style’) that fiction placed its emphasis on speech. In a recent, unusual example of such emphasis, Iris Murdoch begins her novel A Fairly Honourable Defeat, written and set in the 1960s, by inventing a conversation which continues for almost twenty pages, with only one short interjection by the author setting the scene. If one rule of fiction is to discover what most interests the characters, then one such interest could be love, but another might be www.ATIBOOK.ir Writing as art 3 conversation itself. As she demonstrates, talk, conversation, interests this husband and wife because it is their way of shaping experience. We hear their voices because, for them, voices are important. Talking matters. Dialect and Diversity In the middle of the last century, the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called attention to voices used creatively by writers. ‘Diversity of speech’, he wrote, ‘is the ground of style’, and commenting particularly of the novel: ‘For the prose artist the world is full of other people’s words, among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear’ (Bakhtin, 1984:200–1). In his book After Bakhtin, David Lodge, himself a prolific novelist, draws attention to this feature in the novels of Dickens, George Eliot and D.H.Lawrence. But the uses of voice don’t confine themselves only to fiction. In our time poetry has also widened its appeal by developing its range of speaking voices, tones, registers, accents, slang expressions. Writing in all its creative forms no longer limits itself to the voice of one dominant authority, or to a form of address by a single speaker; that is, white, middle-class, educated British-American. Writing as art is now practised by people from a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds, representing differences of age, gender and sexuality. All these voices are actively sought by audiences and readers whose numbers reflect a similar range of culture and experience. When it comes to the question of how much or how little we know about other people, it is hardly surprising that voices provide one of the first signals of difference or similarity. We might indeed remember a voice more than a name or face. City neighbourhoods often consist of people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Living on the same staircase as an Asian family, the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead wonders about the mother’s position in terms of her speech and location. Spoken language can differ between generations in the same household: ‘How does she feel? / her children grow up with foreign accents, / swearing in fluent Glaswegian’ (‘Something I’m Not’, in Crawford and Imlah, eds, 2000:505). In a radio play by Benjamin Zephaniah, a young boy with a natural-born English Midlands accent wonders about his father’s black Caribbean preacher-voice holding forth in a manner astonishing to him—one is obsessed with football, the other with the Bible. In his poem ‘The Shout’, Simon Armitage describes how he and another boy at school were testing ‘the range of the human voice’. How far does a voice carry? was the question they asked themselves: He called from over the park—I lifted an arm. Out of bounds, he yelled from the end of the road… Neither, however, could have foreseen the end of the test: He left town, went on to be twenty years dead www.ATIBOOK.ir The routledge creative writing book 4 with a gunshot hole in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia. (Armitage 2003:2) ‘You can stop shouting now, I can still hear you’, Armitage writes in the final line of the poem. The real question was not about distance but difference: of age and of experience. Can voices ever overcome the sense of growing apart? The news of suicide carries further than any shout could reach. The voice has stopped, yet in a truer sense it persists. Deception and Evasion For some strange reason we often associate creative literature with truth, yet novels and plays are full of characters who fail to tell it, deliberately avoid it, prefer to tell what they wish was the case rather than what actually is. Plays by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, like those by Chekhov and Ibsen, typify what we might call the literature of evasion. The truth, of course, finally gets spoken, but not until a voice for it can be found. In terms of structure their plays are about discovering that voice, but sometimes the reverse happens, and we hear an especially courageous voice begin to founder and almost silence itself. The voices in Beckett’s plays seem to prefer silence. Another voice known for its bleakness and humour is that of Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s novel The Catcher In The Rye: I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversation with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life. Everybody’d think I was just a poor deaf-mute bastard and they’d leave me alone. (Salinger, 1995:178–9) Holden’s ideal world is without voices—even without his own. Even so, we can hear his voice speaking. His bond with the reader overrides his desire to stop communicating. It goes on despite his urge to escape to a permanent deaf-mute state. The voice we recognise—slangy, immediate, often perverse—speaks to us even when he explains he’d rather not. To neutralise one’s voice, as here, could be a form of cancelling out one’s story. Holden hasn’t committed vocal suicide, even though the story he tells contains moments when he’s seriously tempted. In the following extract from a novel by Tim O’Brien, In The Lake of the Woods, again the setting is the United States, and the voices project an imagined alternative space, an ideal: As a kind of game they would sometimes make up lists of romantic places to travel. www.ATIBOOK.ir Writing as art 5 ‘Verona,’ Kathy would say, ‘I’d love to spend a few days in Verona.’ And then for a long while they would talk about Verona, the things they would see and do, trying to make it real in their minds. All around them the fog moved in low and fat off the lake, and their voices would seem to flow away for a time and then return to them from somewhere in the woods beyond the porch… They would go on talking about the fine old churches of Verona, the museums and outdoor cafes where they would drink strong coffee and eat pastries. They invented happy stories for each other A late-night train-ride to Florence, or maybe north into the mountains, or maybe Venice, and then back to Verona, where there was no defeat and nothing in real life ever ended badly. For both of them it was a wishing game. They envisioned happiness as a physical place on the earth, a secret country, perhaps, or an exotic foreign capital with bizarre customs and a different new language. To live there would require practice and many changes, but they were willing to learn. (O’Brien, 1995:2–3) These two characters create a world—they call it ‘Verona’—simply by talking about it. It becomes their own ‘secret country’ an ‘envisioned happiness’. It’s important, of course, that they don’t actually go to the real place, don’t make actual, practical plans. Would they agree with the author’s explanation—that their talk hardly amounts to more than ‘a wishing game’? They probably would. His voice overlaps with theirs. They half-know, half-suspect this Verona is an evasion, an easy escape-route. From what? They probably wouldn’t be willing or ready to say. Voices can be used to show concealment; sometimes this is precisely what speech is about. This merging of the writer’s voice with the voices of characters in fiction is known as free indirect speech, a valuable device in third person narrative, as shown above. As readers it keeps our attention where it should be, not on the writer’s views and opinions, but on the characters in the story. We listen to them, engage with what is happening in their minds below the level of conscious, articulate speech. The writer enables us to see, hear and feel their hidden sensations, first intimations (for example) of doubt or of desire, before these become conscious or can be spoken about directly. Finding a Voice If creative language frequently makes use of voiced forms, does this mean each writer is burdened with the quest to discover his or her unique voice, something expressly original among this huge polyphony of voices? The notion of ‘your own voice’, ‘finding a voice’, refers to a writer’s stance towards all the creative features of writing as art, including, of course, voice itself. Your voice will be generated by what you write about, the recurrent places, aspects and qualities of the world you represent, by the images you choose to highlight, the types of story or story-like events that hold for you a special fascination. Some readers might think certain idioms, slang expressions and regional speech qualities to be a handicap. To others the possession of an accent suggests vitality. Conor MacPherson’s play The Weir (see Chapter 6, p. 214) is a play written to celebrate voices www.ATIBOOK.ir