The Future for Creative Writing E-Book

Graeme Harper

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: Blackwell Manifestos
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 231

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This is a compelling look at the current state and future direction of creative writing by a preeminent scholar in the field. * Explores the practice of creative writing, its place in the world, and its impact on individuals and communities * Considers the process of creative writing as an art form and as a mode of communication * Examines how new technology, notably the internet and cell phones, is changing the ways in which creative work is undertaken and produced * Addresses such topics as writing as a cultural production, the education of a creative writer, the changing nature of communication, and different attitudes to empowerment

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

From Whence…

To Where…

Reference

1 The Age of Creative Writing

Living Beyond Ageing

The New Creative Writing Consciousness

Emerge New Life

Fear

Our New Interconnectedness

Valuing the Creative

Beyond Physicalism

References

2 Dynamism and the Creative Writer

Using Synapses

Creative Writing Is Dynamism

One Analogy of Change

Sequences and Consequences in Creative Composition

Personal and Societal Influences

Cultural Comparisons

Actions of Genre

Other Conditions

References

3 Creative Writing Educating

What Does It Mean?

Where We Have Gone

Journeys in Education

Discoveries, Destinations: The Years Ahead

References

4 Developing Creative Exposition

Beyond Amnesia

Recognition of Creative Writing Research

Genesis and Text-Centrism

A New Field: Creative Exposition

References

5 Selling and Buying Creative Writing

Ding Dong the Book Is Not…?

Expanding Choice

Redefinition

Commerce and Communities of Experiences

References

6 Speaking in Creative Writing

Learning to Converse

Tools of New Creative Writing Languages

Languages of the Moving Media

Global Languages, a Global Language

References

7 Living and Working as a Creative Writer

Firstly, Habitation

Formation, Adjustment, Outlook

Generations of Creative Writers

Sustainability and Creative Writing

References

Conclusion

Selected Reading

Index

Eula

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Wiley Blackwell Manifestos

In this series major critics make timely interventions to address important concepts and subjects, including topics as diverse as, for example: Culture, Race, Religion, History, Society, Geography, Literature, Literary Theory, Shakespeare, Cinema, and Modernism. Written accessibly and with verve and spirit, these books follow no uniform prescription but set out to engage and challenge the broadest range of readers, from undergraduates to postgraduates, university teachers and general readers – all those, in short, interested in ongoing debates and controversies in the humanities and social sciences.

Already Published

The Idea of Culture

Terry Eagleton

The Future of Christianity

Alister E. McGrath

Reading After Theory

Valentine Cunningham

21st-Century Modernism

Marjorie Perloff

The Future of Theory

Jean-Michel Rabaté

True Religion

Graham Ward

Inventing Popular Culture

John Storey

Myths for the Masses

Hanno Hardt

The Future of War

Christopher Coker

The Rhetoric of RHETORIC

Wayne C. Booth

When Faiths Collide

Martin E. Marty

The Future of Environmental Criticism

Lawrence Buell

The Idea of Latin America

Walter D. Mignolo

The Future of Society

William Outhwaite

Provoking Democracy

Caroline Levine

Rescuing the Bible

Roland Boer

Our Victorian Education

Dinah Birch

The Idea of English Ethnicity

Robert Young

Living with Theory

Vincent B. Leitch

Uses of Literature

Rita Felski

Religion and the Human Future

David E. Klemm and William Schweiker

The State of the Novel

Dominic Head

In Defense of Reading

Daniel R. Schwarz

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters

Philip Davis

The Savage Text

Adrian Thatcher

The Myth of Popular Culture

Perry Meisel

Phenomenal Shakespeare

Bruce R. Smith

Why Politics Can’t Be Freed From Religion

Ivan Strenski

What Cinema is!

Andrew Dudley

The Future of Christian Theology

David F. Ford

A Future for Criticism

Catherine Belsey

After the Fall

Richard Gray

After Globalization

Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman

Art Is Not What You Think It Is

Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago

The Global Future of English Studies

James F. English

The Future of Jewish Theology

Steven Kepnes

Where is American Literature?

Caroline Levander

New England Beyond Criticism

Elisa New

The Future for Creative Writing

Graeme Harper

The Future for Creative Writing

Graeme Harper

This edition first published 2014© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks to the wonderful folks of Wiley Blackwell: Emma Bennett, Ben Thatcher, and Bridget Jennings, who have been an absolute pleasure to work with! Thanks to Emma for her vision in suggesting such a book in the first place, and to Ben in offering his friendly and engaged support to ensure the book could be completed. Thanks to all those reviewers and guest reviewers, peer board members, and correspondents who have contributed to the development of New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing and to the presenters and the audience at the annual “Great Writing International Creative Writing Conference” (held at Imperial College, London), now in its seventeenth fine year. Thanks to the many creative writers who have participated in video-linked global discussions, readings, and workshops through the International Center for Creative Writing Research (ICCWR) and more generally too. Thanks to my creative writing colleagues at universities and colleges in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia and to colleagues working at creative writing organizations throughout the world who have committed themselves to supporting creative writing in and around all our sites of education, whether formal or informal sites. Warm thanks to my students – the undergraduates, master’s students, and doctoral students – who have taught me as much if not more than I could ever have taught them. And finally, much love and thanks to my wife Louise and our boys Myles and Tyler, who are a constant source of joy.

Introduction

From Whence…

Some of this book is about the Future for Creative Writing from the point of view of that already in place and now evolving. Some of this book is about where creative writing might be in years to come, if changes in the wider world influence the practice and understanding of creative writing in reasonably predictable ways. Some of this book imagines scenarios purely for the future; other parts of this book look to the past and present in order to suggest why things are as they are and why they will build on their present states to become other things.

This book is strongly influenced by researching and teaching in three creative writing teaching and research locations of the world: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. It is mostly influenced by involvement in work undertaken in the English language; however, it has been a privilege to work also with those writing and teaching in languages as different from each other as Welsh, Chinese, Japanese, German, Scots Gaelic, Czech, Dutch, Urdu, Hindustani, French, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Norwegian, Italian, Afrikaans, and Malay. Among others! Some1 people have considered that creative writing in universities has principally been a phenomenon of the United States, the United Kingdom, and some other countries associated with work in the English language. If ever that were true, it is no longer true today and there is a growth of creative writing teaching and research in educational institutions around the world and in a considerable number of languages. In all probability such work will continue to flourish.

This book is also informed by the professional and personal pleasure of having edited the journal New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing,2 for over a decade now, and by working there with a group of supportive Associate Editors and an international Peer Review Board – and with dozens of other generous guest reviewers from around the world too. Over the years, New Writing has published both critical and creative writing from creative writers based, I believe, on every continent. I am pleased to say that in a number of cases, New Writing has been able to provide support for discussions not previously heard in our field and, additionally, support for creative writers and critical and/or creative writing not previously published. Those discussions, and their progress in an increasingly global sense, have certainly informed this book. The discussions here have also been informed by the explorations that have occurred in other journals published by national creative writing organizations around the world. Over the past two to three decades, these national organizations have become increasingly active at all levels of education and in the community, and their vibrancy is a reflection of a thriving interest in creative writing.

The Future for Creative Writing has likewise been written with an awareness of references made to creative writing in other disciplines such as the study of literature, the media, art and design, or performance. In many ways, there have been key evolutionary developments in the final decades of the 20th Century and the first decade or so of the 21st Century with regard to a clearer understanding of the distinctiveness of creative writing as a human practice and thus in relation to how it can be taught and researched, particularly in institutions of higher education.

At times, one or other academic discipline, most notably that focused on teaching and research relating to literature, has made a contribution to work in the field of creative writing. However, it became increasingly obvious toward those latter decades of the last century that such literary study was indeed a separate though sometimes connected discipline from the study of creative writing, with different practices and often very different epistemological positions.

Some tension occurred in those decades with regard to who was best placed to take the lead in the teaching and research of creative writing. This was exacerbated by the fact that globally, over time, the different roles envisioned for creative writing in academe reflected different national contexts in relation to further developing or strengthening of a literary culture, about the place of arts practices in comprehensive modern universities, and even in relation to the contemporary context of higher learning itself, which in some countries was seen (and continues to be seen) most strongly as a version of professional training and in other countries most strongly as a combination of education for life, citizenship, and employment. Although saying a consensus was eventually reached would be overstating the current condition, there is no doubt that as we entered the second decade of the 21st Century, it was very clear that creative writing was supported by the majority of participants in it as a specific field of human endeavor with specific modes of creative and critical understanding and specific avenues of knowledge to explore and advance. It is from that ground-base that the future of creative writing in universities and colleges around the world is currently being built.

That said, the contributions of other disciplines to the study of creative writing should be noted. There are many disciplines that have played, and continue to play, important roles in assisting creative writers to undertake their work and, in the context of the academic growth and strengthening of the discipline of creative writing, assisting them also in investigating and reporting new findings in the field. Literary study, as mentioned, has contributed much in the realm of textual analysis – locating this analysis largely after the event of creation; that is, after the creative writing itself, but nevertheless offering a contribution to a spectrum of interest – as well as some key things associated with biographical study and, in a connected way, studies of the history of book and of literary cultures. Linguistics, perhaps obviously, has had a linked role – globally with less of a sense of being part of the contributory disciplinary spectrum, but having played an important part in introducing creative writing to some teaching and learning situations in countries where it has not emerged beside the study of literature or through arts practice teaching and research. In many cases, this linguistic route has been associated with language learning, and certainly these exchanges between creative writing teaching and research in English and other languages have come about through language learning or linguistics programs positively, and offered opportunities for considering culturally characteristic aspects of creative writing practice.

Psychology has had an interest, and made a contribution, often through a broader concern with the psychology of creativity and through a consideration of an individual’s sense of engagement with circumstances of life or with ways of releasing emotions, feelings, and their responses to the situations in which they find themselves. Psychology as a field of study has contributed something also to how creative writers have thought about subjects and themes. That is, because creative writers draw on other areas of knowledge for investigation of writing content as well as critical understanding, for subjects and themes as well as for cognate critical investigations, Psychology has long had a role – whether from a behaviorist, information processing, perception, or personality point of view – among others. If anything has been more prominent in the contribution of Psychology to the past, present and future of creative writing it has been its attention to the nature of individual human beings, to our formation, maintenance, and sense of self. Much about creative writing draws from this perspective.

The sciences and social sciences, generally, have situated creative writing as a cultural practice in which they have merely a passing interest, but an interest nevertheless. The sciences’ interest because of occasional concerns about making science accessible and creative communication and popular art forms playing a role in that. The social sciences because, as a cultural phenomenon, creative writing represents some aspect of societal and communal formation and maintenance, some aspect of human ritual or transfer of understanding, conditions of community emotional well-being, an outlet to express political, personal, shared, or divergent ideals, and so forth.

Nevertheless, what we know and project into the future about creative writing from discoveries and ideals in those two wide fields of human knowledge is that creative writing knowledge has most often been differentiated from such things as “scientific knowledge” by its individualism and by the practices of creative writing producing hard to measure results. Creative writing has kept the subjective nature of the human exchanges it encourages as a laudable aspect of its practices, and its works have been valued for their investigations but not necessarily for the veracity of a creative writer’s observations or even the strength of what could easily be called their theories.

Interestingly, both the sciences and social sciences in academe have used creative writing in some way, and as teaching and research evolve with inter-disciplinary exchange and cross-pollination in the contemporary academic world, this is likely to occur even more. Anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, historians, social workers, nurses, computer scientists, and specialists in education, community health, philosophy, and business, to name a few, have all found some reason, advantage, or sense of possibility in engaging with creative writing in an academic setting. That is not to mention further the various arts disciplines that have incorporated creative writing into their own practices and investigations.

So the past and present of creative writing as a field of study in education is such that it has been long embraced, broadly appreciated, and actively advancing its range and types of knowledge. But because creative writing involves eclectic practices, and because it often depends on a wide range of influences, its strengths as a practice and site of human understanding have often also been its weaknesses – at least in terms of industrialized society.

As education (higher education, in particular) became more specialized, especially during the 20th Century, more organized around professional specialization, and more formalized, so creative writing, as both communication and art, was disadvantaged within academe by its desire to keep its doors open and to draw from all around it. Where it was situated, and where education in it became situated (often as part of the professionalized critical study of Literature), reflected the compartmentalizing ethos that much of 20th-Century higher education extolled. Such higher education did so in the name of seeking depth of engagement in fields of knowledge that could feed a perceived need for an increasingly specialized workforce. This, in many ways, was merely a reflection of how creative writing was situated in wider society, for individuals and for communities, as something still drawing from a wider societal participation mentality, while modern industrial practices were creating hierarchies of specialism supported by guild-like certifications and qualifications.

As a practice, creative writing was appreciated and popular, but in a social and economic sense – these two key instances – the practice was not recognized as a significant contributor to tradable human knowledge in the same way professionalized and specialized industrial knowledge was tradable (from the knowledge of biomedical scientists to the knowledge of architects – professionalized practices often also involving the expansion of professional organizations offering formal admission to the field). Though creative writing organizations emerged, and in creative writing genre such as screenwriting even took on the mantel of being certification-orientated and industry-focused, the fact was that the idea of being a creative writer clashed with ideals of being “certified,” or with knowledge (whether critical knowledge of the field or knowledge of the practice itself) being specialized quite in the industrial way that grew popular and prevalent right up to the final decades of the last century. Creative writing was certainly a distinctive practice but it was also distinctive in being very open to drawing from that around it for content, and for acting in craft ways rather than industrial ways, individual ways rather than professional group ways, using the most commonplace of modern mediums – the written word. Creative writing was simply too popular, too familiar, and too accessible to benefit from the knowledge economies of the industrial age.

Even its end products were directed through relatively narrow gateways created between creative writer and her or his audience. Bookstores, television stations, film production and leisure software companies, and even more traditional routes such as theaters all worked on the basis of control of the outputs of creative writers, in creating industrial practices that made the openness of creative writing and its use of the familiar a strong point but weakened the ability of writer to reach reader or audience directly. The practice of creative writing therefore seemed to be represented in the mainstream of every society as something to do almost exclusively with its end results, not a representation of the practice itself. Its end results were chiefly only available through an industrial system that controlled how they would be delivered and – to a certain extent, through the specializing and professionalization of manufacture and distribution and of accepted critical opinion – how they would be received.

None of this is meant to suggest the situation by the latter decades of the last century was predominantly negative. In fact, the expansion of opportunities for creative writers was a direct result of an industrial complex that during the modern period saw in the products creative writers could produce profits, borne on the back of considerable popular interest, and supported by a cultural and educational ethos that valued the works of creative writers (or at least of some creative writers) at such a high level that prizes for works of creative writing multiplied in number and size of prize a hundredfold in the 20th Century alone. It is remarkable in that respect that what creative writers in the industrial age – that is, the age from the mid-18th Century to the late 20th Century – were born into was a range of often disempowering economic and social practices that could at the same time be celebrating and supporting their very existence. From the vast investment in making the end products of creative writing attractive to consumers – as books, as media products – to the cultural embracing of recording and preserving of the outputs of critically recognized creative writers or writers representing prevailing cultural movements, and often also some of the evidence of writing of revered creative writers, the industrial age made for creative writing a somewhat strange set of challenges while at the same time offering a clear set of parameters.

The challenges were strange in that the paradox of focusing on end results when creative writers spent (and spend) the majority of their time on the practice itself and very little of their time on the finality of the practice weighted attention toward the smaller part of their lives and made the larger part of their lives invisible to almost everyone but themselves. The narrowness of the embrace of creative writing lives was also strange, given that much of the latter decades of the industrial period saw strong social movements based on recognizing individual human rights, and empowering the previously disempowered, but in creative writing, it was the end products of a very small number of creative writers that were focused upon, and the rest of creative writing and the other creative writers fell into a mysterious backdrop to this industrially driven notion of material, tradable end result.

Not that these strange creative writing conditions necessarily stand out among the other arts in the industrial age, and undoubtedly the same paradoxical conditions prevailed for most of them as the end result was necessarily more central to things than the actual practice or experiences of doing these things. It might be said that educational conditions were even more strange, because the value of arts practice was seen to be obvious but value in another sense, in the wider world, was more located in completing something tradable than in the experiences contained within the arts practices.

This is not to denigrate our human interest and belief in the beauty, significance, and contribution to our lives made by the final results of arts practices, or specifically by the particular final works of creative writing that were released into the world during the industrial age, in ways that were most common to that age, and that found their way to readers and audiences. It is simply to say that industry, influencing knowledge organization such as that we saw in higher education, cultural conditions, and practices relating to such organization and such influences, worked to represent the human practice of creative writing in certain distinctive and curious ways, not least through the end products that were traded between us in its name, and that, in doing so, a great deal of the character and importance of creative writing was disguised or diminished, though not lost.

To Where…

The end of the 20th Century is associated with the arrival of the post-industrial age. In works published in the early 1970s, influential sociologist Daniel Bell talked of the impending emergence of such an age, and of its distinctive nature. The conditions emerging at the end of the century mapped very closely onto the thoughts expressed by Bell and others such as business and management analyst Peter Drucker who referred to the arrival of “the knowledge economy” (Drucker & Wartzman, 2010). Encouraged, impelled, and bolstered by technological changes that revolutionized human communication and made such concepts as “connectivity” and “network” commonplace, the post-industrial age emerged at the end of the 20th Century with its own challenges to how creative writing had long been positioned as a human practice and how its popularity had been situated in the economy, culture, and in education.

What, therefore, is the future for creative writing?

I cannot hide the fact – and, frankly, I would not want to hide the fact – that I believe that the future for creative writing is exceedingly positive. That the future for creative writing will be created by our enduring human passion for it, our interest in both continuing to undertake it and in producing works of creative writing, engaging both with the actions of it and the results of it. More broadly, a belief in the importance of creative writing to us as individuals and to our societies and our cultures is a considerable and widely held view. The future for creative writing, however, will not be such that we can keep all things about it as they are today or determine all things for the future in a way we might like.