Creative%20writing%20-%20NG

1
Creative writing - NG

• Session 2

2
Writing game 4 - Exquisite Corpse

• Rules In groups of 5, take turns writing a word
  or a sentence without knowing the preceding
  bit(s)
• Follow this sentence structure
  "The/My/His/Her/Your adjective noun (adverb) verb
  the/his/her/your adjective noun, i.e. for
  instance My cool karma always runs over your
  stale dogma

3
Exquisite Corpse 2

• Choose one word each for the first sentence do
  this simultaneously without consulting the others
• Article/pronoun adjective (My green)
• Noun (friend)
• Adverb (if you want/need one) verb (usually
  makes)
• Article/pronoun Second adjective (the best)
• Second noun (Sunday)
• My green friend makes the best Sunday

4
Ex. Corpse 3

• Everyone then gets to know the whole sentence.
• Next, each member writes a whole sentence in
  continuation
• The last word only is revealed to the next
  writer

5
Ex. Corpse 4

• Go through 2 more rounds of corpse, then read the
  whole mess.
• Edit, if absolutely necessary, for comprehension
• Read aloud in class

6
Last weeks genres

• Poems
• Flow writing, therapy
• Short story
• Blog posts

7
Todays genres

• Travel writing one of many forms of creative
  non-fiction

8
Ways of categorising creative non-fiction

• By form memoirs, the personal essay, literary
  journalism
• By content/subject nature writing, literary
  travel, the science essay, creative cultural
  criticism
• The art of the particular

9
Literary travel

• Database categories for the general term travel
  writing
• description and travel
• social life and customs

10
Who writes travel writing?

• Journalists
• Fiction writers ?
• Non-literary travel writing and
• Literary travel writing?

11
Reader expectations

• The journalists have a strong interest in
  maintaining their credibility
• The fiction writers have more creative freedom
  (?)
• Yet they must still confirm some kind of
  credibility (they must have some personal
  experience with the place the describe)

12
Examples of literary travel writing

• The Writer and the City series
• Peter Carey, 30 Days in Sydney A Wildly
  Distorted Account (2001)

13
Elizabeth Bishop

• American poet and writer (1911-1979) Won Pulitzer
  Prize for Poetry 1956)
• From her poem Questions of Travel
• Should we have stayed at home and thought of
  here?

14
Reading protocols (fiction writer)

• The writer should have a personal relationship to
  the place he/she describes
• We expect the account to rely on the writers
  experience and memory
• We expect some literal truthfulness (not
  necessarily expected in fiction by the same
  author)

15
Reading protocols (The journalist)

• The writer will try to be neutral and objective
• This is about something important, not (just)
  about the writer
• The sources will be made clear and their
  reliability will be assessed
• The reader can disagree, but there really is no
  point in doing so

16
Bruce Chatwin

• English novelist and traveller
• 1972 worked for the Sunday Times Magazine as an
  advisor on art and architecture
• Went to Petagonia in 1974 (South America), later
  travelled to the West African state of Benin,
  Australia
• Died in 1989 in France (of AIDS)

17
Bruce Chatwin

• Style
• A story-teller
• Has been criticised for his fictional anecdotes
  of real people, places and events
• Chatwin did not claim his portrayals to be
  faithful representations
• He tells not a half truth, but a truth and a
  half (Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwins
  biographer, a British journalist and writer
  (1999) )

18
The Chinese Geomancer

• Published in What am I doing Here? (1989)
• geomancer -- an expert in geomancy
• geomancy -- noun
• the belief that arranging your home, house,
  office etc in a particular way will bring you
  good or bad luck ? feng shui

19
RP for Geomancer

• Speaks as a visitor to Hong Kong (he is British
  but not as British as the old China hand)
• Self-other construction
• Distance to what he narrates
• Uses irony (when referring to Russian
  architecture)
• Informs the reader (about feng-shui)
• Reflects on China history and contemporary
  Chinese politics
• Light entertainment
• Post-colonialism?

20
Five strands of Travel Writing

• Five broad and overlapping strands that can be
  detected within travel writing of the last 25
  years
• The comical
• The analytical
• The wilderness
• The spiritual
• The experimental

21

• The comic
• For example parodies
• The analytical
• Mixture of personal reportage and socio-political
  analysis (often a component in travel writing)

22

• The wilderness
• The jungle of Amazon and New Guinea
• the wilderness now often as ecological as
  indigenous Siberia, Alaska, the poles
• The spiritual
• the inner journey merging with memoir
• The spiritual dimension of travel

23

• The experimental
• Pushes the genre into a variety of new directions
• Hybridisation (which has periodically
  reinvigorated travel writing through its history)
• extreme travel writing
• intertextuality
• Sometimes the journey is subordinate
• Travel writing as cultural history
• Travel writing meets investigative reporting

24
Writing games

• Writing game 5 pair work.
• Compare your lists of words and merge them into
  one list.
• Choose a title for your piece
• Write a piece of travel writing of no more than
  300 words that incorporates all the data in your
  list
• Revise this writing until the use of this data
  seems completely inevitable, and neither random
  nor forced
• Post on blog.

25
Data-ingredients for next week

• 1 overheard conversation
• 3 species of birds
• 2 brand names for food
• Text from 4 signs
• The name of a planet or a star
• The name of a lipstick
• 1 time of day
• The title of a book
• The title of a painting
• The name of a dead politician
• 2 types of vegetables
• 3 items from a hardware store
• A make of gun