.
I chose the title Conventions of Literary Writing in lieu of the phrase Creative Writing that is so widely used in the schools. That name is misleading. Creativity is a broad concept which refers to any act of invention. The notion that literature has a lock on creativity is simply absurd. Literal reports and commentaries can be just as creative as poems or plays or novels. Who would mistake Isaac Newton’s Philosophiж Naturalis Principia Mathematica for work of literary art? Who would doubt that it is one of the most creative compositions in the history of Western Civilization?
The title Conventions of Imaginative Writing is also too broad. Albert Einstein’s various papers involved epiphanies equal to any of Shakespeare’s.
The essential differences between literature and other more prosaic forms of writing is artificiality. The literary writer portrays and alters reality in interesting but often unrealistic ways; but he does not do so willy-nilly. Instead he follows precedents that have been established by writers over the centuries. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, the gods were shown to mix into human affairs in perverse and even childish ways. Literary writers often suspend the laws of nature and show events which simply could not occur in the ways that they are described. Novelists often report the perceptions, the thoughts and the feelings of their characters; and they or their characters may talk to people who are absent or even dead. (How else was Hamlet to find out from his deceased father how badly his uncle and his mother had behaved?)
Poets talk in very unnatural ways. They employ interesting and intricate rhythms, and they repeat sounds in patterns that are pleasing to the ear. Poetry is actually very unnatural talk, but lovers of poetry are accustomed its artificial rhetoric. Poets - indeed all literary writers - use figurative language to evoke unusual images and associations in the minds of their readers - even though such tropes, if taken literally, are absurd.
English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge talked of a willing suspension of disbelief that is necessary for readers and audiences to accept unrealistic stories. His comment might be expanded to a willing acceptance of things that are often quite silly, but which allow us to enter into the artists’ imaginary worlds. To the uninitiated, grand opera may seem bizarre, but when one has learned and accepted the rules, it can become very involving. Audiences, who have become accustomed to the ways in which creative artists present their material, simply overlook the artificiality of it all, and take pleasure in the vicarious experiences that the artist offers.
Innovation in the field of literary art involves establishing new conventions. The first author to use a flashback, for example, asked his readers to accept that he was omniscient and could access and report the reveries of one of his characters. Since this practice was first introduced during the l9th century, writers have used it time and again to inform their readers about what has happened in the past and how their characters feel about it.
The reason that Shakespeare’s picture appears on the cover of this book is that he was an innovator par excellence. As Harold Bloom put it in his book Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human, Shakespeare introduced revolutionary methods of character development. His dynamic and multidimensional characters have become the gold standard for writers since he wrote his plays five centuries ago.
One does not look to literature for carefully depictions of the real world. That is the province of literal writing which we will explore in the fourth volume of these textbooks.
The assignments offered in this book range from relatively simple to quite challenging. They may be employed in composition classes ranging from junior high school through the university. This book might be viewed as a framework for a creative writing curriculum.
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