English as a Creative Art

Literacy Concepts Linked to Creative Writing

Linden Peach, Angela Burton

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317657095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

English as a Creative Art is different from previous works on either creative writing or contemporary literary criticism. It is the first book to bring the two together, demonstrating how concepts drawn from literary theory can be used to enable students to develop critical insights into their own writing. Conversely, it also aims to help students understand contemporary critical concepts and become more incisive thinkers through creative work.

Chapter One

Writing Meets Literary Theory

In this chapter you will find sections on:

1. English as a creative subject

2. The process of writing

3. Myths about creativity

4. An explanation of what we mean by critical theory

5. Key differences between modern and traditional criticism

6. The origins of traditional criticism

7. The reader’s response to a work

8. Realism

9. Experimental fiction.

Activities

You will be asked to undertake the following activities:

1. A preparatory exercise in which you are asked to reflect upon your previous educational experience.

2. Critical activities concerned with:

• English as a creative subject

• your impressions of English as a subject

• particular approaches to texts

• factors liable to influence a reader’s response to a work

• a summary of how society is represented on television

• an analysis of an innovative piece of writing

• comparing your rewritten passage with the original.

3. An initial writing exercise to help prepare you for the writing activities later in the chapter.

4. Four major writing activities towards the end of the chapter. You are asked to:

• adapt a well-known fable or fairy-tale as a piece of realistic writing;

• an analysis of an innovative piece of writing;

• adapt an episode from a television or radio soap opera as a non-realistic short story;

• rewrite a passage from a novel by Dickens using techniques developed by a later innovative writer;

• write a story-line for a television soap opera fulfilling specified objectives arising from your critical exercises.

5. Research exercises requiring access to a library. You are asked to familiarize yourself with the kind of works painted by Rembrandt, a few chapters from an eighteenth-century realist novel, the nature of one or two literary works – Piers Plowman and/or Pilgrims Progress – written before the novel emerged as a literary form and one or two short stories by the nineteenth- century American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

6. A reading activity which involves comparing examples of criticism that employ different critical approaches,

Preparatory Activity

Before beginning this book, you may like to reflect upon the importance which courses you have followed in English have attached to your own writing. How much opportunity has there been for you to use insights gleaned from your study of literature in your own work? What connections have your courses made or have you been encouraged to make between the critical study of literature and your writing?

Preparatory Writing Activity

The purposes of this exercise are to:

1. get you started with your writing;

2. provide you with a project to supplement some of the exercises you may be undertaking for yourself from the Further Reading section of the Introduction;

3. provide you with insights into writing on a topic which will constitute the focus, albeit in a slightly different form, of subsequent writing exercises in this chapter;

4. provide a link between practically-oriented work you may have undertaken on previous courses and the critical, reflective approach of this book.

Read the stimulus material below and write a short prose account of a family meal on a special occasion from the perspective of a young teenager.

The material listed below consists of snapshots of members of their family by teenagers.

‘Tom’

Tom

lean, earringed,

swearing, shouting, cheering,

never as tough as he looks,

Tom

‘Sue’

Sue,

surly, sleek,

sulking, mocking, smirking,

moon eyes at waiters,

Sue.

‘Dad’

Dad,

cross, canine,

barking, snapping, baying,

always touchy at breakfast,

Dad.

‘Mum’

plump, pink,

heaving, sighing, puffing,

fights the flab at keep fit,

Mum.

(Baxter, 1989, p.29)

Discussion

Only one of the above snapshots was written by a male and we wonder whether you are able to decide which of them. Obviously the exercise implies that you should think about the members of your family, but you may prefer to invent a family, drawing on characteristics of a whole range of people you know. On previous writing courses you may have concentrated on getting the external details ‘right’. Try to go further now. Consider not just people’s appearance, but their attitude towards their appearance. What is their taste in clothes? How do they regard their own bodies? How might someone react to their mannerisms? How do they behave differently with different people? Note their accents, tone, use of stresses, favourite words. All this will help prepare you for later sections and exercises in the book.

Incidentally, only the snapshot of Sue was written by a male.

English as a Creative and Expressive Art

There are now many more opportunities for students of literature to pursue their own writing than existed even ten years ago. Although some advanced and degree level courses still only involve reading works of recognized merit, many schools and colleges have more students studying English Language or English Language and Literature courses which, unlike English Literature generally make provision for the students’ own creative writing. An increasing number of university and college courses now teach writing as part of degrees in English, Education, Communications and Combined Arts. There are also a number of postgraduate writing courses, numerous writing classes offered in adult education programmes and community-based writing workshops for which the only entry qualification is a willingness to participate.

Students of art have always been concerned primarily with the development of their own work on courses where their personal and student-centred activity would be supported by classes in the history and the theory of art. Students of music, dance and drama have similarly always been concerned with the development of themselves as musicians, dancers and actors. Despite the interest now being shown in writing in schools and colleges, there is still little or no opportunity at advanced or degree level for students of English to concentrate on their own work to the same extent as other arts students are able to do. Peter Abbs, a leading writer on the arts and education, argues that this is because English is not always recognized in schools and colleges as a creative and expressive subject: ‘English has been conceived as an analytical subject belonging to the humanities, rather than one belonging with the other arts’ (1989, p.76).

Our own research into the writing backgrounds of students on writing courses in higher education revealed a wide range of prior experience. There were many with more enthusiasm than experience, such as the student who admitted: ‘I hadn’t had much experience of creative writing, but I knew I was particularly gifted with English and so I thought I would be able to apply myself to it’. Others had been writing with various degrees of success for much longer; many of these students confessed to an enthusiasm for writing which went back to their childhoods, but few of them felt they had completed a great deal of work with which they were satisfied. A typical response was:

I have always been interested in creative writing, from being a school child onwards. I have always been involved in writing and telling stories, usually for my own or others’ amusement. My writing continued through my adolescence. Prior to this course I had tackled one short story which I would consider sharing publicly and several other pieces which were too personal to share. I had written some poems and a couple of short essays. I did English at advanced level (Language/Literature) as a mature student and I had worked in Personnel for twelve years drafting my own memoranda and letters.

Nearly all the students who were interviewed by our research assistants found following a course in writing very beneficial. We were impressed by the enthusiasm with which many of them spoke about their courses, as evidenced in the following response: ‘The workshop exercises are brilliant for developing critical/analytical skills because as well as gaining confidence through speaking in group sessions it is good experience to see how other people respond to your work.’ Initially, the transition from writing for oneself to writing for a public caused anxiety for many students although the prospect often proved more daunting than the reality. One respondent seemed to summarize the experiences of a lot of students in this respect:

I found the prospect of workshop exercises quite daunting at first. Prior to these I had never shared my work with anyone (except when I was in my teens). My work has always been kept locked away, a secret pastime. So I thought that I would have difficulty with their [the college’s] workshops. What surprised me was how much I enjoyed them and how helpful I found them. I now see their help in assisting me to evaluate my own work and revise my original ideas.

Critical Activity I

At this point, we would like you to reflect for a few minutes on how approaching English as a creative and expressive art might affect the nature of a course on literature. You may be a student on a course which already makes provision for you to develop your writing and you may like to see this opportunity extended within your own programme of study. You may be studying writing courses for the first time and may wish to reflect upon previous courses which did not afford you this opportunity.

Discussion

Your ideas probably fell into three main areas. Firstly, you probably thought of revisions to the structure of English courses at advanced and degree level that would allow more scope for writing itself. You may have envisaged a writing programme within the courses consisting initially, for example, of writing exercises from which students might learn basic skills and techniques while acquiring confidence in working with language and leading on to more sustained pieces of writing. You might have thought of students eventually initiating, devising, planning and writing a substantial piece of work under the guidance of a tutor.

Secondly, some of your other ideas may have concerned approaches to literary works themselves. You might have suggested less emphasis upon the ideas and messages within the set texts and more discussion of the techniques and conventions employed. This area of enquiry might focus on the possibilities afforded by the various techniques, the reasons for using them and some of the difficulties and pitfalls involved. You might have wished to see more comparative study of the different ways in which different writers from different periods and writing different types of literature tackled the same subject. Such studies would lead to opportunities for students to practise some of these techniques themselves or experiment with their own approaches to the same subject.

Thirdly, your provisional thoughts may also have led you to question the boundaries between literature and the other arts. A creative study of plays, for example, leads inevitably to dramatic interpretation and performance considerations. After all, plays are written not for the page but for the stage. This consideration becomes especially important when we remember that not all plays are written for the same type of theatre; a play written for theatre-in-the-round, for example, would be informed by specific performance criteria. Involvement in directing, acting or artistic design makes us more aware of the creative possibilities of playwriting than simply studying the content and form of plays in a classroom. Poetry can lead us to music in, for example, the study of ballads, or to performance. Much contemporary poetry is written with performance in mind and there are many performance poets, such as Benjamin Zephaniah, who work a circuit of public venues, schools and colleges.

A creative approach to English can enhance our appreciation of the characteristics of particular types of writing and of writing for particular media such as television or radio. You may have suggested that the traditional English literature syllabus be expanded to include the study of texts in a variety of media. You might have liked to have seen more emphasis on the adaptation of a work from one medium to another.

Writing as a Process

The fact that English has not been recognized as a creative art has inhibited the development of writing courses in a number of ways. One of the most common sources of anxiety among tutors who are new to this area is the criteria for assessment. It seems easier to draw up a list of criteria for marking critical essays than for assessing creative work. Unpublished manuscripts from untried writers seem harder to judge than works in print. Yet the criteria by which we discuss the strengths even of a work of received merit are applicable to all writing. We should be able to recognize, articulate and reward the strengths of any work in terms of our established critical vocabulary.

One of the premises on which this book is written, however, is that writing courses should focus not only on the work which students produce – the writing upon which the assessment is based – but also on the process of writing. An important element in a creative course is the opportunities which it provides for the students to reflect on their own work and their own development as writers. This needs to be a systematic process recorded in the form of a working log or diary and in a file of drafts, revisions and amendments. Such reflection should form as important a part of the assessment as the actual writing produced. Members of a writing course need opportunities to share not only their work with each other but also their reflections on their own and each other’s writings.

Our own research into the expectations of students on writing courses revealed that, despite initial fears, many of them valued the chance of sharing their work with others and of being able to reflect on what they were trying to achieve. The opportunity to experiment with a variety of styles and techniques was generally regarded as essential. Critical but constructive feedback was also perceived as invaluable, especially if it was tailored to helping students find their own voices.

Myths about Creativity

Students are sometimes too reluctant to recognize their own creativity. Abbs argues that ‘creativity is not an esoteric power belonging only to a few exceptional individuals, bu...