Creative Writing
Theory and practice in the teaching of creative writing is understandably accompanied with a great deal of malaise, and this suggests a quandary for earnest teachers of creative writing. Should creative writers first look to theories of writing rather than infer them from art? I would like to propose that recent theories of composition - both cognitive theories and those of collaborative learning-can not only inform creative writing pedagogies, but consistently address the theoretical concerns of creative writers. Two major concerns are:
1) Can a collaborative approach to the teaching of creative writing provide a reasonable theory of the imagination- one that adequately describes the private act of invention?
2) Can a collaborative approach address concerns about authority and at the same time the need to teach conventions of public forms of imaginative prose and verse?
I will first address collaboration and the imagination, and I would like to begin with a critical notion articulated by Berthoff : "Rhetoric reminds us that the function of language is not only to name, but also to formulate and to transform - to give form to feeling, cogency to argument, shape to memory". My assumption is that all writing, whether the kind now institutionalized by universities as "creative writing," or otherwise, involves the transformation of memory, of feeling, through a negotiation of the writer's "felt sense" of the world and symbols that represent it, or one that you can find on https://customwriting.com/buy-research-paper. Furthermore, this is a cognitive aspect of writing, and is necessarily bounded by the writing situation. James Moffett describes this "felt sense" as "inner speech"; "However personal or impersonal the subject matter, all writing as authoring must be s«ne revision of inner speech for a purpose and an audience".
One need only recall the critical importance of memory, and manifestations of "inner speech" in works such as Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Oilman's "Yellow Wallpaper," or Woolf 's Mrs. Dalloway . Yet there still remains a mythology of the imagination that continues to influence creative writers, for example, Wordsworth's insistence in "The Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads ." that language is spontaneous , or Henry James's that fictions arise from the "pressure of the individual will". But these rather mystical notions of writing exist alongside others that point to cognitive dimensions: for example, Moffett's reconsideration of William James's notion of "stream of consciousness," from which he distills "'inner speech' ... a version of that stream . . . which can directly serve as the wellspring of writing". it is this wellspring that practicing writers such as Flannery O'Connor have sought to further describe in a larger context. According to O'Connor, "There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you".
Catherine D. Miller, another fiction writer, in her essay, "The Use of Contemporary Culture in American Fiction," suggests that O'Connor's version of manners - the texture of existence that surrounds us - is culturally and socially formulated. Moffett, then, might very well suggest that the "mystery" of which O'Connor speaks is "Egocentricity ... a localization within larger circles of ethnocentricity, biocentricity, and geocentricity," and that the transformation of memory and feeling into words "takes the interplay of inner voices put back into the social world," therefore requiring "enormously more small group interaction".
If we believe that creative writers are concerned somehow with the transformation of both inner speech and the world around them, it does not take a large leap of faith to draw on the ideas of person, who suggests, as many creative writing teachers are beginning to now see, that the imagination transforms experience into language, and is therefore necessarily related to an entire social process of becoming individual, and becoming individually skilled at writing in relation to others and to the world.