Writer's Handbook Blog

The Writing Process

How can we understand the relationship between the writer’s ‘self’ and the writing process? T.S. Eliot, in his famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1951), said that writing involved a ‘loss of personality’. He believed the writer needed to be an impersonal vehicle through which feelings and emotions could ‘enter into new combinations’. This wasn’t a matter of the writer expressing his or her personal feelings or emotions, but rather those appropriate for the work of art. Roland Barthes, in his equally famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), also characterised the writing process as ‘self-less’. For him the writer was not the maker of meaning in a piece of writing, but a ‘scriptor’, a detached and selfless organiser of ‘discourses’, who allowed words to ‘act’ or ‘perform’ through him. Writing required the death of the writer’s self.

By contrast poet Ted Hughes speaks passionately about the deeply personal nature of writing. Talking about Sylvia Plath’s poetry, he says: ‘It’s my suspicion that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the powers in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us’. And novelist Jenni Diski warns that ‘Writers who are not self-obsessed and wriggling through what they hope are their own labyrinthine psyches are very likely not writers at all’.

So we seem to have a contradiction: creative writing is deeply personal, deeply connected with the writer’s self, but it also involves moving away from the self and becoming impersonal. In fact, creative writing involves both of these things: being able to connect deeply with our own felt experience, so as to find our material for writing, as well as being able to distance ourselves from this experience, so as to give the imagination space to work our material into art. For this purpose, of course, we need to develop the craft of writing, so that this too becomes an inner resource we intuitively use whenever we write. Writing, then, is both a public and a private endeavour, requiring us to learn to operate on that precarious borderline between spontaneity and reflection, inner and outer, closeness and distance, freedom and control. 

Celia Hunt is Lecturer in Continuing Education (Creative Writing) at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of Writing: Self and Reflexivity. She was awarded a national teaching fellowship by the Higher Education Academy in 2004.

What is Creative Writing?

Not such a crazy question! Some would say it is an activity (the act of writing creatively); others would be more likely to point to novels, books of poetry, short stories or the script of a film or of a play and suggest Creative Writing is a thing, an end result, the products of writers’ actions.

Of course, Creative Writing is both of these. It is also a way of approaching ideas, things, people, a way of investigating what is around us or, indeed, what is in our minds. And it is a way of communicating our investigations in interesting and thought-provoking ways that will encourage others to also consider their ideas, the things around them, their actions, emotions, attitudes, thoughts.

Creative Writing also leaves behind a vast range of evidence – not all of which is contained in books, or found on television or cinema screens, on the stage or on the web. The evidence of Creative Writing includes the communications of writers to their families and friends, the correspondence between writers and editors, writers and their fans. It also includes complementary pieces of writing (writing done beside the creative writing being undertaken, writing that potentially shows the writer’s influences and ideas), it involves the instruments writers use (whether these are pencils, pens or a computer) and it involves non-writing (for example, pictures, photographs, the doodles on the side of the page). And these are just a few examples of the evidence of Creative Writing!

We have not yet examined the acts and actions, and much of the results, of Creative Writing. We have tended to believe that studying published works, or looking at only completed pieces of Creative Writing is enough. We have tended to think, also, that biographies of famous creative writers cover enough of the study of people who write creatively. But both of these things are not the studying of Creative Writing. Rather, they are the study of publishing, or the study the canonical literary culture, or the study of celebrity.  Creative Writing is more than that. If we are to understand Creative Writing better, we need to recognise that it is both a range of activities and a range of end results, and that the activities and the end results are accessed by us in various ways. Creative Writing is one of the foundational ways in which humans have shared their thoughts and experiences, their ideals, their dreams, their relationships with each other. And this, surely, is worthy of our celebration.

Graeme Harper, Professor of Creative Writing, Bangor, University. Honorary Professor of Creative Writing, Bedfordshire. Series Editor: “Approaches to Writing” (Palgrave). Latest novel: “Moon Dance” (Parlor, 2008)

10 Reasons Not to Write Off Reading From A Screen

Over the past few months there has been much discussion of an impending digital revolution in the way we read books. While much of this is hyperbole there has been incredulity in many quarters that anybody would ever want to read from a screen. We are all attached to books and the idea seems, at first glance, anachronistic. However there are some good reasons why it might not go away as quickly as you’d think. Here’s why:

1.)    We do it all the time anyway. Whether its emails, blogs, the newspaper or text messages for the bulk of us, most of our reading is already on screen. The New York Times now was 13 million online readers per day against a print readership of 1.1 million.

2.)    Those who read books read the most online. The Guardian reported that “women and pensioners were [the] most active readers” (22/08/08). A recent study showed women, the most enthusiastic readers, dominate social networks; 16% of “silver surfers” spend over 42 hours per week online. Moreover overall internet usage was up 158% in the UK from 2002-2007.

3.)    e-Ink technology removes many of the disadvantages of screens. Using ionized black and white particles it eliminates eye strain and glare, expertly recreating the look and feel of paper and print.

4.)    New devices (using e-Ink) like the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle are backed by technology giants who know how to make a product work. They come with features like an MP3 player (the Sony) and wireless connectivity (the Kindle). Expect them to only improve in the coming years.

5.)    In Japan mobile phone fiction- keitai novels- have gone from being a niche market to big business, with some novels being downloaded over 200k times a day. It has been reported that half of bestsellers in Japan are now mobile.

6.)    Likewise in China online novels are huge. The most searched for term on Chinese search engine baidu.cn is “novel”. According to Wired 10m “youth” now list reading online as one of their main hobbies.

7.)    The iPhone has changed the parameters again by offering a fantastic reading experience, on a portable easy to use, multi-functioning device. Apps like eReader and Stanza make an already desirable phone a viable ebook reader.

8.)    Paper costs are going through the roof- up 150% this year. With no slowing of the commodity book in site paper and manufacturing costs are likely to increase. Along with the cheapness of delivery the economics of electronic reading start to make sense.

9.)    Government policy is to invest in ereading. Education policy wonks view reading from laptops and PDAs as a handy workaround to encourage book averse but technophile teenagers to read. A school in Birmingham even replaced all textbooks with Palm Pilots.

10.)  The internet offers a whole new way of consuming content. Bundling, chunking, web only content, integrated multimedia elements, exciting new serialisations are only the beginning. This is reading from a screen not as something like lost but as something gained.

No one is saying that we will all run off any read all our books off a screen. Books are here to stay. Reading from one type of screen or another is not about to replace books, rather it is an addition to the varied climate to literature that already exists, a creative challenge, a commercial opportunity and new way for readers to enjoy texts.

Michael Bhaskar is Digital Publishing Executive at Pan Macmillan and blogs at http://thedigitalist.net.

How to start your blog

One of the most effective ways of promoting your book online is with a blog. It’s free, it’s great for search engines, it helps you sell books (don’t forget an ordering link), and it involves writing – something we’re all doing (or aspiring to do) anyway. But how do you get started?

There are various free tools available to enable anyone to get writing in minutes, with no technical knowledge required. The main options are Blogger, WordPress and TypePad.

One thing you need to decide is whether you want your blog hosted by the software provider (easy) or on your own server space (more difficult). All three will host your blog for you – and Blogger and WordPress will do it for free. If you’re just starting out with blogging, it’s fine to use a hosted service. The important thing is to get writing. It can look a little less professional than hosting it yourself and using your own domain name. But many successful author blogs use a hosted service, including Belle de Jour which is hosted on Blogger. Wife in the North also uses Blogger, but is hosted elsewhere, and uses a web address that matches the title.

The advantage to hosting your blog on your own server space is that:

1. you can choose whatever domain name you like (so long as it’s available), rather than having .blogspot, .wordpress or .typepad in your web address. Depending on the focus of your blog, you may want your domain name to be the same as your own name or your book’s title – think about what people are likely to search for.

2. you’re not restricted by the software provider’s server space limits – important if you’re thinking about including audio or video in your blog

3. you can customise your blog to look however you want

4. you have more control over the features and functions you use.

You do need to be a bit techy to do this – or know someone who is. But if you’re already published, it’s worth speaking to your publisher, since they may be able to set up a blog for you on their server space. In fact, they should be helping you with this sort of thing. If they need some persuading, start with a hosted option so they can see the benefit of what you’re doing. And make sure they link to your blog from their own website.

WordPress offers a lot of flexibility for the first-time blogger. You can sign up for a free account and be up and blogging in no time at http://wordpress.com/, without any technical knowledge. Later on, if you want, you can pay to upgrade to an account that allows you to have your own domain name, more space, and a customised look and feel. Or you can go to http://wordpress.org/, download the software yourself, for free, install it on your own server, and customise it to taste. That’s the part you may need help with – but the flexibility of WordPress, including a vast number of ‘themes’ (design templates) and ‘plugins’ (extra functions) that can be installed for free, make it a very powerful option.

As with all things social media, start small, test things out, and see what works for you. Don’t worry about the technology – it’s the content you create that’s important, and how you encourage people to find and share it. And you can have some fun with it and hone your writing at the same time. So what are you waiting for? Go on – start a blog!

Jon Reed is a social media consultant who specializes in social media. He previously worked in publishing for 10 years, including as publishing director for McGraw-Hill. His blog can be found at http://www.publishingtalk.eu/blog/

The Writer's Handbook

The Writer’s Handbook is exhilarating, daunting – and a glowing testament to the richness of publishing and publications in this country. Who ever really believed that film, television and now the internet, would ever halt our appetites for reading and writing? These days, it seems, more people than ever engage in the challenges of writing poetry, stories and novels, and drama for all media. Certainly the proliferation of creative writing courses has helped. Community and adult education classes have been joined by under-and postgraduate degree courses, where imaginative writing has become the newest art form to enter the academy. While professional success can never be guaranteed, it can be enormously rewarding to discover the excitements and complexities of producing literature (ie, writing), as well as reading. I would even go so far as to say that the study of imaginative writing must and should be accompanied by the experience of studying literature, its traditions and history.

Creative writing’s history and its pedagogy (ways of teaching and learning) are absolutely bound up with literature, its traditions and alternatives and ways of reading. Studying a subject involves understanding its own history and the principles which inform its pedagogy. As a teacher of creative writing, I was impelled to write about how creative writing has developed as an academic subject, and what principles underpin its approaches in the classroom. My book, The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Reconceiving Creative Writing, was a challenge to research and write, and I hope will prove a rewarding challenge for its readers.

Michelene Wandor, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at London Metropolitan University, UK, and author, playwright, poet and broadcaster.