Angela Fields
Christy Toth, PhD
English 3020
29 January 2017
The creative writing discipline covers a wide variety of forms. None of which can fully capture the complexity of the field or the full focus needed to complete any one writing discipline alone within creative writing field. What I mean by that is creative writing encompasses many other aspects from many other disciplines of writing, much like many sciences contract various mathematical educations to perform their evaluations. Yet once one determines the form a piece of creative idea wishes to take, steps can be taken to help construct a well written piece and help a writer excel later from the learning experience. Even finding the right form can be a process needing knowledge from the many facets we call as a whole the creative writing discipline. The effectiveness of a finished work then takes into account the depth of understanding of strategies when writing creatively, as well as knowing the audience for whom it will be addressing.
In a recent student interview given to Paisley Rekdal, a creative writing teacher in the English department at the University of Utah and accomplished author, some of these strategies to successful and effective techniques were discussed. Paisley indicated during the interview her primary focus in the creative writing field was poetry and creative non-fiction with less focused dabbles into many other forms of writing.Paisley answered questions such as: what teachers look for in people attempting to enter the field of creative writing or what is a common problem among those students and what are common missteps she finds in student writing when learning, what can be the most challenging when writing in the creative writing field, and what advice would she give to those writers just starting out, especially when it comes to sticking with the discipline?
One of the many things that can be found among many successful creative writers is the amount they read. Paisley notes that she finds, as well as other colleagues in various writing fields, a repeating theme that many writers wishing to enter any writing focused profession, or at least student writers specifically, complain about the amount of reading they must do during their studies. Reading is as much a part of writing as the physical act of writing is. It’s the collection of ideas we derive from the multitude of written work we read over the course of our lives that most heavily weighs on the diversity of our own writing. We accomplish this diversity by drawing connections from various forms of writing and topics to form new ideas and concepts. Only then can we call the writing creative. A person can relay facts about a subject say, a tree, until the research on the matter runs dry, but it's not until you use that knowledge in conjunction with other topics, say your family ancestry does that image or object take on a whole new meaning. The number of students Paisley finds willing and open to reading assignments have become fewer every year. Reading is one of the things she remembers doing a great deal of during her younger years and to her it was almost like a sort of training that she made herself do with the hopes to become a great writer one day. Because of this “habit” she made her own, she was able to draw on many various styles, ideas, and forms that she was able to use when she built her own unique writing voice, which is a skill anyone who wants to write effectively should strive to gain. Think of reading as a way to build your own mental library of concepts that you can reference any time when the need arises when writing.
Metaphor is a useful tool that nearly every effective and successful creative writer maintains within their writing. This leads into another comment Paisley made about what she looks for in a student's writing which is, “The ability to tell multiple stories and multiple ideas in all the same voice.” The ability to do this is, as Paisley suggests, like the concept of metaphor. An earlier example in the last paragraph of a metaphor, was when it was written something, in this case the topic of a tree, may “run dry.” When you think of something “running dry,” most people's first thought is of a river or streaming ceasing to flow with water. However, in this context it was used as metaphor to illustrate the concepts or facts of what we define of a particular tree, running their course, or exhausting themselves. Ironically, both synonyms “running their course and exhausting themselves” just written are also metaphors to describe the metaphor “run dry.” Metaphor is a very complex ability in writing and as Paisley mentioned, “nearly an impossible thing to teach students,” although often imperative to accomplishing unique and effective work. The ability to weave in concepts from various areas into a complex, yet easily followable string of thought placed into a written form, is something we all develop nearly subconsciously through reading. Though this talent may not be able to be taught as Paisley suggests, it is one that can be nurtured by reading other writers methods of using them. And when it becomes part of your creative writing, it tends to have a way of making it easier for your ideas to reach a higher number of readers.
Writing creatively highly depends on these ties of thought and segments of seemingly unrelated details that get woven into new concepts. Paisley states for many writers they are unable to make it past the anecdote, where she states, “something strange happens to the writer and so they write about it.” Creative writing isn’t simply that. Sure, it may seem to be an interesting idea, but it cannot be called creative until the straight telling of the occurrence is introduced to the world which may have led to the epiphany. Only then can the idea expands to the world of endless forms instead of appearing to your reader to be created from seeming randomness. The idea then finds a way of telling or even taking that instance you wish to relay and elevating it as special going beyond a simple mentioning. In this way, we not only expand the audience and idea of our story, but they can even become part of the story or idea, even invested in it.
Both of these methods of tying in outside influence to your writing and the use of language in the form of metaphor to draw in greater understanding by your readers, can create a piece that is effective to those readers, but can also springboard your own understanding of how to write in the future. Paisley writes in her poem entitled “Fire,”
“...No universe should care so much about our souls.
But science's
statistic bespeak our own. We know heat seeks heat and fire
goes back to fire.
And maybe crime fuels crime because it's energy, and to keep
this world in motion
we must have it. Forget safety. Tell me more about accident.
What I recall
is not the splintered door or scorched lot but the fact the universe
gave me you.
Accidents fuel accidents that are blessings, too.
What you don't
remember, I do. That night in question--its arson, its accident--
it was the first moment
I knew how to love you.”
It is this concept of fire and feeding that play on others, feed on others, seeks others that is so like how we as writers can write more creatively. That to “keep this world in motion we must have it,” as Paisley writes here and to keep our words nonstatic we must perpetually be making these new links to other things and other writers, to go beyond the scope of a single object within our writing and to create something new. Even this piece demonstrates that the use of a larger metaphor of fire, using words like “Fuels, seeks, scorched,” give feelings of need and of one that lasts. We could even go as far as to say the idea here of accident that ends in love, is much like how we as writers may find a topic accidentally, but then from it creates this burning moment of clarity that sticks with us enough to write it down, possible with the ability to ignite many other fires in readers-to-be-writers later.
Despite the useful ability to connect the dots between your own life experiences and the already accomplished publication of other writers in ways readers can more easily grasp with metaphors. At times, Paisley claims as a professional writer, tuning out the noise of her life can challenge her when writing. Since, as a writer, she notes these ties we mentioned all around, she find it difficult to focus on one piece of work. She explains it can be, “hard to meditate and get into the space to write. The more ambitious a piece of writing is, you have to understand there is not a ‘right,’ only that there is a lot of choices, alternative choices.” This turmoil can be found in many discourse communities, not only those involving writing, when people within those communities try to come to an understanding or consensus. These conflicts inside oneself or when others are involved in the process, can hinder creative writing like throwing a wrench into the machine as they say. Paisley also confesses that, “The enthusiasm for writing is hard to maintain, especially when you get overwhelmed when you think ‘I’m not sure where I am going or how I going to finish this out.’” In this way writing creatively armed with the tools of metaphor or the ability to see outside connections to your ideas can be a double edge sword. You may even begin to falter and start relying heavily on the familiar, which in writing we often call cliché, just like the one at the end of that last sentence and also the wrench statement before that. As a professional writer Paisley has developed methods to help her with these difficulties. One is to edit a piece she has written prior. This allows her to focus on something before writing and also to recap on her own voice, helping her to bring her voice into the new idea she wants to write. Another is that she will read work of authors she enjoys or feels connection to. She says that doing this “gives her a lot of courage to face that blank page,” and also when she reads work by an author she likes “it makes her want to write.” Just as we mentioned before, this is yet another way reading can help you as a writer to focus and to process what it is you are trying to tackle.
Being curious about the world can be a good indication that creative writing is a discipline a person may want to explore. Paisley finds it is in her constant indulges of her curiosity that keeps her interest in the creative writing field and so too should it become a habit of writers seeking that course. She states, “When you question something, it keeps you writing which becomes opportunities to start mining those ideas or subjects further.” This can lead to research in a way that fascinates instead of frustrates. Subjects that warrant even the act of further investigation can become foundations for many written works even beyond the subject it started out as. Paisley notices that the lack of interest in choosing a topic to write on is often another indication that a writer may not make it in the creative discipline. She finds that these writers wait to be told what to write before beginning. “Writers must want to write. If you can’t write on your own, you will never make it,” she comments. First you have to plunge into writing. And reflection and the act of editing can further the process still, by branching the ideas and concepts in ways that had only first taken seed. A piece of writing should also continue to be a process. One that is never finished and regularly exercised on a daily basis. As mentioned before ideas can feed one another and seek new avenues to follow.
This discipline to write is a major part of the discipline itself. In another segment of Paisley poem entitled Irises we can connect these principles to the need to pull and pick apart ideas, to feed until they have been fully laid out into the open or onto the page,
….and crows and wild dogs coming
to pick bones clean
among the remnants,
planks of roof and ellipses of iris
where once a garden stood.
The bones laid out like a piece of lace
spread on a table. How carefully
the work was done: the shape
An effective work found in the creative writing discipline has this kind of picked through display. It has been carefully prepared to give the piece its unique shape and shows us things that we may not have been thinking at the time before reading, like “where once a garden stood.” Despite when writing creatively you tend to borrow on other branches of writing and other writers through reading and comparison, know that in the end no two trees are alike just as no two written works will ever fully reflect the other. Though there is certain discourse within the discourse community of creative writing, it is this discourse that should be embraced because through it, we can find what is worth writing about and to write effectively, which for a good writer is everything. And when you let in everything it may just be your book that had been sought to fill a need for the next.
Work Cited
Rekdal, Paisley. "Poetry Daily: Irises, by Paisley Rekdal." Poetry Daily: Irises, by Paisley Rekdal. Coppercanyonpress., 17 Oct. 2016. Web. 06 Feb. 2017.
Rekdal, Paisley. Telephone interview. 25 Jan. 2017.
Rekdal, Paisley. "Fire." F__i__r__e_____a Poem by Paisley Rekdal. Bornmagazine, 1997. Web.
29 Jan. 2017.