Book 2 _ Chapter 3: Invented Voices (Page.101_134)
Creative Writing: purpose and process: (Page.101_103)
Creative writing is a discipline that is about process.
You can't study it unless you try it, not at least because the aim is to reflect on your writing at the planning stage, during composition and when you have finished.
A discipline creative writing includes:
looking at the existing texts.
Analyses the texts.
Thepurposes of analyzing the creative writing are different:
1 _It gives you the idea of how you might write your own material.
2 _To give you sense of what might or might not work for you as a writer.
3 _To understand the dynamic of writing in action.
creative writing courses of study it gives you a wide range of texts in order to think about strategies and tactics rather than to analyze content and intention.
So and in other words creative writing is about:
1_Reading so that you can find and hone your own style.
2_Finding and honing the voice of characters and speakers you create.
People writing work can give you a reference points to analyze your work.
Creative writings ask you to:
Create stories or sequences of images and to work through the best way of engrossing a reader or audience.
To at generation idea.
Teaches you ways of refining language and stricter so these narratives or sequences have maximum impact.
Consist a drafting and editing what you have written:
1_Considering alternative ways of phrasing.
2_Making decisions about each question as what you need to leave in or leave out.
3_How best to sharpen the focus on what you wrote.
Discussion (Page.103)
It describes the writing from page 102 and view about the passage:
Termed poor and clumsy writing.
Glaring problems.
There is absence of dialogue.
It's uninhabited by the voices of characters.
Voices and creative writing (Page.104_111)
From chapter 1 and 2 you saw that speech works in various everyday contexts (How people use language often very creatively to communicate with one another).
And chapter 3 will make you familiar with the speech and conversations in fiction, play, film, poems and life writing.
.Life writing: is "term used to cover both autobiographical and biographical writing".
The great deal creative writing can be recognizing by the voices which they are necessarilyrepresentations or approximations of how people really talk.
In prose fiction and drama (the aim is often to create an illusion of reality to make you feel as if you are eavesdropping real thing).
The main aims of speech are to give readers or audiences an insight into the characters and the action.
Speech doesn't have the quality of transcript (because a transcript can be quit dull and relatively directionless).
The invented speech of fiction and drama is necessarily sharper and sometimes more evasive than it might be in 'real life' because the aim is to tell a story and there is a further complication in one genre may not work in another.
In this chapter Genre is used in two ways and they are:
1_Genre means "Genus" in science.
2_Genre means "sort or kind".
Creative writing is used to distinguish between the different kinds of genre such as:
1_Poetry.
2_Fiction.
3_Drama.
4_Life writing.
And genre is often used a little confusingly to mean something like"
The genre of 'drama', are:
1_Screenplay.
2_ Stage play.
3_Radio play.
Thegenre of 'fiction', are:
1_Crime.
2_Horror.
3_Romance.
4_Science fiction.
5_Fantasy.
(P.S: the 'genre of fiction' is known as'sub-genre'
, and it doesn’t work on the genre of drama).
_The novelist and screenwriter 'Raymond Chandler' noted the 'Cain' dialogue that it was 'written for the eye not for the ear' and that means (it might work on page but would sound wrong to hear out loud), and he rewrote the dialogue so it suites the film.
_One of the amazing parts of a really good dialogue is that it gives you the impression of being in the vernacular withoutbeing in the 'vernacular'.
_Fictional characters, created characters, have to communicate information not only to another character but also to an audience, and they may well have to communicate information about the story in which they 'exist'.
_You can have impression of some aspects of every day speech to convince a reader or a listener which is intended to mimic or to give this impression some is repetition and some hesitations and these are included to suggest the anxiety.
_The writing depends for the most part on being active on possessing a forward movement.
Distinguishing One Voice from another (Page.112_114):
_Voices are crucial to writers because voices mark characters out and characters are at the heart of almost every good story.
_Nothing is more un-dramatic than having all the characters in exactly the same way, the way characters express themselves is the key to their identity.
_When the writer make someone speak in a drama or prose fiction, he may be leading or misleading the reader as to what direction the story will take.
_The voice we provide may offer up facts; (whole, partial, or illusory),but we are likely to concentrate on the process of creating the character through voices.
_We change the way in which we interpret each line we read in a story by in which the context were spoken or the intention of the speaker.
_The creative writing is nearly always concerned with building up characters by indirect means and that allows the reader and the audience to engage with the characters and the story itself.
The Narrator's Voice (Page.115_117):
_In fiction and in life writing stories are told.
_It is not merely the voices of people in a story that engage a reader.
_Life writing needs to consider the narrator point of view from which the story is being told.
_There are many ways to engage a reader and it depends on the life writing strategy, some of these strategies are:
1_You might use quite a neutral narrative voice in which case the significance of the voice passes to greater degree view of one of the characters.
2_You might tell the story from the point of view of one of the characters who is directly involved in action.
_A peripheral narrator is called 'witness narrator'.
_ Most of the autobiographical life writing stories are told by the point of view of the first-person, and first-person narrator voice is important because it is likely to be biased or opinionated.
_First person voice can be made is unreliable and it been used by writers in creative writing in order to create tension in a story and forcing the reader to assess and reassess their own responses.
_If you want to have your own creative writing you will need to:
1_Build a character by creating a fictional voice.
2_To remember that it's always important not to be implied by the way the character speaks.
3_To set ideas in your mind and think of the best situation in which to place your characters, and how the characters develop.
4_Entails forward planning, the earlier stage, finding the voices, finding the characters and editing what you have done afterwards.
:Narrators and Characters (Page.118)
_In order to study this part of chapter 3, you will focus on the short story "Pretty Ice" by "Mary Robison" to understand the narrators and characters.
_When you look at the short story "Pretty Ice" by "Mary Robison" which the narrator is one of 3 characters, and you will focus on two aspects, they are:
1_How the narrator speaks when she is narrating.
2_How the characters (including the narrator) speak to each other.
_When you read the story "pretty Ice" by "Mary Robison" you need to be alert to:
1_ the way the narrator developed the voices.
2_Think of how she hopes or expects that the reader will react.
_A story involves more than voice, it involves:
1_Structure.
2_Time.
3_Theme.
4_Plot (the ordering of the events in the story).
_When the characterization of a story comes from?
The characterization will come from what the narrator and characters do as well as they say.
_When a creative writer is developing a voice, this voice needs to be consistent in tone, in what we might call attitude.
Dialogue (Page.119_121):
_ How can we define that the 'Dialogue' in creative writing?
When term we give to what takes place when 2 or more characters are speaking.
_It's fairly rare to find several characters talking in the same scene, even when there are many characters in a:
_Novel, play or film.
_On radio (because it's difficult for listeners to follow).
_In short stories (which tend to focus on a few characters and a relatively short space of time, as the short story "Pretty Ice" by "Mary Robison".
_Dialogues never copies real-life conversations. It simply talks on the air of real-life conversations.
_From Stein observes (Page119); a good dialogue in a story needs to be oblique responses.
_Stein is crucially right about opening sallies fictional dialogues and that means that platitudes need to be avoided especially at the outside of a scene.
_The dialogue in "Pretty Ice" by "Mary Robison" moves away from "real" conversation in the way it was edited and presented to us by the writer. And the exchanges are there to invite us to speculate about the character.
_"Mary Robison" is advancing the story, and since it's fundamental of most good storytelling that character drives it.
_One of the principal ways of defining characters in text is by his or her (the character) voice.
_The dialogue between two characters goes on more than exchange, such as:
The innocuous opening conversation gambit is derailed by the replay. This is not to imply that creative dialogue consists of characters refusing to answer questions, or being deliberately obtuse.
_ A conversation that consisted entirely of stand-offs would become tedious.
Dialogue has to do more that establish the act of speech. The interaction of the voices has to move a story on and make the reader or audience want to move on with it.
Subtext (Page.122_125)
_Subtext: is what the conversation beneath the words is communicating (both between characters, and to the reader/audience).
_Harold Painter refers in his speech to two kinds of subtext, they are:
1_The implication of characters not speaking and there are being in silence.
2_ the implication of what the characters actually mean when they are speaking.
_Harold Painter is making an important point in his speech, that he might be regarded as having made the art of meaningful silence his own. What character says doesn't necessarily coincide with what he or she means.
_It's important for any creative writing from any genre to have some sense of the subtext in your head and what the character is really saying.
P.S: (You don't need to have an absolutely precise interpretation on your head or a parallel set of statementsthat constitutes the subtext).
_In Jules Feiffer interview he remarks that he has 'often been surprised by what his characters have to say each other. You get them going and they take off on their own'.
_Many writers discovered their characters in the process of creating them.
_Writers of scripts for stage screen or radio give their scripts to actors and directors for interpretation, just as writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry surrender their voices to readers.
_ There are many way of reading extract from a play, as actors would have to do. (It is true that it would be easier in the context of the whole play but every line does need some close attention).
_The activity from Page (125_126) show us some interesting point in the short play dialogue "Three More Sleepless Nights" by "Caryl Churchill" because it's a little unpredictable important in any medium (it shows echoing, questioning, the text shows the voice are distinctive like animated and laconic, the pattern of the characters language is different, there is a contrast between the characters).
Subtext and prose fiction (Page.126_129):
_ The creative writers in other genres (Prose and poetry) also have to reach a stage in which they hand over their voice and texts for interpretation by readers.
_As a reader you can indicate a subtext as a writer and it is important that you do, but you cannot reach the stage where a reading of your voice and texts is definitive. Cause readers bring their own experiences and prejudices and personalities on a text.
_The solution for more creative writing might be for prose writer too add direction for instance by the use of verbs an adverbs.
_The trouble that the text will start to become unwieldy once you, via your narrator, interpret the voices for the reader. And it will be filled with signals that you will crowed your reader out.
_Creating a short dialogue between two people is harder to do in prose that it is in stage or film drama.
In drama, fewer words will usually be required because the actor will be able to hint at subtext using body language, and by altering the tone and timbre of their voices.
In film, because of the use of close-ups, it is possible to have significant 'conversation' with very few words being spoken.
_In a prose fiction you have to supply the context and give us some insight into what the character may be thinking, and you have to use adverbs and powerful verbs to do this.
_You can use as a narrator technique which allows you to look into a character's head and to hear their thoughts. In effect, a kind of subtext being brought to the surface for the reader's inspection.
_Free indirect speech: is a way when the writer attempts to let us look into the thoughts of more than one character in a story.
Voices from Real Life (Page.128_129):
_Life writers (Autobiographers and Biographers) have an interesting challenge in creating the voices of the people who usually lived or are living, they have to achieve a degree of fidelity to the original.
_The voice in conversation is going to be recreated since none of us possesses perfect recall.
_Life writers have much the same task as writer of prose fiction: they have to edit any recreated dialogue so that the speech is believable and gives an insight into a character.
_A great deal of life writing sits interesting on the fence between fiction and fact, and life writing is often distinguishable from fiction only its stated intention.
The differences between a real life writing and prose are:
There are many novels that have been discovered later to have been highly autobiographical and many autobiographies that have subsequently turned out to have played fast and loose with the truth.
_The prose writing borrows the skills of such as: the structure, characterization, narrative and voice from fiction.
______
Transcript, Oral History Theatre and Verbatim theatre (Page.130_133):
This section is giving you examples of life writing that have elected to remain faithful to what has been recorded and transcribed.
_Oral History is recording of voices by social historian most notably "Charles Parker"
Most notable "Charles Parker" he has over sixty or seventy year history that is over a period when equipment became portable and from time when the BBC radio services became interested in presenting the language of dialect. The creative writers found this process very interesting and faithful.
Charles Parker:
_Radio producer with BBC.
_He was the key figure in the creating of oral history.
_His work was about recording the words of the working men and women for radio programs.
Mass-Observation:
Organization founded in 1937 to record the opinions of volunteer diarists on a range of social issues.
_Created by "Tom Harrison" "Charles Madge" and "Humphrey Jennings"
_All the archives of this organization at the University of Sussex.
_The most well-known products in its archives were "Housewife" and "Victoria Wood" TV adaptation of the diaries of "Nella Last".
_One of the attractions of recorder speech is the authority of authenticity.
_Authority can take a variety of forms. So many writers (especially film makers) invest their work with authority by stating that the events to be witnessed are based on a 'true story'.
_Oral History Theater and verbatim Theater are extremely conscientious about fidelity.
_Oral History Theater: is an overarching term used to describe drama that used transcripts to a greater or less degree.
_Verbatim Theater: is a more specific term used of drama that is almost entirely constructed from transcript and occasionally, public documents.
_How "Rob Davis" did use a material spoken by real people in his stage script for TV and Radio?
_He turned the original monologue into a dialogue shared between characters, who they sometimes echo each other, address each other, or address the audience.
_He dramatize the transcript by editing it, changing it context and multiplying the voices.
_He added repetitions and pauses to give the pieces greater tension and drama.
_From "Rob Davis" point of view that stage adaptation requires great speed, more activity more for the audience to focus upon.
_What interesting about "Rob Davis" work is that it operates with integrity he involves those whose writing he has transcribed in the process of staging a play.
_Ralph writing work known that it:
_It may not alter the words but he edits them together.
_Conflate occasional characters.
_Stitches the many excerpts together into a coherent whole.