CREATIVE WRITING AND STYLISTICS: REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION Approaches to Writing SERIES EDITOR: Graeme Harper (Oakland University, USA) PUBLISHED TITLES IN THIS SERIES WRITING SPECULATIVE FICTION Eugen Bacon WRITING FOR THE SCREEN Craig Batty and Zara Waldeback WRITING FICTION Amanda Boulter WRITING POETRY Chad Davidson and Greg Fraser WRITING SONG LYRICS Glenn Fosbraey and Andrew Melrose WRITING FOR THEATRE Kim Wiltshire CREATIVE WRITING AND STYLISTICS Jeremy Scott CREATIVE WRITING AND STYLISTICS: REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION CRITICAL AND CREATIVE APPROACHES Jeremy Scott BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Jeremy Scott, 2023 Jeremy Scott has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Scott, Jeremy (Jeremy David), author. Title: Creative writing and stylistics : critical and creative approaches / Jeremy Scott. Description: Revised and expanded edition.
| London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Series: Approaches to writing | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2022055806 (print) | LCCN 2022055807 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350372962 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350372955 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350372979 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350372986 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Creative writing. | English language–Style.
Classification: LCC PN187 .S36 2023 (print) | LCC PN187 (ebook) | DDC 808–dc23/eng/20230425 LC record available at https://lccn.gov/2022055806 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.gov/2022055807 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-7296-2 PB: 978-1-3503-7295-5 ePDF: 978-1-3503-7297-9 eBook: 978-1-3503-7298-6 Series: Approaches to Writing Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.com and sign up for our newsletters. For Hanne and Lily, of course. vi CONTENTS Series preface viii Acknowledgementsix Introduction 1 1 Seeing: Looking through language 7 2 Creativity: Making (a)fresh 25 3 Bricks: A creative writing grammar 39 4 Structure: Narrative and form 59 5 Looking: Who tells? Who sees? 83 6 Voices: Speech and thought 105 7 World-building: A cognitive poetics of creative writing 135 8 Style: Figurative language 165 9 Blends: Metaphor 183 10 Soundscapes: Patterns, sound, sense 197 Bibliography224 Index233 SERIES PREFACE Books in the Approaches to Writing series actively explore the creative and critical practices of creative writing, offering practice-focused advice as well as defining work in creative writing criticism, and how this differs from critical approaches taken in Writing Studies, Literary or Cultural Studies.
In this way, books in the series offer key links between creative practice and critical understanding. These books are entirely accessible to students but are challenging enough to provide reference for creative writing teachers in all levels of education, and even to encourage researchers in Creative Writing Studies to explore this field further and build on established ideas. Each title in the Approaches to Writing series takes a similar (if not identical) form based on linking creative practice with ways of increasing our critical awareness. Readers will notice that the individual authors have interpreted this creative-critical brief in different ways – and have been inspired to bring their own ways of working to the fore.
Generally, series authors are encouraged to think in terms of ‘Foundations’, where readers are introduced to both creative and critical conceptualizing which occupies the more ‘canonical’ aspects of creative practice and critical understanding of that practice (in terms of a genre or adjacent field of study). They are then encouraged think in terms of ‘Speculations’, where the reader is presented with other possibilities, alternative/ comparative ways of seeing, alternative/comparative ways of writing creatively, and ways of contextualizing both this practice and the critical understanding. In some fashion, both these elements of each book generate brief summaries and frequently authors highlight the creative/critical discussions by offering thought-provoking activities and creative writing exercises. Approaches to Writing offers a wealth of usable material for writers and teachers alike, from the beginning student to the advanced professional.
Series authors are experts in their respective areas and combine their own engagement with creative writing practice with advanced knowledge of contemporary critical understanding of creative writing. Whether wondering on the foundations of a genre or form, or on an approach to way of writing creatively, or looking for encouragement to speculate and try your own new creative or critical approaches, drawing on your own practice or your thoughts about the practice of other creative writers, books in the Approaches to Writing series offer lively ideas. They explore potential directions, and they present you with an exciting range of understanding and knowledge to enhance your own practice. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The ideas and resources in this book come from many different places.
There are so many people to thank that I don’t know where to start. Inevitably I will forget some people, and I am truly sorry for that. Let’s begin by thanking all of my friends and colleagues from the Poetics and Linguistics Association, but in particular Billy Clark and Alison Gibbons for their advice and support. Thanks too to series editor Graeme Harper for his dedication to the cause.
I also owe huge thanks to current and former colleagues at the University of Kent: Patricia Debney, for inspiration and poetry; Nancy Gaffield, for ideas, exercises and more poetry; and Amy Sackville, for allowing me a forum to talk about some of this stuff. And thanks to my writing partner and friend Greg Lawrence – a magnificent writerandreader who makes things happen. And of course, this book would not exist without the constant inspiration, magic, joy, riotous laughter and enthusiasm of my students. You know who you are.
You all rule. x INTRODUCTION Creative style The idea for this book came from an observation: that many people think about creative writing in the same way as Plato did 2,000 years ago. He writes in The Republic: The poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind. (Leitch 2001: 35) In other words, the writer in the throes of creation all but abandons any critical faculty – any understanding of how texts ‘work’ or of the language from which they are put together – and devotes every ounce of their energy to self-expression, like an ancient shaman, out of their mind on a secret blend of herbs that only they know the recipe for.
The assumption often appears to be that beginning creative writers (or any writer at all) will write well if pushed in at the deep end and asked to produce full stories and poems, or to ‘just write’. While, self-evidently, this may well produce good results in some cases, I wondered whether there was not something to be drawn from more critical approaches to the discipline – especially when it is being practised in an academic context: school, college, university. An analogy could be drawn with learning to paint. Would your first experience of an art class be to sit down and paint a still life in oils? Continuing this analogy: is there not an argument for complementary approaches to creative writing practice that view the subject in a similar way, i.
that a writer has available to them a set of tools and techniques, in the same way that an artist has a range of colours on their palette and a spread of different-sized brushes in the China pot next to the easel? Where we might learn to lighten a deep red by adding a drop of white paint, so a writer might benefit from learning how a particular mood in a piece of writing can be ‘foregrounded’ by careful selection of particular lexical fields, or by repetition, or parallelism. Just as a painter learns to use shading to create the illusion of depth, so can a writer learn to use fracturing syntax, creative punctuation and linguistic deviation to convey the illusion of being inside the mind of a character. Of course, approaching creative writing practice from the perspective of ‘craft’ is not new. In dialogue with Plato, Aristotle’s Poetics constitutes the first rigorous categorization of the form of verbal art.
Poetics is a scientific anatomization, in opposition to Plato’s Creative Writing and Stylistics: Revised and Expanded Edition obsession with ‘inspiration’,1 just as can be found in Aristotle’s work on classifications of the natural world, and as such anticipates stylistics’s rigorous accounts of the forms of literary discourse. During the Renaissance, it was treated as rulebook or manual for composition, one of the first European works of literary criticism. So, right at the dawn of the enterprise of criticism itself we find an interest in the processes of composition, not just textual analysis. So, the idea of approaching creative writing from perspective of technique is not new; approaching it from the perspective of a discipline rooted in linguistics, I believe, is.
The discipline I am referring to is that of (literary) stylistics,2 and if this book has a manifesto, it is this: that stylistics has an enormous amount to offer the practising writer through widening their understanding of what we could call the ‘expressive mechanics’ of language. If this sounds a little too dry, don’t be alarmed. There is plenty to be found here on creativity, aesthetics and artistic appreciation too. There is a debate around whether creative writing in an academic context should be taught creatively through, say, workshops and peer feedback, or more didactically, with emphasis on craft and critical theory.
Some in fact would argue that creative writing cannot be ‘taught’ at all. I don’t agree with that, but nor do I wish this book in any way to suggest that a firm choice has to be made in terms of the first or second approach; in fact, I think we can have our cake and eat it. There are many different ways to approach the subject, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I see this book’s contribution as an add-on to existing methodologies – as a new, complementary perspective.
In keeping with the traditions of stylistics more generally, the approach of this book is eclectic, democratic, diverse and accessible. I’ve used examples from a very wide range of texts from a range of cultural contexts: from high fantasy and science fiction to hip hop to punk poetry to the English Romantic odes. In the same spirit of opening up I would add that intense and rigorous awareness of the stuff of language can in and of itself lead to creativity. As we will see, creativity can arise from within language, and not only from sources external to it; in other words, inspiration often comes from and within the act of writing itself, and is available to everyone, not just a few gifted or privileged individuals.
As such, this book has little to say in answer to that perennial question of ‘where do ideas come from?’, other than: ‘often, from language itself ’ – from a kind of playfulness and an openness to the infinite possibilities of transformation which language offers. Creativity, it must surely be agreed, is directly accessible through language, and thus to everyone.