Bread, Circuses and Creative Writing
Why are some writers and reviewers so quick to use the term 'creative writing' as a pejorative signal? A reviewer in the last issue of this Journal does this not once, but twice. In the first instance, he praises a poet whose work indicates "... soul ... and not just mindless reportage or Creative Writing exercises". Later, he reviews an anthology which has "an almost total lack of imagination", its poems suffering from "... Creative Writing Exercise syndrome". I am aware that the reviewer specifies 'exercises' rather than the courses themselves, but it is nevertheless clear in both cases that the term 'creative writing' is intended to flag up 'bad writing'.
I write, not in defence of creative writing courses; they may stand or fall on their own merits. What I want to do is show that using such a quick and easy formula for dismissing the work of another writer is cheap, lazy, and even downright dangerous. It is cheap to the point of costing nothing at all in terms of thought. It is lazy because the writer is content with a sloppy reliance on the tropes of other lazy writers, in what has become a lazy vicious circle: knocking creative writing gives a spurious air of knowing better, so let's appear clever and join in. It is as if the reasoning runs like this: everyone knows that you can't teach creativity, and people foolish enough to fork out for a course of it are talent-free saddos, led up the garden (or campus) path by opportunists in ivory towers who see them coming a mile off, the academic equivalent of second-hand car salesmen. So 'creative writing', tossed with a sneer, and with or without its capitals, into a review, serves as a kind of mantra to evoke a warm sniggery glow in readers' bosoms.
Well, not in this reader's bosom. Writing such as this is dangerous in the way that unthinking acceptance of any received opinion is dangerous. It is this third aspect that I wish to examine further.
The plebeians of Ancient Rome only wanted bread and circuses to keep them happy and out of mischief. The plebs had no schooling; they did not vote. For a grown-up twenty-first-century population with the fate of countries and lives in its hands, bread and circuses make poor nourishment. Yet more and more it seems that bread and circuses are what we receive: we have enough to eat, and we get plenty of entertainment. But that is where it stops. It may well suit certain powers to keep us in the effective status of Roman plebeians while offering the illusion of participatory democracy.
We may vote, but our choices can be manipulated; we may speak, but our voices, however many thousands of us take to the streets and shout, will be ignored.
We need our creative people. Writers of fiction, like Dickens and Hardy, and Angela Carter, can reveal truths to us about society, about history and about ourselves. Writers of poetry are the "movers and shakers of the world" to quote the Irish poet Louis MacNeice. I do not mean simply that poetry should serve as a political tool, although it can, but in the wider sense poetry tests and can break through the bonds of blandness and limited awareness that determine how we usually live and how we perceive the world. Look at how Carol Anne Duffy turns the tables on the great men of history. Look at how Shakespeare deals with human power and human folly. Writers can raise us above the status of plebs, up to where we need to be in order to function effectively in the world. In short, writers can make us think. Don Paterson says that writing both evokes and invokes. I think it can also provoke. A writer who merely follows a current prejudice provokes nothing, moves and shakes nothing, in the end serving those who would keep the plebs down. Orwell warned how people's thinking can be restricted and manipulated by the control of language. In the face of advertisers and politicians, adept at hijacking our thoughts and feelings for their own ends, we have to work to keep our language fresh and real. There is an absolute imperative upon the guardians of language, i.e. those who write for publication, to use our precious and powerful tools with care.
Of course creativity cannot be taught - everybody knows that. It can, however, be fostered. Just as a musically creative person will still need lessons in order to play or compose well, and a visually creative person can benefit from skills imparted at Art School, so creative writing courses exist for people who have the urge to write, and to write better. If we acknowledge that we need writers, we should respect the people and places that support and encourage them. For anyone trying to score easy points by pressing the "creative writing" button, it may be advisable to pause for a moment to consider whose interests are really being served.
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