Teaching creative writing

We all teachers and trainers now and then find it rewarding to be reading a riveting story or musical poem written by our own students or future teachers. It is not an easy task, especially when it comes to introducing the writing process and how motivation and inspiration could be awaken so as to let our students see their minds and transfer their imagining to black and white.

            Initially, we need to come to terms with the writing process and how this can be organised pedagogically speaking. Hyland (2002: 6-33) proposes three types of approaches: text-oriented, writer-oriented, and reader-oriented. Perhaps, we may agree on the assumption that creative writing could be better connected to the second approach since it attempts to analyse what good writers do with a writing task. In the writer-oriented approach, writing could be seen as a personal expression where the process is as important as the product itself. This process does not need to be seen as linear for there is constant dialogue between the writer and the writing or among all the variables that play a role in the creative process of literature. This dialogue, from a writing-as-a-situated-act position, is influenced by the personal attitudes and social experiences the writer brings to writing. In sum, it is within this approach that we can place the voices that a writer can hear when involved in a close encounter with a painting to look for inspiration.

In the literature it may be widely found that one way to inspire our students is by introducing literary works of art as reading matter which will prompt their own writing initiatives.  Belcher & Hirvela (2000: 7-9) believe that the use of literature has been recognised as a powerful tool to develop communicative competence, therefore being useful for the development of writing skills, creative writing even. This belief that literary texts could be used as examples of writing in composition classes may be enhanced if ekphrasis is introduced in such a way that students are not only exposed to literature based on paintings but also on paintings themselves for students to write about.

 What is ekphrasis?

            According to Verdonk (2005:231), ekphrasis refers to ‘a sub-genre of poetry addressing existent or imaginary works of art’ and its etymology takes us to the Greek word ‘description’. It goes without saying then that this sub-genre is anything but new as it originates in classical rhetoric, the technique of describing visual art in a literary work – with all the demands of vividness which that involves (Grogan, 2009: 167). However, Heffernan (1991: 297- 298) points out that although the term ekphrasis, which he defines as ‘the verbal representation of graphic representation’ (ibid: 299), has been known since the Greek both in creative writing and rhetoric, it is new in the literary academe even though scholars have been doing and writing about ekphrasis without using such a word. For example, Wellek and Warren (1963: 125-135) devote a whole chapter to ‘Literature and the Other Arts’ making reference to the relationship between painters and writers without the use of our key term in this paper.

            We can discuss and create ekphrasis from two different senses (Verdonk 2005: 233). On the one hand, we can create ekphrasis in a wider sense through the detailed description of any real or imagined object, scene or abstraction. On the other hand, in a narrow sense, we can see it in the creation of poetry addressing not only paintings but also architectural art, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats for instance as well as artefacts such as weapons, or even food, for example ‘Oda a las papas fritas’ by Pablo Neruda. It follows that ekphrasis as a literary figure covers both actual, that is real, as well as notional, i.e. fictional, objects.

Ekphrasis seems to be the solely realm of poetry. Nonetheless, it should not be limited to a mere poetic spatial account of a painting, but rather a narrative account, a storytelling representation, of a visual account (Heffernan 1991:302). Perhaps such a view may be inviting us to explore the creation of short stories or other narrative structures therefore introducing ekphrastic narration. Whether we talk about ekphrastic poetry or narration, we still need to look further and see how such a connection, poetry-paintings, can be fruitful, that is, what benefits these two artistic expression can offer in our teaching practices.

Firstly, painting and poem constitute new realities or alternate spaces in which the relationships between such phenomena exist and signify on formal, structural levels (Wyman, 2010: 41). This means that we will be looking not only at time in writing and space in painting, a traditional view, but also at how these two dimensions can be encountered simultaneously in both life representations. These encounters could be further exploited if we consider that, as Wyman (ibid: 44) asserts, the word and the picture, that is, word-making and form-building are one and the same as both function as self-regulated language systems. It is therefore our task to introduce our students to these interrelated systems, how they operate and how they can be combined in the creative writing process of poetry.

This interrelationship may be better understood if we bring two other terms into the picture: enargeia and empathy. By enargeia, we mean ‘the commitment to creating intensely vivid images in the mind’s eye of the reader’ (Grogan, 2009: 168). Such a view entails that the creative writing process our students will be exploring needs to be visual through words, allowing the reader of their poems, to imagine unique paintings. Grogan (ibid: 170) adds that enargeia can take a reflective turn inward, merging seen and imagined elements in ambiguous phrasing. The confusion between the material object, its referent and the writer’s imagination and craft puts the reader at a loss to know what exactly is being described. This is exactly what our students should be encouraged to pursue, this word-image game in which boundaries are pushed to limits where the reader, and even the writer, does not know whether he or she is writing/reading or painting/viewing.

Such a game leads us to the term empathy. Amir (2009: 234) views this term as an affect which often accompanies ekphrasis, which has a subjective as well as an intersubjective dimension. Empathy in ekphrasis, Amir adds (ibid: 242), accounts for the dialogical relationship established between writer/reader/painter/viewer where each actor here is searching for something: identity. This is a key issue in creative writing as we teachers need to invite our students to look for their own identity in their productions, to create a persona that will be the result of their own imaginings and cultural background.

The second and last part appearing next Wed... :)