Fortunately, however, for everyone there are some aspects of creative writing that can and must be learned. This involves research. To produce a great piece of literature a writer needs to engage in creative writing with the same degree of study, investigation and examination that one would need to engage in academic writing, or any other discipline. And while there are plenty of methods of research for creative writing, in this essay I will summarise them within four distinct categories:
1. Technique
Writers need to develop an understanding of the linguistics of the English language, including a practical knowledge of all the language tools, such as commas, full stops, quotation marks, ellipses, italics, section breaks, colons and semicolons, in order to effectively convey what they are trying to communicate. We can learn about spelling and grammar in texts like Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words (1984). For example, Bryson explains that the comma is the most abused and overused of punctuation marks in the English language, which is why, as a copyeditor, and proofreader, I have spent, half my career, just, deleting, them. Another example Bryson discusses is the ellipsis, which in spite of the fact that it can indicate any given length of time is only ever supposed to be three stops. (Some do argue that it is four stops if you use it at the end of a sentence because you also need to include the full stop.) The fact that so many bad writers think the number of stops that form an ellipsis is determined by the length of time that has passed is the reason editors always have to deal with one of these ……………………………………………………
Furthermore, technique refers to how a writer might handle literary systems in creative writing such as tense, perspective, voice, pace, time, and if a writer is multilingual, how to negotiate the use of two or more languages in Australian English. One time I tried to explain this to the monotoned universalist, Victor, whose latest story was constantly moving in and out of the past and present tense by accident. By this point Victor was a self-proclaimed Joycean scholar and quickly spat back, ‘James Joyce doesn’t follow any of these rules in Finnegans Wake.’ This was a total and typical misreading of what Joyce was doing – he was not misusing the language because he didn’t understand it, he was manipulating language to his will because he understood it so well. Indeed, the stronger one’s grasp of a language, the more one can bend the language, transform it, and reintroduce it as new language. To Victor I said, ‘Please don’t mix up your ignorance with Joyce’s genius.’ And that was the last time I saw him, a way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun …
2. Subject matter
If a writer is producing a work of fiction which concerns horseracing or mountain climbing or in my case boxing, it stands that the writer needs to do some research into the subject. This kind of research might involve practical application, as in you actually do some horseracing or mountain climbing or boxing, as well as some theoretical research into the field, for example investigating what mountaineers have said about mountain climbing or sports historians have said about boxing. If you are writing about people, then of course you need to do some research about these people. Now you’ve already done half the research if you’re writing about your own people, which is why writers are always encouraged to write what they know, not to mention that this is steeped in the politics of decolonisation, self-determination and empowerment, so hands off our stories, Whitie! But even if you are writing about an identity that is your own, you could investigate some of the creative and academic texts on your identity that are already out there. In Tamar Chnorhokian’s case it was certainly to her advantage that her novel The Diet Starts on Monday (Sweatshop, 2014), was about a physically and mentally challenged Armenian-Australian Apostolic girl from Fairfield and that she was a physically and mentally challenged Armenian-Australian Apostolic girl from Fairfield. However, after I read the original manuscript I said to Tamar, ‘What is your malfunction, numbnuts?’ Then I deleted two-thirds of the book in one reading, 40,000 words in total, and as she started over on an Apple computer so old it still had ‘Macintosh’ in the logo, I stood over her right shoulder and screamed into her ear: ‘Research food groups and how they each impact and shape our bodies, you worm! Research dieting programs that actually work and the technical processes involved in undertaking them, you slob! Research socio-economic and cultural factors that directly impact people’s health in Western Sydney, you loser!’ And while Tamar sobbed and read and typed, I continued shouting until I could feel the veins in my neck throbbing and my voice straining, ‘Read some literary criticism about Armenian literature, you sad case! Read creative fiction about fat people, you maggot!’ Finally, the manuscript was ready and Tamar was standing upright outside my office. Her eyes tipped back into her skull, her teeth bared, she held the new draft to her chest and said, ‘This manuscript is mine, there are many just like it, but this one is mine.’
Even if a writer’s subject matter is based on fantasy or science fiction it still requires a serious degree of research in order to create a convincing fictional realm. Stories about space travel need some understanding of orbital mechanics, which were developed and written about with detailed scientific accuracy and language in texts such as Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Stories about aliens or monsters need some understanding of the laws of nature, biology and anatomy, which were stitched together with disturbing consequences in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). (It is worth noting that Mary Shelley also drew from the most advanced scientific understanding of electricity and chemistry available in the early nineteenth century in order for Victor Frankenstein to bring his monster to life.) And stories about robots need some technical understanding of electronics, mechanics and robotics, which became a standard in the prolific number of short stories and novels written by science fiction writer and scientist Isaac Asimov throughout the last century, including most famously his collection of nine short stories called I, Robot (1950) (though claiming Asimov conducted research into robotics is an oxymoron since he was the one that invented the term ‘robotics’ while thinking it already existed).
3. Genre
This is the category of writing a writer chooses to work in, be it autobiography or autobiographical fiction or magic realism or romance or satire, or even a new, experimental or hybrid category. In addition to reading extensively within the genre you would like to write in, this also requires researching the academic and literary tradition of that genre – for example, understanding the history of the Gothic plays just as an important role in how a writer deals with the subject of vampires as does reading vampire novels, even if it is only to subvert the tradition. Vampires are a particularly relevant topic for me because every time I have taught creative writing in a girls’ high school since the Twilight series entered our global consciousness, I have been swamped with stories about some misogynist named Edward Cullen. My tolerance for this fad notwithstanding, I’ve often argued to these teenage girls that if they are in fact interested in producing creative writing about vampires they ought to do some research about the history of the vampire in literature: what does the vampire represent, what are the rules of the world in which the vampire exists and why. During my last workshop at Auburn Girls High School I said, ‘You need to know these rules even if it’s just to break them.’ One girl in a pink hijab responded, ‘Sir, do you mean like how Stephenie Meyer decided in Twilight that her vampires can go out into the sunlight?’
‘Exactly,’ I responded, ‘exactly.’
4. Form
What kind of text does a writer want to produce – is it a novel, novella or novelette? Is it a vignette or a short story? Is it a hybrid form, a short story written in limericks perhaps? Is it a poem, a prose poem, a slam poem? If, for example, you are interested in writing poetry, then before you start rhyming and rambling on about the moon and the stars, love and hate, life and death – the gospels of bad poetry – ask yourself, ‘What is a poem?’ Investigate the history of the poem from the root of the word to the day the word was roo
ted by hip-hop and rap music. I was a teenager when I discovered that the ancient philosophers and the contemporary gangsta rappers on each end of this spectrum had come together to create the poetry of Punchbowl Boys High School. Etched into my English desk like rust and stardust were the words: Jesus and Tupac are Muslim.
Next we need to get specific about the kind of poetry and poems a writer wants to produce. Let us say, for example, you are going to write a collection of sonnets. Obviously you need to read a variety of sonnets, but it would also help to examine the context of the sonnet, where it came from and what purposes it serves. You need to learn about the technical guidelines for writing a sonnet – and whether these rules have ever been broken and why and how and by whom. Finally, you can begin experimenting with your own sonnets and find someone who has expertise in the form that can revise them with you. Hopefully this will result in the kind of exchange I had with the skinniest Pacific Islander kid I ever met at Belmore Boys High School. I read out loud, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and he responded, ‘Shall I compare your pussy to my dick, bro?’ Behold the Bard of Belmore.
Perhaps the most complicated literary form is also the one that most bad writers attempt to produce – the novel. Some scholars argue that the novel is a relatively new form invented by English writers some time in the eighteenth century, while others argue that it is an ancient form, starting with Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, which was written in 1010. The novel has always tended to frighten people, from prohibitions because of controversial sexual content, such as Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), to fatwas because the novel has smeared the Prophet Muhammad, such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). What’s most intriguing about the novel to me is that it really has no parameters. A novel can be 127 pages and have no chapters, like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) or it can be 1488 pages, like Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993). A novel can be written as a collection of sonnets, in iambic pentameter, like another of Vikram Seth’s works, The Gold Gate (1986), or it can be told as a collection of vignettes, like Sandra Cisneros’s The House On Mango Street (2009). It can constantly jump first-person perspective, like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), or it can be divided into three parts, such as ‘heat’ and ‘water’ and ‘light’ in Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light (2014). A bad writer in Year Seven, who weighed 100 kilos and whose voice had not broken yet, demonstrated to me why so many young people in Australia are given the entirely wrong impression about the novel from a very young age. He said, ‘I am a novelist – I’ve written 300 pages and it has chapters.’ I told him that these were not the criteria that determine what is a novel and that it was the responsibility of his English teachers to explore with him the history and diversity of a form which has radically changed lives and shaped societies and cultures for as long as it has existed.
*
Last year I was facilitating a writers’ group for Penrith City Council, which in spite of the council’s attempt to attract young people drew only four participants, each of whom was old enough to be one of my grandparents. Of the four, only one had claimed to have any formal education in creative writing, but I’m certain she was lying because she came into the workshop barefoot from across the street and said that her stories were so advanced and radical that the professors at Western Sydney University had kicked her out of the course. And of the four, none of them had ever been published anywhere but in community arts anthologies, the kind that includes every participant with no edits or revisions. I spent hours listening to these seniors read what can only be described as ‘roses are red’ poems, filled with lines such as I saturate my heart and soul in your love. I also spent hours trying to offer them some helpful advice to improve their writing, to write something honest, specific, tangible, to use original metaphors and symbols that I could see in my mind’s eye, and to write something that was not a rehash of what they had been conditioned to believe a poem should be. One of the participants, who was named Harry and carried a walking stick, got so agitated by the idea that some educated Lebanese boy had tips for him that he began to shout at me, ‘You’re just another shifty Ayrab!’ Then while he swung his walking stick in my face, missing me by an inch, he said, ‘Go on, if you’re so clever give us a poem, go on, give us a poem!’
This essay has not been about offending bad writers, though I’m well aware that the truth is often offensive and hard to hear. This essay seeks to inspire bad writers, to encourage them to take creative writing more seriously and not to think of it as a God-given talent which just comes naturally. Creative writing is not a skill or profession bad writers can simply work out for themselves as they sit up late at night typing at their computers with dim lighting and the theme from Titanic playing in the background, reading back lines they wrote and telling themselves, that’s some good shit right there. This essay demands more from bad writers, because while I am certainly critical of bad writers, I also believe that bad writers who are interested in learning can become good writers. To those who are not interested in learning, however, I’ll say to you what I said to Harry: ‘Roses are red. Violets are blue. I’m not a poet. And neither are you.’
A Short History of the Italian Language
Moreno Giovannoni
Morè.
Morè.
Only an Italian can say that properly and there’s only one person left who calls me that. The rest are dead.
The first words I ever heard were Italian ones. The first word I ever spoke was an Italian word – papà. This was according to my poor mum, who stopped speaking Italian when her vocal cords froze, together with the rest of her, in a nursing home bed, a few weeks before she died. We sat with her and exchanged the occasional Italian word. We spoke Italian words to her even though we didn’t know if she could understand.
For the first three years of my life my only language was Italian. In the village where I was born Italian was in the air and the language went in through your soft baby skin and one day it came out your mouth, so you had no choice but to speak Italian.
Then they took me to Australia, where I spoke English with the Australians and Italian with my mother and father. This was the same Italian that the Australians used to call Eye-talian and the people who spoke it Eye-talians (and Eye-ties for short).
I became very good at English. I was the best speller in my class, probably in the world, and the best writer in the class. I was better at English than the Australian kids were. But in prep I struggled.
One day, at the age of four and a half, I came home from school distraught because I didn’t know how to spell ‘cheese’. I had written c-h-e-s-s. Cheese.
Another difficult word was ‘banana’. I didn’t know when to stop. I wrote bana-nana-nana- …
I asked my mother, who said it was the same as in Italian – banana – and she wrote it down for me. I thought it was a trick. How could you turn one language into another and the spelling be the same? Then I realised that what my mother had done was not just a simple trick, it was a magic trick. Italian was powerful. She had translated a word. I realised that if I could harness the power of the Italian language it could solve all my Australian word problems. On that day I became a translator. For the rest of my life I knew I would be able to say things in two languages. I knew there was more than one way of saying the same thing. The world was suddenly much bigger, richer and more complex than the Australian monolinguals realised. It gave me such confidence that ‘cheese’ and ‘banana’ were the only words I ever misspelled.
*
When my brother was born I waited for him to start speaking. Would he speak English or Italian? At first he didn’t speak at all. He just cried and cried so I shoved chunks of parmesan inside his little toothless mouth, because he was obviously hungry, but this upset my mother a lot. Sadly, my brother, when he did finally start, spoke English. English was in the Australian air and it went in through your skin when you were a baby and the English came out your mouth.
I also spoke Italian with family friends, people who visited on Sundays and ate hard little biscuits and drank small glasses of liqueur and strong cups of coffee. They were amazed at how well I spoke Italian and how at the age of five I could already read the Italian newspaper to my uncle Succhio who had only completed three years of primary school. When he wanted to know what was happening in the world he would hand me Il Globo and say: leggi.
At school in Australia I studied Italian and at university in Italy I studied English. The two languages were seeking some kind of equilibrium. Back in Australia at university I studied English and Italian literature.
*
When my children were born I waited to see what language they would speak and sadly they only spoke English. It was my fault and it wasn’t my fault. The law of natural and unnatural language applied. I didn’t know enough baby talk to communicate with them in Italian. I even asked my mother to teach me baby talk, but it was too hard and I gave up. The English language in the Australian air smothered them. It entered their little baby pores and grew there until one day they started speaking English. It was unnatural for them to speak anything else.
A language is like a mother. My biological mother was Italian but the language that raised me from the age of three was English. I would always love my biological mother and wish we could be reunited. I even wished we had never been separated.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 19
