Creative Writing Powerpoint

1. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
SPEAKING AND PERFORMING
The magic anthill
• Writing in performance is an art form, just as drama is, and
requires as much attention to detail
• As a new writer, you need to find a place where people other
than yourself, your tutor and your workshop think of you as a
writer
• A new writer must create an audience
• teaching writing can also be performative, but the best teaching
in writing workshops is more centred on students
• Publication is not everything, and book promotion is only a
small part of creative writing in performance.

2. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
SPEAKING AND PERFORMING
Audience as reader
• A book or portfolio of writing signals finality for its writer and
potentiality for its reader
• Live performance renders your writing into something
provisional.
• The spoken performance of your language escapes books by
this means and audiences read you as the messenger, not the
message, of your writing

3. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
SPEAKING AND PERFORMING
Audience as reader
• Only twelve per cent of what an audience receives and
understands is made up of the words they hear. The rest is
made up of the performer’s body language, dress sense, mood
and tone of voice
• although live readings can be merely promotions, they are also
entertainments, or an art form in themselves

4. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
SPEAKING AND PERFORMING
Audience as reader
• We should aim, first, at clarity (as in our writing), then aim at
bringing the listener into the work (as we would a reader, by
sleight of style)
• although live readings can be merely promotions, they are also
entertainments, or an art form in themselves
• The audience is a reader and, like the reader of a book, the
audience is active
• Mary Kinzie alerts us to the ‘two chronic errors in the audible
reading of verse, sing-song and reading as if verse were prose’
(1999: 486).

5. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
SPEAKING AND PERFORMING
Creating a Audience
• If they choose not to go to creative writing, then we should do
everything in our power to open creative writing
• New creative writers need to reinvent the world where fine
• literature drew its audience to it, and did not look down on them
• The audience is a reader and, like the reader of a book, the
audience is active
• Take lessons from street theatre – give an apparently
‘spontaneous’ literary performance in unorthodox venues such
as a public park or shopping mall

6. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
VOICE WORK
The tongue’s arrow
• Regularly practise the projection of your own voice. You need to
do this whether you use a microphone or not.
EXERCISES FOR ACTORS
• use the relaxation exercise above
• stand in a room with other members
• Take one phrase from Shakespeare at random
• move around the room having one arm raised
• cease moving and pass the phrase from one to another,
raising your arm slowly to point at the person who will say
it next

7. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
VOICE WORK
The tongue’s arrow
• Regularly practise the projection of your own voice. You need to
do this whether you use a microphone or not.
EXERCISES FOR ACTORS
• use the relaxation exercise above
• stand in a room with other members
• Take one phrase from Shakespeare at random
• move around the room having one arm raised
• cease moving and pass the phrase from one to another,
raising your arm slowly to point at the person who will say
it next

8. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
VOICE WORK
The tongue’s arrow
• As In Your Voice and How to Use It, Cicely Berry, Voice Director
of the Royal Shakespeare Company, says: as you release the
breath into sound the whole of your chest cavity will add its
vibrations and resonance and contribute to the sound . . . Your
whole body becomes part of the sound, giving it solidity,
firmness and edge . . . The voice will spring of its own impulse –
like loosing an arrow. (2003: 31) Pools

9. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
VOICE WORK
Pools and stream of speech
• Many creative writers use the page of a manuscript or book as
a screen behind which to hide
• Before you read, look at the audience; even talk to some
audience members in order to break the ice and get a few of
them on your side. While you are reading, look up regularly;
even look one or two of the audience in the eye for a moment,
as you read. Try to look at everybody at least once.

10. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
VOICE WORK
Pools and stream of speech
FOUR VERBAL EQUIVALENTS OF
“LOOKING UP” AT THE AUDIENCE
• Pausing places silences into your reading
• Changing the pitch and inflection of voice will maintain
interest
• Altering the pace
• changing the volume

11. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
VOICE WORK
Reading a reading
• if you are not interested in reading the work of other authors,
why should anybody be interested in reading you? The same
goes for creative writing in live performance. You learn by going
to festivals of new writing, and to live readings, and watching,
hearing, then imitating, writers in performance.

12. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
READING TECHNIQUES AND MUSIC
A charm
• plan and prepare in order to make the reality of it possess
inevitable magic. Sift the work you are going to read and what
you
• Intrigue the audience with some anecdote about a work’s
composition, but keep your commentary brief or you risk
making it sound more interesting
• The length and language of this explanation should be
economical
• Overstate nothing; over-explain nothing

13. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
READING TECHNIQUES AND MUSIC
A charm
• With a novel or book of creative nonfiction, read short excerpts
that tug on a reader’s curiosity, or which are playful, relaxing the
audience. With poetry, choose poems that resonate strongly
with your own speaking voice
• consider distributing a copy of this poem to the audience
• always undercut this time and never exceed it

14. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
READING TECHNIQUES AND MUSIC
Space
• Both you and they are affected by the space in which the
performance takes place
• music or visual display as part of your performance, it is vital
this is arranged, set up and tested well before your reading

15. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
READING TECHNIQUES AND MUSIC
Set
• rely on having a ‘set’, a standard reading that you tailor to fit to
different times
• You may wish to play variations on your work, to add or remove
words or whole paragraphs or stanzas to suit that time, place
and audience, something a popular or jazz musician would do
as a matter of course

16. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
READING TECHNIQUES AND MUSIC
A cold open
• Begin your reading with practised intent by launching into a
longer piece only to bring yourself up short after a minute, and
then re-begin your reading in amore orthodox fashion. For
performance poets this would be a routine manipulation of
audience; for literarywriters it is something to which you might
aspire. These kinds of literary guerrilla tactics – memorisation,
oral storytelling, audience participation, variations,
improvisations, cold opens – bringmany non-readers to creative
writing

17. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
READING TECHNIQUES AND MUSIC
A silent rule
• A writer who is determined to play the role of audience to their
work by themselves, commenting on work after it has been
read or making a show of personality, sometimes breaks that
silent rule
• Study the manner in which a soloist, a string quartet or whole
orchestra proceeds in its delivery, and mimic that determination
and professionalism
• Silence around your readings creates spellbound attention. Be
wary – this silence could also signal boredom

18. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
READING TECHNIQUES AND MUSIC
Blending music
• It is a truth universally acknowledged among arts programmers
that poets
• Writers, novelists included, are also growing more interested in
the use of music as part of literary performance
• Slam poets blend spoken word stories and poems, sometimes
with live music, in high-impact, competitive performances.

19. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
READING TECHNIQUES AND MUSIC
Mushairas
• A Mushairas is a highly public event in Pakistan and India, and
is defined by being distinctively literary and cerebral
• Mushairas arises from a combination of vibrancies: the
audience’s knowledge of literary design and poetic form; the
respect by the audience for poets, often expressing itself in
calls for the encore of especially effective work
• At their conclusion, a Mushairas audience does not divide and
disappear into the night – they often dine and celebrate the
successes of the evening

20. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
CONCEPT AS PERFORMANCE
• What is a book anyway? Some books never appear on shelves.
This does not mean they have vanished on the audience’s
radar
• Writing can perform as a spoken or musical art, as a species of
visual art, or as a form of electronic art. ‘Books’ can be
downloaded from the Internet. Their process of composition
and reception might depend entirely on this medium
• At their conclusion, a Mushairas audience does not divide and
disappear into the night – they often dine and celebrate the
successes of the evening

21. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
CONCEPT AS PERFORMANCE
Performing your writing as public art
• best experiments do not seem like hybrids but more like a new
species of art, or something simply possessing bold taste.
• For example, many writers work with visual artists such as
photographers and painters.
• Many things can be said in literature using words, but they can
also be said using other arts, or by means of a building, or even
a garden. It all depends on how you place your writing

22. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
CONCEPT AS PERFORMANCE
Performing your writing as public art
• best experiments do not seem like hybrids but more like a new
species of art, or something simply possessing bold taste.
• For example, many writers work with visual artists such as
photographers and painters.
• Many things can be said in literature using words, but they can
also be said using other arts, or by means of a building, or even
a garden. It all depends on how you place your writing You
develop an eye for placing, as well as an ear for the language
of a place

23. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
CONCEPT AS PERFORMANCE
Performing your writing as public art
• Augustan poets and thinkers attempted to transform
landscapes so that they reflected ethical and aesthetic values.
In the past, poets who sought ‘a place to stand’ assumed the
role of gardener, and gardening was seen as an act of
composition, analogous to writing. How might you do the
same? Finlay comments, ‘Gardening activity is of five kinds,
namely sowing, planting, fixing, placing, maintaining. In so far
as gardening is an Art, all these may be taken under the one
head, composing’ (quoted in Abrioux, 1994: 38).

24. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
Electronic performance
• As creative writers, the Internet is another open space for the
creation and performance of our writing, or the digital or kinetic
performances of poems and stories that are first written for the
page. There are several kinds of digital writing including
weblogs, hypertext fiction and poetry, kinetic poetry, code
poetry, and writing that takes advantage of the programmable
nature of the computer to create works that are interactive

25. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
Transaesthetics
• Electronic performance allows huge room for experiment,
especially in the technological melding with writing in live
performance of other art forms, such as film, visual art or music,
a phenomenon Margot Lovejoy explores as transaesthetics
(2004: 270)

26. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
Collaborative performance
• In the virtual continent of electronic literature, the literary
concept as a performance is often interactive and even
collaborative. Creative writing students might begin with
something as simple as an e-mail list for the class to which they
all contribute new work and criticism, before developing a
website that performs the same function more publicly
• teacher should oversee these projects, and moderate their
development, but many of them should be allowed to grow
without being overseen once they are up and running

27. CHAPTER 9
Performing Writing
Blogs: wide open spaces
• Many writers and students maintain a regularweblog or blog: an
online journal.
• Many writers and students maintain a regularweblog or blog: an
online journal.
• You can also rapidly incorporate photos, video clips and audio
files, or send images straight from your mobile phone to a blog,
adding text while you are on the move