Creative Writing Considerations Flashcards
Describe the role of voices in Creative Writing, and how this is defined.
The aim is to create an illusion of reality, to make you feel like you are eavesdropping on the real thing. Voices are representation or approximations of how people really talk.
What are main aim of speech in CW?
To give audience an insight into the characters and the action. Doesn’t have to be transcript, as they are dull and relativly directionless as they are a ‘representation of speech’, writers can take transcripts to fabricate scripts.
Invented speach is necessarily sharper and sometimes more evasive than ‘real life’ as the aim is to tell a story - what works in one genre may not work in another.
What is genre? List some?
Genre in CW means sort or kind. CW uses it to distinguish between: poetry, drama, fiction and life writing. It is also used (confusingly) with specific kinds of writing within the main genre (in drama) screenplya, stage play, radio play, or (in fiction) crime, horror, romance, science fiction, fantasy and so on. These sometimes are called sub-genres.
Give some examples how to make a text have verisimilitude?
Contains devices such as pauses (or different length), repititions and linguistic confusion, (as when someone says he is very compressed when he means depressed).
What does the adjective ‘Pinteresque’ mean?
Of relating to Harold Pinters; resembling or characteristics of his plays. Adds Pinter’s plays are typically characterised by implications of threath and strong feeling produced through colloquial lanugage, apparent triviality and long pauses.
What are the characteristics of Caryl Churchill’s writing?
Has experimented with overlapping dialoge. Caryl use a backslash to indicate where speech overlaps, widely adopted by other playwrigths. Often timed to make characters speak in unison. Carefully constructed to echo eachother.
How did american playwright David Mamet write in Oleanna?
He writes about a telephone conversation with a speaker who is unable to finish his words, whose trademark is a burst of unfinished staccato sentences - thought ‘realistic’. Mamet says the language in his play is not realistic but poetic, the words have musical quality. Language that is tailor made for the stage. It is an illusion because people don’t speak like his writing.
What type of narrator did F Scott Fitzgerald employ in The Great Gatsby?
He used Nick Carraway as a peripheral narrator - witness narrator. Observe actions of other characters but doesn’t take part.
