CREATIVE WRITING COURSE #6 AUTHENTICITY OF CREATIVE IMPULSE

We should ensure that our impulse creative writing is authentic. Assuming that this impulse has troubled you on the emotional plane, as it often does, the question you should ask, is charming and overwhelming as it may have been at that moment, was it not rather a transient and hence a superficial motion?

As an emotional person in neighbourhood burst into tears at the sight of a puppy in distress or a bride leaving her mother’s home?

Could it have happened that you were taken in by the setting or the atmosphere?

In a romantic atmosphere of moon and far away music and you, you thought the dialogue of an old couple particularly cute and you thought you could write a poem on the theme of ‘Love at Night’.

Or while passing through a slum you were walking by the sight of a young, good looking mother being harassed by a brood of unkempt and pot bellied children and you get idea to write a story on the theme of ‘Flowers in The Slum’

It may well be that you can write a powerful content on either. You should let the confidence to grow over a period of time, after you have ensured that...

Such emotive reactions have been fairly recurrent with you in the same situation.

You can reasonably well with the old couple or the young mother in the course of their lives.

Having some distance is necessary for creative effort. Do not trust the impulse for immediate action. Let the storm to calm it’s only then that you can write on it effectively.

Truman Capote, a contemporary fiction writer, writes in a vein, I have exhausted the emotion before i feel clinical enough to analyse and project it. My own theory is that every writer should have dried his tears long, long before setting out to evoke the same reactions in a reader. In so far as the emotional stimulus is concerned, a certain distance is necessary to have for creative effort.

For example you have lost a loved one, you are naturally overwhelmed with sadness and as a writer, and you think to release yourself in verse or prose. You may surely do so for the therapeutic reasons, just as you could release yourself in tears. But the best results in terms of literary merit can be achieved only when you can look upon the event from a distance, say thank to passage of time, among other things and can call upon other people to share those intense moment with you. Then your literary content would be authentic in terms of emotional experience and objective in terms of expressed thought. The best combination any writer could think of.

Also, you should not misjudge the stirrings of an abiding motivation for a creative impulse. Like, you are strongly motivated, by temperament and conviction, to expose the evils of social justice. Clearly this motivation would govern your outlook on the human condition, and you would smell injustice in a situation, which to some others may be no more than a curiosity in terms of interpersonal conflict. There is nothing inherently wrong in such collaboration that is bound to creep into the works of a motivated writer. But it is important to have genuine creative impulse to start creative writing. Content with a motivation written into it should indeed be richer, for it gives an extra dimension to the story. But let it not appear that the characters have been directed to prove the truth of the motivation, for that may be self-defeating. It gives them the importance of being human and the freedom that goes with it. Freedom to love, weep, haul, fight and act in all sorts of funny and foolish ways, in situations that may be called socially evil, and you will see how your motivation works through the intensely human narrative.