Following on from my thinking over the past two blogs, I’ve decided to use my portfolio of experimentation to set myself a series of writing-based experiments and challenges to push forward my practice.
I’m looking at my practice through an intercultural lens – examining how it is an intercultural practice in and of itself (translation, writing for different audiences), and how I use writing to tell intercultural stories and reflect on intercultural experiences.
I’m particularly interested in exploring modes of storytelling and of representing the other (in an expansive sense, where the other is any other person) – and across real and fictionalised lines. Coming from a perspective of interculturality, this will mean engaging with ideas of cultural appropriation and speaking to or with, not for. I’m hoping to challenge the way I navigate between objectivity and subjectivity in my work and shift my relationship with truth – to understand it in a different way.
Some acts I’d like to engage with:
- Developing a practice of morning pages – seeing if I can shift my relationship to the blank page and if this ritual can generally aid my writing practice; potentially using it as a site of exploration and play.
- Experiments in translation – something that’s totally new to me.
- Studying short stories (in Spanish & English).
- Engaging with traditional training around writing fiction, such as studying character development.
- Responding to writing prompts.
- Reading around the subject of fiction, cultural appropriation.
- Reflection on these experiments.
What’s led me to this point:
- Identifying a cognitive dissonance in my relationship to fiction – that I value it from others but not myself, that I see my work as devoid of it.
- Our Cultural Appropriation reading group and thinking about these ethical concerns in relation to fiction – and other modes – of writing.
- Athina Vahla highlighting the need to speak ‘to’ or ‘with’, not ‘about’, in intercultural contexts, and me being unsure how I could apply that to my writing in intercultural contexts.
- Working on my Archive of Decisions project and contemplating writing about others and their experiences – and facing a deep discomfort in relation to this.
- Marsha asking if I’d use fiction in the development of the Archive of Decisions project and feeling a similar reaction in myself – that I was unsure of the value of this (of the value of what I could add).
- Reading ‘Ethical Aesthetics /Aesthetic Ethics: The Case of Bakhtin (Sevda ÇALIŞKAN)’ and thinking about this idea that creating fictional characters is a more worthwhile act than empathy with real people as real people are fundamentally unknowable but through fiction we can get to know ourselves better.
Some resources I might want to engage with:
- New Yorker Fiction podcast
- Zadie Smith writing about fiction and cultural appropriation – https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/zadie-smith-in-defense-of-fiction/
- The Royal Institute of Philosophy debate around cultural appropriation – https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/event/cultural-appropriation-is-an-inappropriate-method-for-writers/
- A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge – https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203940273
- Write What You Know: Characterisation workshop with Jo Gatford – https://www.jogatford.com/writing/workshops-zc9xp
- Online masterclass: Malorie Blackman on how to create relatable, believable characters – https://www.bbcmaestro.com/writing-for-young-adults-lesson-0 + Character bio template
- George Saunders ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.
- Short stories by Samantha Schweblin in ‘El buen mal’
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