Post by Cameron Sherwell

When it comes to creativity, it is tempting to seek affirmation. As a writer, seldom is there anything better than hearing your work praised. Fear of embarrassment, disapproval, or being told that, after so much effort, you’re not as good as you think you are, is common amongst creative writing students, and a constant source of anxiety. At best it strengthens our resolve, at worst it makes us transfer to economics.

For these reasons, it is tempting to search for dictums – commandments to worship at the altar of creativity – that let us know we’re doing something right. ‘Show don’t tell’, ‘less is more’, ‘write what you know’: these are “rules” all of us have looked to for guidance— rules that we often forget aren’t eternal truths. But Toby Litt won’t let us forget. In fact, in his guest lecture last week, he was adamant that we should break these rules. For Litt, greatness in writing means embodying the spirit of free-form jazz; it is all well and good to be competent, to have the formal elements down and play a melody, but competency isn’t enough. There has to be more. There has to be risk.

Awareness of the self is also crucial, and Litt suggests that studying your own reading habits is vital to understanding and improving yourself as a writer. At the end of the lecture, he proposed four tasks writers should undergo to become better acquainted with themselves: writing, reading, re-writing, and re-reading.

More than anything, Litt’s creative philosophy is individualistic. He doesn’t want you to write to better the world, he wants you to “write for yourself”. What I took away from his lecture was: only adhere when it suits you. If the pressure of being yourself is too much, be someone else. Write with a pseudonym. Write what you love. Write what is LIVE, and be open to the process of growth and transformation, because thinking that there’s nothing left to learn is the biggest pitfall of all. Competency is boring.

Cameron Sherwell,  7 November 2016