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Peter Steward's Web Pages |
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My Site
Review Section Books Concerts
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Creative Writing It was the British author Malcolm Bradbury who used
cricket as an example during one of his many world famous courses in
creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Malcolm was trying to illustrate the difference
between “dry writing” and writing that leapt off the page and he
illustrated this with the use of pages from a cricket scoring book. His argument was simple. By looking at the scorecard
anybody with a knowledge of the game would be able to deduce a number of
things. Firstly they would be able to see that team A beat team B. They
would be able to establish the winning margin, the fact that one of the
openers for team A had scored a century and one of Team B’s bowlers had
taken five wickets. They would even be able to deduce that the match
started at 2 p.m and finished at 7.20 p.m, that 486 runs were scored
during the day, that 16 wickets had fallen, of which five were clean
bowled and three stumped. They would be able to establish equally easily
that one player hit three sixes and five fours in an innings of 47. With these facts a writer could put together a report
of the game. But it is the things omitted from the scorebook that would
take any artistic writing endeavour from the mundane into the realms of
creative writing. The scorebook would not have told us that it was a
scorchingly hot day with no fewer than six breaks in play for liquid
refreshment, or the fact that one of the sixes was hit with such ferocity
that the ball cleared trees behind the boundary and was lost necessitating
a replacement. It wouldn’t note that one player had to come off
the field after suffering a bout of hay fever or that the 12th
man carrying a tray of drinks tripped over the pavilion steps and spilled
the lot. It wouldn’t mention that at one point the game had to be held
up when one of the players’ dogs carried a dead rabbit onto the field of
play or that the game finished in extremely bad light. Incorporating those details elevates the written word from straight reportage to creative writing. Hopefully on this site over the coming months we will feature some of the best creative writing on a great sport that lends itself to that genre of art.
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