Creative Writing

Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics. Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though they fall under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development. Both fictional and non-fictional works fall under this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage--screenwriting and playwriting--are often taught separately, but fit in the creative writing category as well.

Creative writing can technically be considered any writing of original composition. In this sense, creative writing is a more contemporary and process-oriented name for what has been traditionally called literature, including the variety of its genres. In her work, Foundations of Creativity, Mary Lee Marksberry references Paul Witty and Lou LaBrant's Teaching the People's Language to define creative writing, Marksberry notes:

Witty and LaBrant...[say creative writing] is a composition of any type of writing at any time primarily in the service of such needs as: (1) the need for keeping records of  significant experience; (2) the need for sharing experience woth an interested group; and (3) the need for free individual expression which contributes to mental and physical health.

Unlike its academic counterpart of writing classes that teach students to compose work based on the rules of the language, creative writing is believed to focus on students' self-expression. While creative writing as an educational subject is often available at some stages, if not throughout, K-12 education, perhaps the most refined form of creative writing as an educational focus is in universities. Following a reworking of university education in the post-war era, creative writing has progressively gained prominence in the university setting. In the UK, the first formal creative writing program was established as Master of Arts degree in University of East Anglia in 1970 by novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. With the beginning of formal creative writing programs:

For the first time in the sad and enchanting history of literature, for the first time in the glorious and dreadful history of the world, the writer was welcome in the academic place. If the mind could be honored there, why not the imagination.

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