welcome to creative writing domains

Virtually every field of writing offers writers the opportunity to be creative, but the characteristics or circumstances for creative writers and writing in one domain may not be the same as those in other domains. Creative writing domains also offer readers different ways to enjoy, learn, and benefit from what they read.

At this feature, The Muse Of Language Arts introduces and explores creative writing domains, their individual natures and differences, and the creative opportunities they afford readers and writers.

about creative writing domains

Creative writing takes place in many more literary fields and forms than the public generally realizes. Virtually every field of writing offers writers the opportunity to be creative.

For example, journalistic writing is normally considered uncreative because it's goal is to report hard facts. But from the way creativity is understood here, it's possible and desirable for newspaper or magazine feature stories to be written creatively when the content of these features is specifically focused on narrative (story telling) and character development.

The same is true of many other forms of expository writing. All works whose purpose is to set forth, expound, or explain, such as scientific writing, technical writing, user manuals, military documents, advertising, etc.

What fields of endeavor offer authors the possibility of setting aside rules and conventions in order to become creative? Seen broadly, virtually any kind of composition that is normally formulaic can be considered creative if it exceeds the normal bounds of convention, regardless of the field in which it is spawned.

This means that creative writing can take place in fields customarily thought to be uncreative, fields such as business, the professions, academia, the military, the government, filmdom, stage and screen, scientific, engineering, computers, economics—these and other fields can become sources for creative writing. Even private parties in the home or on the street can write creatively if they put their minds to it; even notes on refrigerators and lost dog posters can be creative.

There are so many different ways and places that writing can be creative, it's easy to see that conventional wisdom has it all wrong. From a conventional standpoint, traditionally only fictional literary classics deserve the appellation creative writing; only the pens of distinguished fictional authors are regarded as creative instruments. Fictional literary forms such as novels, biographies, short stories, poems, and dramas are thought of as creative works. Even nonfictional writings like biography and history are exempt from that status because they're said to be "unimaginative."

How did misconceptions like these become common in many parts of the world?

The artificially restrictive premise that limits creative writing to the arts began in institutions of higher learning; it's prepared by, influenced by, encouraged by, and reinforced by the way creative writing is organized and taught in secondary schools such as middle schools and junior high schools, in intermediate or middle schools such as junior high schools, and in high schools, community colleges; it's even savored and preserved in some full colleges and universities. Despite the wide variety of creative writing types, styles, and fields where creative writing actually takes place, academia behaves as though the only kinds of creative writing are fictional prose and poetry, and the only fields where they occur are scholastic and artistic.

Rightly or wrongly, academics have acquired their preconceptions about creative and uncreative writing from a variety of historical, cultural, and didactic sources. Colleges and universities transfer their biases to students through a number of subtle, unpremeditated practices.

They typically isolate fictional writing courses from nonfictional ones. They teach fictional writing as though it's a creative activity and nonfictional writing as though it's an uncreative one. Instructors who teach novel writing and poetic composition encourage their students to write in ways that are original for them, and to invent new genres and writing styles; they discourage students from imitating preexisting styles or established genres such as crime or horror. But instructors who teach "uncreative" writing subjects, such as journalism, television, or advertising, deemphasize the creative aspects of writing. They tend to discourage initiatives they consider original and encourage conformity instead.

In practical fields of education, academics and schools consider acting and playwriting to be one thing and drama to be another; they teach drama as a creative art, but they treat dramatic writing for television, screen, and stage—that is, television writing, screenwriting and playwriting—as uncreative professional and commercial specialties rather than as artistic pursuits.

Schools organize these different specialties according to the way they teach them. The academic community generally separates pragmatic courses from literary writing and appreciation courses. Commercially oriented writing classes are often taught in community colleges or at independent, commercial training schools rather than at academically accredited institutions, partly because academics consider them to be less creative or uncreative forms of writing.

In reality, the act of creative writing is universal. It's not limited to a particular class of writers, a particular field of writing, certain kinds of books, particular fields of education, or special styles of writing. Writing that is creative can be accomplished by paid, professional or unpaid writers or by amateurs. Whether fictional or nonfictional, and whatever the field—prosodic, poetic, dramatic, technical, journalistic, or other—written works of any kind are creative if and only if they flow from their author's original, imaginative thoughts or expressions.

Creativity is a manifold experience. If you give it some thought, the true nature of creative writing and the number of different places and ways it can occur may surprise you. Some of them are explored in this feature.

The fiction creative writing domain compared with The nonfiction creative writing domain

One of the biggest misconceptions about creative writing is that it must be fictional to be creative...and that by its very nature, nonfictional writing cannot be creative. Nonfictional writing cannot be creative because it offers information, opinions, or conjectures upon facts and reality, which are directly opposed to fictional writing, which offers information, opinions, or facts which come straight from an author's imagination.

Since reality is not imaginary, there's no room for an author of nonfiction to create anything new. Since he can only write about things that already exist and not about things he creates himself, what he writes cannot be creative...at least that's the traditional conclusion. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

This conventional wisdom is one of the biggest misconceptions about creative writing there is.

Here The Muse Of Language Arts explores why this is the case, why nonfiction writing can be creative.

• Discover why nonfiction writing can be creative and why fiction writing can be uncreative Visit The Muse Of Language Arts feature titled The Fiction Creative Writing Domain Compared With The Nonfiction Creative Writing Domain: tap or click here.