What is Creative Writing

I’m often asked in the beginning of a class what is creative writing? It is most widely understood to be writing that comes from the imagination, writing that is not true.  Creative writing is thought to be the art of making things up, in the most attractive, apt and convincing way possible. Many believe it’s the telling of lies in order to reveal illuminating and dark truths about the world and our place in it. Because of these beliefs, I’ve had students enroll for my class with expectations of writing music, a screenplay or poetry.

It’s never failed—I have one poet in every one of my classes. I enjoy them.  I too began my writing with poetry and have great appreciation for poets that I read today. On occasion these students have been disappointed when they discover creative writing involves structure.  

Others who hold the reins tight in their writing can’t seem to get comfortable with not writing about the factual and logical progression to their story ideas.  Although they can churn events into wordy flat passages, they don’t express their feelings and can’t open themselves up to less expository writing.  

They have a hard time understanding when I say, creative writing doesn’t tell, it shows.

Some creative writing remains fiction and makes no actual claim to the facts.

What we do know about creative writing is that it is partly inspired by real events or based on people or things we are all familiar with.  Real life scenarios and real people can sometimes directly or indirectly make a creative subject.  “Write about what you know” is the writer’s maxim that has long fallen into a crashing cliché - but it‘s a cliché for a good reason. Many writers do precisely that and thus it becomes Creative Non-Fiction. 

What puts the Creative into Non-Fiction has a great deal more to do with how a subject is treated rather than the nature of the subject itself. The personal involvement of the narrator with its subject or subject matter is common, and events are not recounted in the same way which we tend to associate with factual or informative writing. 

But the chief hallmark of Creative Non-Fiction is a higher, more stylized technique, closer to that of the novel, transcending the boundaries of convention, execution and approach and this immediately distinguishes it from other types of writing.