These last few months, I’ve been researching for a book I’m writing for McGraw-Hill’s education department. It’s called Creative Writing Demystified and is meant for use in high school and college classrooms. Creative writing is a broad term that covers a lot of ground, and when I share this title with writers I know, they chuckle at the task ahead for me. We know that if we are not in school, we never need to use the phrase creative writing, a term most often applied in naming college courses in English departments.

My colleagues also chuckle at the word “demystified” because those of us who write believe we rely on magic, on the “I don’t know how it happened but I was in flow as I wrote and suddenly everything fell together,” part of our process. We believe that synchronicity is at work when just the right thing happens in our outer life to trigger a scene or connection for our writing. It is magic, we believe, that brings our writing alive. But we also know that we work hard at craft to bring our writing alive. And that is what I want to demystify — the elements of the craft of creative writing.

To get my feet into the book, I looked into the meaning of the phrase “creative writing” and the story of how it came to be taught in schools. Knowing the history is helpful to learning how institutions of higher education have helped shape writing today. It also helps us know where our writing fits in literary publications.

In Brief
To most of us, the term “creative writing” probably means writing we make up ourselves — in contrast to writing we believe imparts factual, well-supported arguments and points of view in reports, case histories, technical manuals, interviews, instruction, and academic papers and articles. In reality, though, all writing is creative because all writing is a made thing; in the artifice of the making, we reveal who we are, slightly or more fully, depending on the level of subjectivity we involve. And subjectivity creeps into everything written, whether that’s in creative writing or journalism, from the way authors leave out and include and prioritize facts and choose words with particular connotations as well as denotations.

 Despite the fact that all writing is a made up way of sharing information, what we mean when we say “creative” writing is writing that isn’t trying for objectivity. It is writing that embraces subjectivity. Even when we write about fact-based subjects, we find a way to declare that it is our individual way of selecting facts and telling the story that is important in the writing. In journalism, history and science writing, research takes center stage, but in creative nonfiction and poetry, although there may be factual information included, reflection takes center stage.

The label creative writing generally includes the genres of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. And each of these genres includes multiple sub-genres and/or styles. Playwriting, for stage or screen, is one branch of creative writing that is most usually taught in drama departments, and people who study playwriting generally study outside of the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programs. This is so despite the fact that poets have a long history of writing plays. Shakespeare and William Butler Yeats are among those whose work was well produced, and Dorothy Parker and Dylan Thomas were among those writers Hollywood studios hired to turn out screenplays. Fiction writers, of course, such as Rebecca Miller, Nora Ephron, Nick Hornby and Stephen King regularly write screenplays.

Journalism may include creative writing in what is referred to as New Journalism, but there is a big distinction on college campuses in the training of journalists and the training of creative writers. The former observe and report on events with an eye toward others and not toward the response of the observer/author, while the creative writer is always looking for the interior story and writes about events as avenues for self-reflection.

Even though we make distinctions, the line between what’s taught in the traditional non-creative writing programs and creative writing programs is blurring. And inside the standard creative writing programs, the lines between fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction blur some more, yielding hybrid work like prose poems and lyric essays, historical novels, partly fictionalized stories (faction), or something called exaggerated memoirs.

Whatever the sub genre or hybrid a creative writer is working in, most of the time, the authors’ attempt is “to reclaim human civilization by returning to ‘the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them.'” (Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, New York: Picador, 2005, as quoted by D. G. Myers in “On the Reform of Creative Writing” in Teaching Creative Writing in Higher Edu­cation: Anglo-American Perspectives. Ed. Heather Beck. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

This is why creative writing has longevity — we can read words in poems and essays, novels and stories decades or centuries later and recognize ourselves, our feelings, our thoughts, and our situations.

History of the Term Creative Writing
Ralph Waldo Emerson may have coined the term “creative writing” in an address he presented to The Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837. (According to D. G. Meyers in his book The Elephants Teach) In this address titled “The American Scholar,” Emerson wrote:

The world — this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys, which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult…

…the best books…impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy — with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said…we should suppose some pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, — with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life — remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom.

So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.

Emerson presented something essential about creative writing authors: When we write, we relish the fact that kernels and images arise, and we know we’ll work from them. We relish the fact that authors, even those who came centuries before us, had this experience, too, and reading their creative writing illuminates our experience as we hope to illuminate the experience others. Often in pieces of creative writing, authors introduce their work with epigraphs made from the words of other authors who have gone before or, as writers, we may thank a particular author whose works and words have inspired us. In this way, creative writing is a conversation, a very long one that has and will go on through the ages.

More Recently
If Emerson may be credited with coining the term creative writing, The University of Iowa may be credited with establishing creative writing as an area of expertise worthy of study. The school offered creative writing coursework (verse-making) as early as 1897, 60 years after Emerson’s speech to eastern academia. In 1922, Iowa became the first United States university to accept creative projects as theses for advanced degrees. This meant that collections of poems, musical compositions, or series of paintings could be presented to the Graduate College, which led to the creation of the Master of Fine Arts degree and a larger place for writers and artists in the academy.

The writing workshop method for the study of writing emerged at Iowa: in writing workshops, senior writers lead discussions about work by class members; all the workshop students share impressions, advice, and analysis and writers benefit from listening to a variety of responses and thoughts on their writing. Today, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, founded in 1936, is the prototype for more than 300 writing programs.

Iowa’s mission is guided by the idea that although writing is a solitary pursuit, it’s significantly enriched by the presence of other writers. Paul Engle, one of the program’s early directors wrote, “Our plan gives the writer a place where he can be himself, confronting the hazards and hopes of his own talent, and at the same time he can measure his capacity against a variety of others.”

And so many of today’s famous poets and novelists gathered at the program, trained there, and went on to publish widely acclaimed creative writing. In 1987, The English Department at Iowa approved the “M.A. in English With Emphasis on Expository Writing,” which later became the Nonfiction Writing Program. Today, we often hear the word “creative” before “nonfiction,” writes Lee Gutkind, who named the journal he edits Creative Nonfiction, making this phrase the dominant one when we mean writing outside of the realm of fiction, poetry, and plays but using the craft of those genres to elevate the quality of our nonfiction, whether that be memoir, personal essay, travel writing, nature writing, or investigative journalism that mixes the personal experience of the investigator with the story under investigation.

Though he has used the phrase creative nonfiction for the title of his journal, Gutkind claims not to know who coined the term. He believes it became an official term in 1983 at a meeting convened by the National Endowment for the Arts to deal with the question of what, exactly, to call the genre as a category for the organization’s creative writing fellowships.

“Creative nonfiction writers,” he says, “do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.” The “real demarcation points” in dividing kinds of writing are not, he believes, between what is factual and what is not, but between fiction, which is or can be mostly imagination; traditional nonfiction (journalism and scholarship), which is mostly information; and creative nonfiction, which presents or treats information using the tools of the fiction writer while maintaining allegiance to fact.” George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff are, according to Gutkind, “classic creative nonfiction efforts — books that communicate information (reportage) in a scenic, dramatic fashion.”

In the realm of “creative writing” today there are new genres and the names for them pop up in literary and writing circles: flash fiction, Drabble, 69-er, sudden nonfiction, and lyric essays, among them. But whatever you call a particular piece of creative writing, what is most important to remember is that writers write, and as they write, they discover new strategies and re-discover older ones for researching themselves and moving others. Eventually, editors, school programs and grant-giving organizations find a name to distinguish what they are printing, teaching, and funding. Creative writing is creative through and through and by the time you are reading this book, scores of online journals, print journals, and performance pieces may have new names for work in this expanding field. As the Internet has given all of us access to the equivalent of the printing press, more writers, using more and more publishers, are joining the creative writing conversation.

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I hope that this review has filled you in on the development of terms you come across in discussions of writing and publishing. If you would like to read more about creative writing, visit these websites:

For creative nonfiction writers: George Mason University maintains Nonfiction Universe, a site filled with information for those who write in many of the nonfiction genres. You might be interested in ordering tapes of speakers and panels at the University of Iowa’s last Nonfiction Now conference in 2007. The next one is this November, 2010. You might also enjoy reading material on Brevity’s blog on creative nonfiction.

For poetry writers: For an index to some interesting sites visit the online teacher resource. The Academy of American Poets offers essays by poets on poetry. Scroll to the bottom of the page for a brief list. The Poetry Foundation site is a great one for information, too.

For fiction writers: Writing-World.com has a good article on flash fiction with links to sites that publish this genre. About.com maintains a site with loads of fiction writing information.

Don’t forget that Writer’s Digest Magazine has a lot of free online information as well as a free electronic newsletter you can sign up for on the site.