creative writing and article writing

What is Creative Writing? A Key Piece of the Writer’s Toolbox

Not all writing is the same and there’s a type of writing that has the ability to transport, teach, and inspire others like no other.

Creative writing stands out due to its unique approach and focus on imagination. Here’s how to get started and grow as you explore the broad and beautiful world of creative writing!

What is Creative Writing?

Creative writing is a form of writing that extends beyond the bounds of regular professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature. It is characterized by its emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or poetic techniques to express ideas in an original and imaginative way.

Creative writing can take on various forms such as:

short stories
screenplays

It’s a way for writers to express their thoughts, feelings, and ideas in a creative, often symbolic, way . It’s about using the power of words to transport readers into a world created by the writer.

5 Key Characteristics of Creative Writing

Creative writing is marked by several defining characteristics, each working to create a distinct form of expression:

1. Imagination and Creativity: Creative writing is all about harnessing your creativity and imagination to create an engaging and compelling piece of work. It allows writers to explore different scenarios, characters, and worlds that may not exist in reality.

2. Emotional Engagement: Creative writing often evokes strong emotions in the reader. It aims to make the reader feel something — whether it’s happiness, sorrow, excitement, or fear.

3. Originality: Creative writing values originality. It’s about presenting familiar things in new ways or exploring ideas that are less conventional.

4. Use of Literary Devices: Creative writing frequently employs literary devices such as metaphors, similes, personification, and others to enrich the text and convey meanings in a more subtle, layered manner.

5. Focus on Aesthetics: The beauty of language and the way words flow together is important in creative writing. The aim is to create a piece that’s not just interesting to read, but also beautiful to hear when read aloud.

Remember, creative writing is not just about producing a work of art. It’s also a means of self-expression and a way to share your perspective with the world. Whether you’re considering it as a hobby or contemplating a career in it, understanding the nature and characteristics of creative writing can help you hone your skills and create more engaging pieces .

For more insights into creative writing, check out our articles on creative writing jobs and what you can do with a creative writing degree and is a degree in creative writing worth it .

Styles of Creative Writing

To fully understand creative writing , you must be aware of the various styles involved. Creative writing explores a multitude of genres, each with its own unique characteristics and techniques.

Poetry is a form of creative writing that uses expressive language to evoke emotions and ideas. Poets often employ rhythm, rhyme, and other poetic devices to create pieces that are deeply personal and impactful. Poems can vary greatly in length, style, and subject matter, making this a versatile and dynamic form of creative writing.

Short Stories

Short stories are another common style of creative writing. These are brief narratives that typically revolve around a single event or idea. Despite their length, short stories can provide a powerful punch, using precise language and tight narrative structures to convey a complete story in a limited space.

Novels represent a longer form of narrative creative writing. They usually involve complex plots, multiple characters, and various themes. Writing a novel requires a significant investment of time and effort; however, the result can be a rich and immersive reading experience.

Screenplays

Screenplays are written works intended for the screen, be it television, film, or online platforms. They require a specific format, incorporating dialogue and visual descriptions to guide the production process. Screenwriters must also consider the practical aspects of filmmaking, making this an intricate and specialized form of creative writing.

If you’re interested in this style, understanding creative writing jobs and what you can do with a creative writing degree can provide useful insights.

Writing for the theater is another specialized form of creative writing. Plays, like screenplays, combine dialogue and action, but they also require an understanding of the unique dynamics of the theatrical stage. Playwrights must think about the live audience and the physical space of the theater when crafting their works.

Each of these styles offers unique opportunities for creativity and expression. Whether you’re drawn to the concise power of poetry, the detailed storytelling of novels, or the visual language of screenplays and plays, there’s a form of creative writing that will suit your artistic voice. The key is to explore, experiment, and find the style that resonates with you.

For those looking to spark their creativity, our article on creative writing prompts offers a wealth of ideas to get you started.

Importance of Creative Writing

Understanding what is creative writing involves recognizing its value and significance. Engaging in creative writing can provide numerous benefits – let’s take a closer look.

Developing Creativity and Imagination

Creative writing serves as a fertile ground for nurturing creativity and imagination. It encourages you to think outside the box, explore different perspectives, and create unique and original content. This leads to improved problem-solving skills and a broader worldview , both of which can be beneficial in various aspects of life.

Through creative writing, one can build entire worlds, create characters, and weave complex narratives, all of which are products of a creative mind and vivid imagination. This can be especially beneficial for those seeking creative writing jobs and what you can do with a creative writing degree .

Enhancing Communication Skills

Creative writing can also play a crucial role in honing communication skills. It demands clarity, precision, and a strong command of language. This helps to improve your vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, making it easier to express thoughts and ideas effectively .

Moreover, creative writing encourages empathy as you often need to portray a variety of characters from different backgrounds and perspectives. This leads to a better understanding of people and improved interpersonal communication skills.

Exploring Emotions and Ideas

One of the most profound aspects of creative writing is its ability to provide a safe space for exploring emotions and ideas. It serves as an outlet for thoughts and feelings , allowing you to express yourself in ways that might not be possible in everyday conversation.

Writing can be therapeutic, helping you process complex emotions, navigate difficult life events, and gain insight into your own experiences and perceptions. It can also be a means of self-discovery , helping you to understand yourself and the world around you better.

So, whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting out, the benefits of creative writing are vast and varied. For those interested in developing their creative writing skills, check out our articles on creative writing prompts and how to teach creative writing . If you’re considering a career in this field, you might find our article on is a degree in creative writing worth it helpful.

4 Steps to Start Creative Writing

Creative writing can seem daunting to beginners, but with the right approach, anyone can start their journey into this creative field. Here are some steps to help you start creative writing .

1. Finding Inspiration

The first step in creative writing is finding inspiration . Inspiration can come from anywhere and anything. Observe the world around you, listen to conversations, explore different cultures, and delve into various topics of interest.

Reading widely can also be a significant source of inspiration. Read different types of books, articles, and blogs. Discover what resonates with you and sparks your imagination.

For structured creative prompts, visit our list of creative writing prompts to get your creative juices flowing.

Editor’s Note : When something excites or interests you, stop and take note – it could be the inspiration for your next creative writing piece.

2. Planning Your Piece

Once you have an idea, the next step is to plan your piece . Start by outlining:

the main points

Remember, this can serve as a roadmap to guide your writing process. A plan doesn’t have to be rigid. It’s a flexible guideline that can be adjusted as you delve deeper into your writing. The primary purpose is to provide direction and prevent writer’s block.

3. Writing Your First Draft

After planning your piece, you can start writing your first draft . This is where you give life to your ideas and breathe life into your characters.

Don’t worry about making it perfect in the first go. The first draft is about getting your ideas down on paper . You can always refine and polish your work later. And if you don’t have a great place to write that first draft, consider a journal for writing .

4. Editing and Revising Your Work

The final step in the creative writing process is editing and revising your work . This is where you fine-tune your piece, correct grammatical errors, and improve sentence structure and flow.

Editing is also an opportunity to enhance your storytelling . You can add more descriptive details, develop your characters further, and make sure your plot is engaging and coherent.

Remember, writing is a craft that improves with practice . Don’t be discouraged if your first few pieces don’t meet your expectations. Keep writing, keep learning, and most importantly, enjoy the creative process.

For more insights on creative writing, check out our articles on how to teach creative writing or creative writing activities for kids.

Tips to Improve Creative Writing Skills

Understanding what is creative writing is the first step. But how can one improve their creative writing skills? Here are some tips that can help.

Read Widely

Reading is a vital part of becoming a better writer. By immersing oneself in a variety of genres, styles, and authors, one can gain a richer understanding of language and storytelling techniques . Different authors have unique voices and methods of telling stories, which can serve as inspiration for your own work. So, read widely and frequently!

Practice Regularly

Like any skill, creative writing improves with practice. Consistently writing — whether it be daily, weekly, or monthly — helps develop your writing style and voice . Using creative writing prompts can be a fun way to stimulate your imagination and get the words flowing.

Attend Writing Workshops and Courses

Formal education such as workshops and courses can offer structured learning and expert guidance. These can provide invaluable insights into the world of creative writing, from understanding plot development to character creation. If you’re wondering is a degree in creative writing worth it, these classes can also give you a taste of what studying creative writing at a higher level might look like .

Joining Writing Groups and Communities

Being part of a writing community can provide motivation, constructive feedback, and a sense of camaraderie. These groups often hold regular meetings where members share their work and give each other feedback. Plus, it’s a great way to connect with others who share your passion for writing.

Seeking Feedback on Your Work

Feedback is a crucial part of improving as a writer. It offers a fresh perspective on your work, highlighting areas of strength and opportunities for improvement. Whether it’s from a writing group, a mentor, or even friends and family, constructive criticism can help refine your writing .

Start Creative Writing Today!

Remember, becoming a proficient writer takes time and patience. So, don’t be discouraged by initial challenges. Keep writing, keep learning, and most importantly, keep enjoying the process. Who knows, your passion for creative writing might even lead to creative writing jobs and what you can do with a creative writing degree .

Happy writing!

Brooks Manley

Creative Primer is a resource on all things journaling, creativity, and productivity. We’ll help you produce better ideas, get more done, and live a more effective life.

My name is Brooks. I do a ton of journaling, like to think I’m a creative (jury’s out), and spend a lot of time thinking about productivity. I hope these resources and product recommendations serve you well. Reach out if you ever want to chat or let me know about a journal I need to check out!

Here’s my favorite journal for 2024:

Gratitude Journal Prompts Mindfulness Journal Prompts Journal Prompts for Anxiety Reflective Journal Prompts Healing Journal Prompts Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Journal Prompts Mental Health Journal Prompts ASMR Journal Prompts Manifestation Journal Prompts Self-Care Journal Prompts Morning Journal Prompts Evening Journal Prompts Self-Improvement Journal Prompts Creative Writing Journal Prompts Dream Journal Prompts Relationship Journal Prompts "What If" Journal Prompts New Year Journal Prompts Shadow Work Journal Prompts Journal Prompts for Overcoming Fear Journal Prompts for Dealing with Loss Journal Prompts for Discerning and Decision Making Travel Journal Prompts Fun Journal Prompts

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Writers' Treasure

Effective writing advice for aspiring writers

Creative Writing 101

Creative writing is any form of writing which is written with the creativity of mind: fiction writing, poetry writing, creative nonfiction writing and more. The purpose is to express something, whether it be feelings, thoughts, or emotions.

Rather than only giving information or inciting the reader to make an action beneficial to the writer, creative writing is written to entertain or educate someone, to spread awareness about something or someone, or to express one’s thoughts.

There are two kinds of creative writing: good and bad, effective and ineffective. Bad, ineffective creative writing cannot make any impression on the reader. It won’t achieve its purpose.

So whether you’re a novelist, a poet, a short-story writer, an essayist, a biographer or an aspiring beginner, you want to improve your craft. The question is: how?

When you write great fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, amazing things can happen. Readers can’t put it down. The work you wrote becomes a bestseller. It becomes famous. But you have to reach to that level… first .

The best way to increase your proficiency in creative writing is to write, write compulsively, but it doesn’t mean write whatever you want. There are certain things you should know first… it helps to start with the right foot.

To do exactly that, here we have a beginners’ guide from Writers’ Treasure on the subject:

An Introduction to Creative Writing
How to Get Started in Creative Writing in Just Three Steps
Creative Writing vs. Technical Writing
Fiction Writing 101: The Elements of Stories
Poetry Writing: Forms and Terms Galore
Creative Non-Fiction: What is it?
Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Creative Writing
Common Mistakes Made by Creative Writers

For novelists: do you want to write compelling opening chapters?

Are you an aspiring novelist? Will your novel see the light of day? For that, you will need to make the first chapter of your story as compelling as possible. Otherwise, readers won’t even pick up your novel. That chapter can be the make-or-break point that decides whether your novel is published or not. It’s because good editors know how you write from the first three pages… or sometimes even from the opening lines.

To solve this problem, I created a five-part tutorial on Writing Compelling Opening Chapters . It outlines why you need to write a compelling opening chapter, my personal favourite way of beginning it, what should be told and shown in it, general dos and don’ts, and what you need to do after having written it. Check it out for more.

Need more writing tips?

Sometimes you reach that stage when you outgrow the beginner stage of writing but feel that you’re not yet an expert. If I just described you, no worries– Writers’ Treasure’s writing tips are here. Whether you want to make your writing more readable, more irresistible, more professional, we’ve got you covered. So check out our writing tips , and be on your way to fast track your success.

I offer writing, editing and proofreading , as well as website creation services. I’ve been in this field for seven years, and I know the tools of the trade. I’ve seen the directions where the writing industry is going, the changes, the new platforms. Get your work done through me, and get fast and efficient service. Get a quote .

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10 Types of Creative Writing (with Examples You’ll Love)

A lot falls under the term ‘creative writing’: poetry, short fiction, plays, novels, personal essays, and songs, to name just a few. By virtue of the creativity that characterizes it, creative writing is an extremely versatile art. So instead of defining what creative writing is , it may be easier to understand what it does by looking at examples that demonstrate the sheer range of styles and genres under its vast umbrella.

To that end, we’ve collected a non-exhaustive list of works across multiple formats that have inspired the writers here at Reedsy. With 20 different works to explore, we hope they will inspire you, too.

People have been writing creatively for almost as long as we have been able to hold pens. Just think of long-form epic poems like The Odyssey or, later, the Cantar de Mio Cid — some of the earliest recorded writings of their kind.

Poetry is also a great place to start if you want to dip your own pen into the inkwell of creative writing. It can be as short or long as you want (you don’t have to write an epic of Homeric proportions), encourages you to build your observation skills, and often speaks from a single point of view .

Here are a few examples:

“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The ruins of pillars and walls with the broken statue of a man in the center set against a bright blue sky.

This classic poem by Romantic poet Percy Shelley (also known as Mary Shelley’s husband) is all about legacy. What do we leave behind? How will we be remembered? The great king Ozymandias built himself a massive statue, proclaiming his might, but the irony is that his statue doesn’t survive the ravages of time. By framing this poem as told to him by a “traveller from an antique land,” Shelley effectively turns this into a story. Along with the careful use of juxtaposition to create irony, this poem accomplishes a lot in just a few lines.

“Trying to Raise the Dead” by Dorianne Laux

A direction. An object. My love, it needs a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening. I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.

Poetry is cherished for its ability to evoke strong emotions from the reader using very few words which is exactly what Dorianne Laux does in “ Trying to Raise the Dead .” With vivid imagery that underscores the painful yearning of the narrator, she transports us to a private nighttime scene as the narrator sneaks away from a party to pray to someone they’ve lost. We ache for their loss and how badly they want their lost loved one to acknowledge them in some way. It’s truly a masterclass on how writing can be used to portray emotions.

If you find yourself inspired to try out some poetry — and maybe even get it published — check out these poetry layouts that can elevate your verse!

Song Lyrics

Poetry’s closely related cousin, song lyrics are another great way to flex your creative writing muscles. You not only have to find the perfect rhyme scheme but also match it to the rhythm of the music. This can be a great challenge for an experienced poet or the musically inclined.

To see how music can add something extra to your poetry, check out these two examples:

“Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen

You say I took the name in vain I don't even know the name But if I did, well, really, what's it to ya? There's a blaze of light in every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Metaphors are commonplace in almost every kind of creative writing, but will often take center stage in shorter works like poetry and songs. At the slightest mention, they invite the listener to bring their emotional or cultural experience to the piece, allowing the writer to express more with fewer words while also giving it a deeper meaning. If a whole song is couched in metaphor, you might even be able to find multiple meanings to it, like in Leonard Cohen’s “ Hallelujah .” While Cohen’s Biblical references create a song that, on the surface, seems like it’s about a struggle with religion, the ambiguity of the lyrics has allowed it to be seen as a song about a complicated romantic relationship.

“I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie

If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks Then I'll follow you into the dark

You can think of song lyrics as poetry set to music. They manage to do many of the same things their literary counterparts do — including tugging on your heartstrings. Death Cab for Cutie’s incredibly popular indie rock ballad is about the singer’s deep devotion to his lover. While some might find the song a bit too dark and macabre, its melancholy tune and poignant lyrics remind us that love can endure beyond death.

Plays and Screenplays

From the short form of poetry, we move into the world of drama — also known as the play. This form is as old as the poem, stretching back to the works of ancient Greek playwrights like Sophocles, who adapted the myths of their day into dramatic form. The stage play (and the more modern screenplay) gives the words on the page a literal human voice, bringing life to a story and its characters entirely through dialogue.

Interested to see what that looks like? Take a look at these examples:

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

“I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”

Arthur Miller acts as a bridge between the classic and the new, creating 20th century tragedies that take place in living rooms and backyard instead of royal courts, so we had to include his breakout hit on this list. Set in the backyard of an all-American family in the summer of 1946, this tragedy manages to communicate family tensions in an unimaginable scale, building up to an intense climax reminiscent of classical drama.

💡 Read more about Arthur Miller and classical influences in our breakdown of Freytag’s pyramid .

“Everything is Fine” by Michael Schur ( The Good Place )

“Well, then this system sucks. What...one in a million gets to live in paradise and everyone else is tortured for eternity? Come on! I mean, I wasn't freaking Gandhi, but I was okay. I was a medium person. I should get to spend eternity in a medium place! Like Cincinnati. Everyone who wasn't perfect but wasn't terrible should get to spend eternity in Cincinnati.”

A screenplay, especially a TV pilot, is like a mini-play, but with the extra job of convincing an audience that they want to watch a hundred more episodes of the show. Blending moral philosophy with comedy, The Good Place is a fun hang-out show set in the afterlife that asks some big questions about what it means to be good.

It follows Eleanor Shellstrop, an incredibly imperfect woman from Arizona who wakes up in ‘The Good Place’ and realizes that there’s been a cosmic mixup. Determined not to lose her place in paradise, she recruits her “soulmate,” a former ethics professor, to teach her philosophy with the hope that she can learn to be a good person and keep up her charade of being an upstanding citizen. The pilot does a superb job of setting up the stakes, the story, and the characters, while smuggling in deep philosophical ideas.

Personal essays

Our first foray into nonfiction on this list is the personal essay. As its name suggests, these stories are in some way autobiographical — concerned with the author’s life and experiences. But don’t be fooled by the realistic component. These essays can take any shape or form, from comics to diary entries to recipes and anything else you can imagine. Typically zeroing in on a single issue, they allow you to explore your life and prove that the personal can be universal.

Here are a couple of fantastic examples:

“On Selling Your First Novel After 11 Years” by Min Jin Lee (Literary Hub)

There was so much to learn and practice, but I began to see the prose in verse and the verse in prose. Patterns surfaced in poems, stories, and plays. There was music in sentences and paragraphs. I could hear the silences in a sentence. All this schooling was like getting x-ray vision and animal-like hearing.

This deeply honest personal essay by Pachinko author Min Jin Lee is an account of her eleven-year struggle to publish her first novel . Like all good writing, it is intensely focused on personal emotional details. While grounded in the specifics of the author's personal journey, it embodies an experience that is absolutely universal: that of difficulty and adversity met by eventual success.

“A Cyclist on the English Landscape” by Roff Smith (New York Times)

These images, though, aren’t meant to be about me. They’re meant to represent a cyclist on the landscape, anybody — you, perhaps.

Roff Smith’s gorgeous photo essay for the NYT is a testament to the power of creatively combining visuals with text. Here, photographs of Smith atop a bike are far from simply ornamental. They’re integral to the ruminative mood of the essay, as essential as the writing. Though Smith places his work at the crosscurrents of various aesthetic influences (such as the painter Edward Hopper), what stands out the most in this taciturn, thoughtful piece of writing is his use of the second person to address the reader directly. Suddenly, the writer steps out of the body of the essay and makes eye contact with the reader. The reader is now part of the story as a second character, finally entering the picture.

Short Fiction

The short story is the happy medium of fiction writing. These bite-sized narratives can be devoured in a single sitting and still leave you reeling. Sometimes viewed as a stepping stone to novel writing, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Short story writing is an art all its own. The limited length means every word counts and there’s no better way to see that than with these two examples:

“An MFA Story” by Paul Dalla Rosa (Electric Literature)

At Starbucks, I remembered a reading Zhen had given, a reading organized by the program’s faculty. I had not wanted to go but did. In the bar, he read, "I wrote this in a Starbucks in Shanghai. On the bank of the Huangpu." It wasn’t an aside or introduction. It was two lines of the poem. I was in a Starbucks and I wasn’t writing any poems. I wasn’t writing anything.

Creative Writing Examples | Photograph of New York City street.

This short story is a delightfully metafictional tale about the struggles of being a writer in New York. From paying the bills to facing criticism in a writing workshop and envying more productive writers, Paul Dalla Rosa’s story is a clever satire of the tribulations involved in the writing profession, and all the contradictions embodied by systemic creativity (as famously laid out in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era ). What’s more, this story is an excellent example of something that often happens in creative writing: a writer casting light on the private thoughts or moments of doubt we don’t admit to or openly talk about.

“Flowering Walrus” by Scott Skinner (Reedsy)

I tell him they’d been there a month at least, and he looks concerned. He has my tongue on a tissue paper and is gripping its sides with his pointer and thumb. My tongue has never spent much time outside of my mouth, and I imagine it as a walrus basking in the rays of the dental light. My walrus is not well.

A winner of Reedsy’s weekly Prompts writing contest, ‘ Flowering Walrus ’ is a story that balances the trivial and the serious well. In the pauses between its excellent, natural dialogue , the story manages to scatter the fear and sadness of bad medical news, as the protagonist hides his worries from his wife and daughter. Rich in subtext, these silences grow and resonate with the readers.

Want to give short story writing a go? Give our free course a go!

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How to Craft a Killer Short Story

From pacing to character development, master the elements of short fiction.

Perhaps the thing that first comes to mind when talking about creative writing, novels are a form of fiction that many people know and love but writers sometimes find intimidating. The good news is that novels are nothing but one word put after another, like any other piece of writing, but expanded and put into a flowing narrative. Piece of cake, right?

To get an idea of the format’s breadth of scope, take a look at these two (very different) satirical novels:

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality — all simply store workers.

Creative Writing Examples | Book cover of Convenience Store Woman

Keiko, a thirty-six-year-old convenience store employee, finds comfort and happiness in the strict, uneventful routine of the shop’s daily operations. A funny, satirical, but simultaneously unnerving examination of the social structures we take for granted, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is deeply original and lingers with the reader long after they’ve put it down.

Erasure by Percival Everett

The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it.

Erasure is a truly accomplished satire of the publishing industry’s tendency to essentialize African American authors and their writing. Everett’s protagonist is a writer whose work doesn’t fit with what publishers expect from him — work that describes the “African American experience” — so he writes a parody novel about life in the ghetto. The publishers go crazy for it and, to the protagonist’s horror, it becomes the next big thing. This sophisticated novel is both ironic and tender, leaving its readers with much food for thought.

Creative Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is pretty broad: it applies to anything that does not claim to be fictional (although the rise of autofiction has definitely blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction). It encompasses everything from personal essays and memoirs to humor writing, and they range in length from blog posts to full-length books. The defining characteristic of this massive genre is that it takes the world or the author’s experience and turns it into a narrative that a reader can follow along with.

Here, we want to focus on novel-length works that dig deep into their respective topics. While very different, these two examples truly show the breadth and depth of possibility of creative nonfiction:

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend the circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural.

Writer Jesmyn Ward recounts the deaths of five men from her rural Mississippi community in as many years. In her award-winning memoir , she delves into the lives of the friends and family she lost and tries to find some sense among the tragedy. Working backwards across five years, she questions why this had to happen over and over again, and slowly unveils the long history of racism and poverty that rules rural Black communities. Moving and emotionally raw, Men We Reaped is an indictment of a cruel system and the story of a woman's grief and rage as she tries to navigate it.

Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

He believed that wine could reshape someone’s life. That’s why he preferred buying bottles to splurging on sweaters. Sweaters were things. Bottles of wine, said Morgan, “are ways that my humanity will be changed.”

In this work of immersive journalism , Bianca Bosker leaves behind her life as a tech journalist to explore the world of wine. Becoming a “cork dork” takes her everywhere from New York’s most refined restaurants to science labs while she learns what it takes to be a sommelier and a true wine obsessive. This funny and entertaining trip through the past and present of wine-making and tasting is sure to leave you better informed and wishing you, too, could leave your life behind for one devoted to wine.

Illustrated Narratives (Comics, graphic novels)

Once relegated to the “funny pages”, the past forty years of comics history have proven it to be a serious medium. Comics have transformed from the early days of Jack Kirby’s superheroes into a medium where almost every genre is represented. Humorous one-shots in the Sunday papers stand alongside illustrated memoirs, horror, fantasy, and just about anything else you can imagine. This type of visual storytelling lets the writer and artist get creative with perspective, tone, and so much more. For two very different, though equally entertaining, examples, check these out:

Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

"Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure."

A Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. A little blond boy Calvin makes multiple silly faces in school photos. In the last panel, his father says, "That's our son. *Sigh*" His mother then says, "The pictures will remind of more than we want to remember."

This beloved comic strip follows Calvin, a rambunctious six-year-old boy, and his stuffed tiger/imaginary friend, Hobbes. They get into all kinds of hijinks at school and at home, and muse on the world in the way only a six-year-old and an anthropomorphic tiger can. As laugh-out-loud funny as it is, Calvin & Hobbes ’ popularity persists as much for its whimsy as its use of humor to comment on life, childhood, adulthood, and everything in between.

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

"I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell."

Comics aren't just the realm of superheroes and one-joke strips, as Alan Moore proves in this serialized graphic novel released between 1989 and 1998. A meticulously researched alternative history of Victorian London’s Ripper killings, this macabre story pulls no punches. Fact and fiction blend into a world where the Royal Family is involved in a dark conspiracy and Freemasons lurk on the sidelines. It’s a surreal mad-cap adventure that’s unsettling in the best way possible.

Video Games and RPGs

Probably the least expected entry on this list, we thought that video games and RPGs also deserved a mention — and some well-earned recognition for the intricate storytelling that goes into creating them.

Essentially gamified adventure stories, without attention to plot, characters, and a narrative arc, these games would lose a lot of their charm, so let’s look at two examples where the creative writing really shines through:

80 Days by inkle studios

"It was a triumph of invention over nature, and will almost certainly disappear into the dust once more in the next fifty years."

Named Time Magazine ’s game of the year in 2014, this narrative adventure is based on Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. The player is cast as the novel’s narrator, Passpartout, and tasked with circumnavigating the globe in service of their employer, Phileas Fogg. Set in an alternate steampunk Victorian era, the game uses its globe-trotting to comment on the colonialist fantasies inherent in the original novel and its time period. On a storytelling level, the choose-your-own-adventure style means no two players’ journeys will be the same. This innovative approach to a classic novel shows the potential of video games as a storytelling medium, truly making the player part of the story.

What Remains of Edith Finch by Giant Sparrow

"If we lived forever, maybe we'd have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is."

This video game casts the player as 17-year-old Edith Finch. Returning to her family’s home on an island in the Pacific northwest, Edith explores the vast house and tries to figure out why she’s the only one of her family left alive. The story of each family member is revealed as you make your way through the house, slowly unpacking the tragic fate of the Finches. Eerie and immersive, this first-person exploration game uses the medium to tell a series of truly unique tales.

Fun and breezy on the surface, humor is often recognized as one of the trickiest forms of creative writing. After all, while you can see the artistic value in a piece of prose that you don’t necessarily enjoy, if a joke isn’t funny, you could say that it’s objectively failed.

With that said, it’s far from an impossible task, and many have succeeded in bringing smiles to their readers’ faces through their writing. Here are two examples:

‘How You Hope Your Extended Family Will React When You Explain Your Job to Them’ by Mike Lacher (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

“Is it true you don’t have desks?” your grandmother will ask. You will nod again and crack open a can of Country Time Lemonade. “My stars,” she will say, “it must be so wonderful to not have a traditional office and instead share a bistro-esque coworking space.”

An open plan office seen from a bird's eye view. There are multiple strands of Edison lights hanging from the ceiling. At long light wooden tables multiple people sit working at computers, many of them wearing headphones.

Satire and parody make up a whole subgenre of creative writing, and websites like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Onion consistently hit the mark with their parodies of magazine publishing and news media. This particular example finds humor in the divide between traditional family expectations and contemporary, ‘trendy’ work cultures. Playing on the inherent silliness of today’s tech-forward middle-class jobs, this witty piece imagines a scenario where the writer’s family fully understands what they do — and are enthralled to hear more. “‘Now is it true,’ your uncle will whisper, ‘that you’ve got a potential investment from one of the founders of I Can Haz Cheezburger?’”

‘Not a Foodie’ by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell (Electric Literature)

I’m not a foodie, I never have been, and I know, in my heart, I never will be.

Highlighting what she sees as an unbearable social obsession with food , in this comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell takes a hilarious stand against the importance of food. From the writer’s courageous thesis (“I think there are more exciting things to talk about, and focus on in life, than what’s for dinner”) to the amusing appearance of family members and the narrator’s partner, ‘Not a Foodie’ demonstrates that even a seemingly mundane pet peeve can be approached creatively — and even reveal something profound about life.

We hope this list inspires you with your own writing. If there’s one thing you take away from this post, let it be that there is no limit to what you can write about or how you can write about it.

In the next part of this guide, we'll drill down into the fascinating world of creative nonfiction.

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What Is Creative Writing? The ULTIMATE Guide!

Creative Writing Summer School in Yale - students discussing

At Oxford Royale Academy, we offer a range of summer school programmes that have become extremely popular amongst students of all ages. The subject of creative writing continues to intrigue many academics as it can help to develop a range of skills that will benefit you throughout your career and life.

Nevertheless, that initial question is one that continues to linger and be asked time and time again: what is creative writing? More specifically, what does it mean or encompass? How does creative writing differ from other styles of writing?

During our Oxford Summer School programme , we will provide you with in-depth an immersive educational experience on campus in the colleges of the best university in the world. However, in this guide, we want to provide a detailed analysis of everything to do with creative writing, helping you understand more about what it is and why it could benefit you to become a creative writer.

The best place to start is with a definition.

What is creative writing?

The dictionary definition of creative writing is that it is original writing that expresses ideas and thoughts in an imaginative way. [1] Some academics will also define it as the art of making things up, but both of these definitions are too simplistic in the grand scheme of things.

It’s challenging to settle on a concrete definition as creative writing can relate to so many different things and formats. Naturally, as the name suggests, it is all built around the idea of being creative or imaginative. It’s to do with using your brain and your own thoughts to create writing that goes outside the realms of what’s expected. This type of writing tends to be more unique as it comes from a personal place. Each individual has their own level of creativity, combined with their own thoughts and views on different things. Therefore, you can conjure up your own text and stories that could be completely different from others.

Understanding creative writing can be challenging when viewed on its own. Consequently, the best way to truly understand this medium is by exploring the other main forms of writing. From here, we can compare and contrast them with the art of creative writing, making it easier to find a definition or separate this form of writing from others.

What are the main forms of writing?

In modern society, we can identify five main types of writing styles [1] that will be used throughout daily life and a plethora of careers:

Narrative Writing
Descriptive Writing
Persuasive Writing
Expository Writing
Creative Writing

Narrative writing refers to storytelling in its most basic form. Traditionally, this involves telling a story about a character and walking the readers through the journey they go on. It can be a long novel or a short story that’s only a few hundred words long. There are no rules on length, and it can be completely true or a work of fiction.

A fundamental aspect of narrative writing that makes it different from other forms is that it should includes the key elements of storytelling. As per UX Planet, there are seven core elements of a good story or narrative [2] : the plot, characters, theme, dialogue, melody, decor and spectacle. Narrative writing will include all of these elements to take the ready on a journey that starts at the beginning, has a middle point, but always comes to a conclusion. This style of writing is typically used when writing stories, presenting anecdotes about your life, creating presentations or speeches and for some academic essays.

Descriptive writing, on the other hand, is more focused on the details. When this type of writing is used, it’s focused on capturing the reader’s attention and making them feel like they are part of the story. You want them to live and feel every element of a scene, so they can close their eyes and be whisked away to whatever place or setting you describe.

In many ways, descriptive writing is writing as an art form. Good writers can be given a blank canvas, using their words to paint a picture for the audience. There’s a firm focus on the five senses all humans have; sight, smell, touch, sound and taste. Descriptive writing touches on all of these senses to tell the reader everything they need to know and imagine about a particular scene.

This is also a style of writing that makes good use of both similes and metaphors. A simile is used to describe something as something else, while a metaphor is used to show that something is something else. There’s a subtle difference between the two, but they both aid descriptive writing immensely. According to many writing experts, similes and metaphors allow an author to emphasise, exaggerate, and add interest to a story to create a more vivid picture for the reader [3] .

Looking at persuasive writing and we have a form of writing that’s all about making yourself heard. You have an opinion that you want to get across to the reader, convincing them of it. The key is to persuade others to think differently, often helping them broaden their mind or see things from another point of view. This is often confused with something called opinionative writing, which is all about providing your opinions. While the two seem similar, the key difference is that persuasive writing is built around the idea of submitting evidence and backing your thoughts up. It’s not as simple as stating your opinion for other to read; no, you want to persuade them that your thoughts are worth listening to and perhaps worth acting on.

This style of writing is commonly used journalistically in news articles and other pieces designed to shine a light on certain issues or opinions. It is also typically backed up with statistical evidence to give more weight to your opinions and can be a very technical form of writing that’s not overly emotional.

Expository writing is more focused on teaching readers new things. If we look at its name, we can take the word exposure from it. According to Merriam-Webster [4] , one of the many definitions of exposure is to reveal something to others or present them with something they otherwise didn’t know. In terms of writing, it can refer to the act of revealing new information to others or exposing them to new ideas.

Effectively, expository writing focuses on the goal of leaving the reader with new knowledge of a certain topic or subject. Again, it is predominately seen in journalistic formats, such as explainer articles or ‘how-to’ blogs. Furthermore, you also come across it in academic textbooks or business writing.

This brings us back to the centre of attention for this guide: what is creative writing?

Interestingly, creative writing is often seen as the style of writing that combines many of these forms together in one go. Narrative writing can be seen as creative writing as you are coming up with a story to keep readers engaged, telling a tale for them to enjoy or learn from. Descriptive writing is very much a key part of creative writing as you are using your imagination and creative skills to come up with detailed descriptions that transport the reader out of their home and into a different place.

Creative writing can even use persuasive writing styles in some formats. Many writers will combine persuasive writing with a narrative structure to come up with a creative way of telling a story to educate readers and provide new opinions for them to view or be convinced of. Expository writing can also be involved here, using creativity and your imagination to answer questions or provide advice to the reader.

Essentially, creative writing can combine other writing types to create a unique and new way of telling a story or producing content. At the same time, it can include absolutely none of the other forms at all. The whole purpose of creative writing is to think outside the box and stray from traditional structures and norms. Fundamentally, we can say there are no real rules when it comes to creative writing, which is what makes it different from the other writing styles discussed above.

What is the purpose of creative writing?

Another way to understand and explore the idea of creative writing is to look at its purpose. What is the aim of most creative works of writing? What do they hope to provide the reader with?

We can look at the words of Bryanna Licciardi, an experienced creative writing tutor, to understand the purpose of creative writing. She writes that the primary purpose is to entertain and share human experiences, like love or loss. Writers attempt to reveal the truth with regard to humanity through poetics and storytelling. [5] She also goes on to add that the first step of creative writing is to use one’s imagination.

When students sign up to our creative writing courses, we will teach them how to write with this purpose. Your goal is to create stories or writing for readers that entertain them while also providing information that can have an impact on their lives. It’s about influencing readers through creative storytelling that calls upon your imagination and uses the thoughts inside your head. The deeper you dive into the art of creative writing, the more complex it can be. This is largely because it can be expressed in so many different formats. When you think of creative writing, your instinct takes you to stories and novels. Indeed, these are both key forms of creative writing that we see all the time. However, there are many other forms of creative writing that are expressed throughout the world.

What are the different forms of creative writing?

Looking back at the original and simple definition of creative writing, it relates to original writing in a creative and imaginative way. Consequently, this can span across so many genres and types of writing that differ greatly from one another. This section will explore and analyse the different types of creative writing, displaying just how diverse this writing style can be – while also showcasing just what you’re capable of when you learn how to be a creative writer.

The majority of students will first come across creative writing in the form of essays . The point of an essay is to present a coherent argument in response to a stimulus or question. [6] In essence, you are persuading the reader that your answer to the question is correct. Thus, creative writing is required to get your point across as coherently as possible, while also using great descriptive writing skills to paint the right message for the reader.

Moreover, essays can include personal essays – such as writing a cover letter for work or a university application. Here, great creativity is needed to almost write a story about yourself that captivates the reader and takes them on a journey with you. Excellent imagination and persuasive writing skills can help you tell your story and persuade those reading that you are the right person for the job or university place.

Arguably, this is the most common way in which creative writing is expressed. Fictional work includes novels, novellas, short stories – and anything else that is made up. The very definition of fiction by the Cambridge Dictionary states that it is the type of book or story that is written about imaginary characters and events not based on real people and facts. [7] As such, it means that your imagination is called upon to create something out of nothing. It is a quintessential test of your creative writing skills, meaning you need to come up with characters, settings, plots, descriptions and so much more.

Fictional creative writing in itself takes on many different forms and can be completely different depending on the writer. That is the real beauty of creative writing; you can have entirely different stories and characters from two different writers. Just look at the vast collection of fictional work around you today; it’s the perfect way to see just how versatile creative writing can be depending on the writer.

Similarly, scripts can be a type of creative writing that appeals to many. Technically, a script can be considered a work of fiction. Nevertheless, it depends on the script in question. Scripts for fictional television shows, plays or movies are obviously works of fiction. You, the writer, has come up with the characters and story of the show/play/movie, bringing it all to life through the script. But, scripts can also be non-fictional. Creating a play or movie that adapts real-life events will mean you need to write a script based on something that genuinely happened.

Here, it’s a perfect test of creative writing skills as you take a real event and use your creative talents to make it more interesting. The plot and narrative may already be there for you, so it’s a case of using your descriptive writing skills to really sell it to others and keep readers – or viewers – on the edge of their seats.

A speech is definitely a work of creative writing. The aim of a speech can vary depending on what type of speech it is. A politician delivering a speech in the House of Commons will want to get a point across to persuade others in the room. They’ll need to use creative writing to captivate their audience and have them hanging on their every word. A recent example of a great speech was the one by Sir David Attenborough at the recent COP26 global climate summit. [8] Listening to the speech is a brilliant way of understanding how creative writing can help get points across. His speech went viral around the world because of how electrifying and enthralling it is. The use of many descriptive and persuasive words had people hanging onto everything he said. He really created a picture and an image for people to see, convincing them that the time is now to work on stopping and reversing climate change.

From this speech to a completely different one, you can see creative writing at play for speeches at weddings and other jovial events. Here, the purpose is more to entertain guests and make them laugh. At the same time, someone giving a wedding speech will hope to create a lovely story for the guests to enjoy, displaying the true love that the married couple share for one another. Regardless of what type of speech an individual is giving, creative writing skills are required for it to be good and captivating.

Poetry & Songs

The final example of creative writing is twofold; poetry and songs. Both of these formats are similar to one another, relying on creativity to deliver a combination of things. Poetry can take so many forms and styles, but it aims to inspire readers and get them thinking. Poems often have hidden meanings behind them, and it takes a great deal of imagination and creativity to come up with these meanings while also creating a powerful poem. Some argue that poetry is the most creative of all creative writing forms.

Songwriting is similar in that you use creativity to come up with lyrics that can have powerful meanings while also conjuring up a story for people. The best songwriters will use lyrics that stay in people’s minds and get them thinking about the meaning behind the song. If you lack imagination and creativity, you will never be a good songwriter.

In truth, there are so many other types and examples of creative writing that you can explore. The ones listed above are the most common and powerful, and they all do a great job of demonstrating how diverse creative writing can be. If you can hone your skills in creative writing, it opens up many opportunities for you in life. Primarily, creative writing focuses on fictional pieces of work, but as you can see, non-fiction also requires a good deal of creativity.

What’s needed to make a piece of creative writing?

Our in-depth analysis of creative writing has led to a point where you’re aware of this style of writing and its purpose, along with some examples of it in the real world. The next question to delve into is what do you need to do to make a piece of creative writing. To phrase this another way; how do you write something that comes under the creative heading rather than another form of writing?

There is an element of difficulty in answering this question as creative writing has so many different types and genres. Consequently, there isn’t a set recipe for the perfect piece of creative writing, and that’s what makes this format so enjoyable and unique. Nevertheless, we can discover some crucial elements or principles that will help make a piece of writing as creative and imaginative as possible:

A target audience

All creative works will begin by defining a target audience. There are many ways to define a target audience, with some writers suggesting that you think about who is most likely to read your work. However, this can still be challenging as you’re unsure of the correct demographic to target. Writer’s Digest makes a good point of defining your target audience by considering your main motivation for writing in the first place. [9] It’s a case of considering what made you want to start writing – whether it’s a blog post, novel, song, poem, speech, etc. Figuring out your motivation behind it will help you zero in on your target audience.

Defining your audience is vital for creative writing as it helps you know exactly what to write and how to write it. All of your work should appeal to this audience and be written in a way that they can engage with. As a simple example, authors that write children’s stories will adapt their writing to appeal to the younger audience. Their stories include lots of descriptions and words that children understand, rather than being full of long words and overly academic writing.

Establishing the audience lets the writer know which direction to take things in. As a result, this can aid with things like character choices, plot, storylines, settings, and much more.

A story of sorts

Furthermore, great works of creative writing will always include a story of sorts. This is obvious for works such as novels, short stories, scripts, etc. However, even for things like poems, songs or speeches, a story helps make it creative. It gives the audience something to follow, helping them make sense of the work. Even if you’re giving a speech, setting a story can help you create a scene in people’s minds that makes them connect to what you’re saying. It’s a very effective way of persuading others and presenting different views for people to consider.

Moreover, consider the definition of a story/narrative arc. One definition describes it as a term that describes a story’s full progression. It visually evokes the idea that every story has a relatively calm beginning, a middle where tension, character conflict and narrative momentum builds to a peak and an end where the conflict is resolved. [10]

Simplifying this, we can say that all works of creative writing need a general beginning, middle and end. It’s a way of bringing some sort of structure to your writing so you know where you are going, rather than filling it with fluff or waffle.

A good imagination

Imagination is a buzzword that we’ve used plenty of times throughout this deep dive into creative writing. Every creative writing course you go on will spend a lot of time focusing on the idea of using your imagination. The human brain is a marvellously powerful thing that holds the key to creative freedom and expressing yourself in new and unique ways. If you want to make something creative, you need to tap into your imagination.

People use their imagination in different ways; some will be able to conjure up ideas for stories or worlds that exist beyond our own. Others will use theirs to think of ways of describing things in a more creative and imaginative way. Ultimately, a good imagination is what sets your work apart from others within your genre. This doesn’t mean you need to come up with the most fantastical novel of all time to have something classified as creative writing. No, using your imagination and creativity can extend to something as simple as your writing style.

Ultimately, it’s more about using your imagination to find your own personal flair and creative style. You will then be able to write unique pieces that stand out from the others and keep audiences engaged.

How can creative writing skills benefit you?

When most individuals or students consider creative writing, they imagine a world where they are writing stories for a living. There’s a common misconception that creative writing skills are only beneficial for people pursuing careers in scriptwriting, storytelling, etc. Realistically, enhancing ones creative writing skills can open up many windows of opportunity throughout your education and career.

Improve essay writing – Naturally, creative writing forms a core part of essays and other written assignments in school and university. Improving your skills in this department can help a student get better at writing powerful essays and achieving top marks. In turn, this can impact your career by helping you get better grades to access better jobs in the future.
Become a journalist – Journalists depend on creative writing to make stories that capture audiences and have people hanging on their every word. You need high levels of creativity to turn a news story into something people are keen to read or watch.
Start a blog – In modern times, blogging is a useful tool that can help people find profitable and successful careers. The whole purpose of a blog is to provide your opinions to the masses while also entertaining, informing and educating. Again, having a firm grasp of creative writing skills will aid you in building your blog audience.
Write marketing content – From advert scripts to content on websites, marketing is fuelled by creative writing. The best marketers will have creative writing skills to draw an audience in and convince them to buy products. If you can learn to get people hanging on your every word, you can make it in this industry.

These points all demonstrate the different ways in which creative writing can impact your life and alter your career. In terms of general career skills, this is one that you simply cannot go without.

How to improve your creative writing

One final part of this analysis of creative writing is to look at how students can improve. It begins by reading as much as you can and taking in lots of different content. Read books, poems, scripts, articles, blogs – anything you can find. Listen to music and pay attention to the words people use and the structure of their writing. It can help you pick up on things like metaphors, similes, and how to use your imagination. Of course, writing is the key to improving; the more you write, the more creative you can get as you will start unlocking the powers of your brain.

Conclusion: What is creative writing

In conclusion, creative writing uses a mixture of different types of writing to create stories that stray from traditional structures and norms. It revolves around the idea of using your imagination to find a writing style that suits you and gets your points across to an audience, keeping them engaged in everything you say. From novels to speeches, there are many forms of creative writing that can help you in numerous career paths throughout your life.

[1] SkillShare: The 5 Types of Writing Styles with Examples

[2] Elements of Good Story Telling – UX Planet

[3] Simile vs Metaphor: What’s the Difference? – ProWritingAid

[4] Definition of Exposure by Merriam-Webster

[5] The Higher Purpose of Creative Writing | by Terveen Gill

[6] Essay purpose – Western Sydney University

[7] FICTION | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary

[8] ‘Not fear, but hope’ – Attenborough speech in full – BBC News

[9] Writer’s Digest: Who Is Your Target Reader?

[10] What is a Narrative Arc? • A Guide to Storytelling Structure

A Look Into Creative Writing | Oxford Summer Courses

Exploring the magic of creative writing with oxford summer courses.

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Defining Creative Writing

Creative writing , as taught at Oxford Summer Courses, is the process of crafting original and imaginative works of literature, poetry, prose, or scripts. It transcends conventional writing, encouraging individuals to explore language, structure, and narrative. Whether it's a heartfelt poem, a captivating short story, or a thought-provoking novel, creative writing allows us to communicate our unique perspectives and experiences with the world.

The Magic of Imagination

Creative Writing is a catalyst that sparks our creativity and empowers us to breathe life into our ideas on the page. With Oxford Summer Courses, aspiring writers aged 16-24 can embark on an extraordinary journey of creative expression and growth. Immerse yourself in the captivating realms of Oxford and Cambridge as you explore our inspiring creative writing programs. Teleport readers to distant lands, realms of fantasy and creation, introduce them to captivating characters, and craft new worlds through the transformative art of storytelling. Discover more about our creative writing course here . Unleash your imagination and unlock the writer within.

What Are the Different Types of Creative Writing?

Creative Writing comes in many forms, encompassing a range of genres and styles. There are lots of different types of Creative Writing, which can be categorised as fiction or non-fiction. Some of the most popular being:

Biographies
Fiction: novels, novellas, short stories, etc.
Poetry and Spoken word
Playwriting/Scriptwriting
Personal essays

At Oxford Summer Courses, students have the opportunity to delve into these various types of Creative Writing during the Summer School.

The Benefits of Creative Writing with Oxford Summer Courses

Engaging in Creative Writing with Oxford Summer Courses offers numerous benefits beyond self-expression. By joining our dedicated Creative Writing summer school programme, you would:

Foster self-discovery and gain a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and personal experiences.
Improve your communication skills, honing your ability to express yourself effectively and engage readers through refined language and storytelling abilities.
Enhance empathy by exploring diverse perspectives and stepping into the shoes of different characters, broadening your understanding of the world around you.
Gain new skills for further education or work, expanding your repertoire of writing techniques and abilities to enhance your academic or professional pursuits.
Nurture your creativity, encouraging you to think outside the box, embrace unconventional ideas, and challenge the status quo, fostering a life-long mindset of innovation and originality.

Embracing the Journey

To embark on a journey of creative writing, embrace curiosity, take risks, and surrender to the flow of imagination. Write regularly, read widely, embrace feedback from tutors and peers at Oxford Summer Courses. Begin to experiment with styles and genres, and stay persistent in your course of action. The path of creative writing requires dedication, practice, and an open mind. Join us as we provide tips to help you start your creative writing journey and unleash your full creative potential under the guidance of industry professionals.

Creative Writing is a remarkable voyage that invites us to unleash our imagination, share our stories, and inspire others. It offers countless personal and professional benefits, nurturing self-expression, empathy, and creativity. So, grab a pen, open your mind, and embark on this enchanting journey of creative writing with Oxford Summer Courses. Let your words paint a vivid tapestry that captivates hearts and minds under the guidance of experienced tutors from Oxford and Cambridge. Join us as we explore the magic of creative writing and discover the transformative power it holds within through the renowned Oxford Summer Courses summer school.

Ready to study Creative Writing? Apply now to Oxford Summer Courses and join a community of motivated learners from around the world. Apply here .

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Discover the enchantment of creative writing with Oxford Summer Courses. Unleash your imagination, explore different genres, and enhance your communication skills. Nurture self-expression, empathy, and creativity while gaining valuable writing techniques.

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How creative writing can increase students’ resilience, students can find strength and community in sharing their stories through writing..

Many of my seventh-grade students do not arrive at school ready to learn. Their families often face financial hardship and live in cramped quarters, which makes it difficult to focus on homework. The responsibility for cooking and taking care of younger siblings while parents work often falls on these twelve year olds’ small shoulders. Domestic violence and abuse are also not uncommon.

To help traumatized students overcome their personal and academic challenges, one of our first jobs as teachers is to build a sense of community. We need to communicate that we care and that we welcome them into the classroom just as they are. One of the best ways I’ve found to connect with my students, while also nurturing their reading and writing skills, is through creative writing.

For the past three years, I’ve invited students in my English Language Development (ELD) classes to observe their thoughts, sit with their emotions, and offer themselves and each other compassion through writing and sharing about their struggles. Creating a safe, respectful environment in which students’ stories matter invites the disengaged, the hopeless, and the numb to open up. Students realize that nobody is perfect and nobody’s life is perfect. In this kind of classroom community, they can take the necessary risks in order to learn, and they become more resilient when they stumble.

Fostering a growth mindset

One of the ways students can boost their academic performance and develop resilience is by building a growth mindset. Carol Dweck, Stanford University professor of psychology and author of the book Mindset , explains that people with a growth mindset focus on learning from mistakes and welcoming challenges rather than thinking they’re doomed to be dumb or unskillful. A growth mindset goes hand in hand with self-compassion: recognizing that everyone struggles and treating ourselves with kindness when we trip up.

One exercise I find very useful is to have students write a story about a time when they persevered when faced with a challenge—in class, sports, or a relationship. Some of the themes students explore include finally solving math problems, learning how to defend themselves, or having difficult conversations with parents.

I primed the pump by telling my students about something I struggled with—feeling left behind in staff meetings as my colleagues clicked their way through various computer applications. I confided that PowerPoint and Google Slides—tools (one might assume) that any teacher worth a paperweight has mastered—still eluded me. By admitting my deficiency to my students, asking for their help, and choosing to see the opportunity to remedy it every day in the classroom, I aimed to level the playing field with them. They may have been reading three or four grade levels behind, but they could slap a PowerPoint presentation together in their sleep.

For students, sharing their own stories of bravery, resilience, and determination brings these qualities to the forefront of their minds and helps solidify the belief that underlies a growth mindset: I can improve and grow . We know from research in neuroplasticity that when students take baby steps to achieve a goal and take pride in their accomplishments, they change their brains, growing new neural networks and fortifying existing ones. Neurons in the brain release the feel-good chemical dopamine, which plays a major role in motivating behavior toward rewards.

After writing about a few different personal topics, students choose one they want to publish on the bulletin boards at the back of the classroom. They learn to include the juicy details of their stories (who, what, when, where, why, and how), and they get help from their peers, who ask follow-up questions to prompt them to include more information. This peer editing builds their resilience in more ways than one—they make connections with each other by learning about each other’s lives, and they feel empowered by lending a hand.

In my experience, students are motivated to do this assignment because it helps them feel that their personal stories and emotions truly matter, despite how their other academics are going. One student named Alejandro chose to reflect on basketball and the persistence and time it took him to learn:

Hoops By Alejandro Gonzalez Being good takes time. One time my sister took me to a park and I saw people playing basketball. I noticed how good they were and decided I wanted to be like them. Still I told my sister that basketball looked hard and that I thought I couldn’t do it. She said,“You could do it if you tried. You’ll get the hang of it.” My dad bought me a backboard and hoop to play with. I was really happy, but the ball wasn’t making it in. Every time I got home from school, I would go straight to the backyard to play. I did that almost every day until little by little I was getting the hang of it. I also played with my friends. Every day after lunch we would meet at the basketball court to have a game. … I learned that you need to be patient and to practice a lot to get the hang of things. With a little bit of practice, patience, and hard work, anything is possible.

Originally, Alejandro wasn’t sure why he was in school and often lacked the motivation to learn. But writing about something he was passionate about and recalling the steps that led to his success reminded him of the determination and perseverance he had demonstrated in the past, nurturing a positive view of himself. It gave him a renewed sense of investment in learning English and eventually helped him succeed in his ELD class, as well.

Maintaining a hopeful outlook

Another way to build resilience in the face of external challenges is to shore up our inner reserves of hope —and I’ve found that poetry can serve as inspiration for this.

For the writing portion of the lesson, I invite students to “get inside” poems by replicating the underlying structure and trying their hand at writing their own verses. I create poem templates, where students fill in relevant blanks with their own ideas.

One poem I like to share is “So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye. Its lines “Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house / and now live over a quarry of noise and dust / cannot make you unhappy” remind us that, despite the unpleasant events that occur in our lives, it’s our choice whether to allow them to interfere with our happiness. The speaker, who “love[s] even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens, and scratched records,” has a persistently sunny outlook.

It’s unrealistic for students who hear gunshots at night to be bubbling over with happiness the next morning. Still, the routine of the school day and the sense of community—jokes with friends, a shared bag of hot chips for breakfast, and a creative outlet—do bolster these kids. They have an unmistakable drive to keep going, a life force that may even burn brighter because they take nothing for granted—not even the breath in their bodies, life itself.

Itzayana was one of those students who, due to the adversity in her life, seemed too old for her years. She rarely smiled and started the school year with a defiant approach to me and school in general, cursing frequently in the classroom. Itzayana’s version of “So Much Happiness” hinted at some of the challenges I had suspected she had in her home life:

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. Even the fact that you once heard your family laughing and now hear them yelling at each other cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of tamales and horchata and love even scrubbing the floor, washing dishes, and cleaning your room. Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, help people in need, help your family, and take care of yourself. —Itzayana C.

Her ending lines, “Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, / help people in need, help your family, and take care of yourself,” showed her growing awareness of the need for self-care as she continued to support her family and others around her. This is a clear sign of her developing resilience.

Poetry is packed with emotion, and writing their own poems allows students to grapple with their own often-turbulent inner lives. One student commented on the process, saying, “By writing poems, I’ve learned to be calm and patient, especially when I get mad about something dumb.” Another student showed pride in having her writing published; she reflected, “I feel good because other kids can use it for calming down when they’re angry.”

To ease students into the creative process, sometimes we also write poems together as a class. We brainstorm lines to include, inviting the silly as well as the poignant and creating something that represents our community.

Practicing kindness

Besides offering my students new ways of thinking about themselves, I also invite them to take kind actions toward themselves and others.

In the music video for “Give a Little Love” by Noah and the Whale, one young African American boy—who witnesses bullying at school and neglect in his neighborhood —decides to take positive action and whitewash a wall of graffiti. Throughout the video, people witness others’ random acts of kindness, and then go on to do their own bit.

“My love is my whole being / And I’ve shared what I could,” the lyrics say—a reminder that our actions speak louder than our words and do have an incredible impact. The final refrain in the song—“Well if you are (what you love) / And you do (what you love) /...What you share with the world is what it keeps of you”—urges the students to contribute in a positive way to the classroom, the school campus, and their larger community.

After watching the video, I ask students to reflect upon what kind of community they would like to be part of and what makes them feel safe at school. They write their answers—for example, not being laughed at by their peers and being listened to—on Post-it notes. These notes are used to create classroom rules. This activity sends a message early on that we are co-creating our communal experience together. Students also write their own versions of the lyrics, reflecting on different things you can give and receive—like kindness, peace, love, and ice cream.

Reaping the benefits

To see how creative writing impacts students, I invite them to rate their resilience through a self-compassion survey at the start of the school year and again in the spring. Last year, two-thirds of students surveyed increased in self-compassion; Alejandro grew his self-compassion by 20 percent. The program seems to work at developing their reading and writing skills, as well: At the middle of the school year, 40 percent of my students moved up to the next level of ELD, compared to 20 percent the previous year.

As a teacher, my goal is to meet students where they’re at and learn about their whole lives. Through creative writing activities, we create a community of compassionate and expressive learners who bear witness to the impact of trauma in each others’ experiences and together build resilience.

As a symbol of community and strength, I had a poster in my classroom of a boat at sea with hundreds of refugees standing shoulder to shoulder looking skyward. It’s a hauntingly beautiful image of our ability to risk it all for a better life, as many of my ELD students do. Recognizing our common humanity and being able to share about our struggles not only leads to some beautiful writing, but also some brave hearts.

About the Author

Laura Bean, M.F.A. , executive director of Mindful Literacy, consults with school communities to implement mindfulness and creative writing programs. She has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and presented a mindful writing workshop at Bridging the Hearts and Minds of Youth Conference in San Diego in 2016.

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Articles on Creative writing

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Associate professor, Deakin University

Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

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Executive Dean (interim) Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra

Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Southern Queensland

Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Stirling

Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Winchester

Dean of Research (Creative), University of South Australia

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Creative Writing: What It Is and Why It Matters

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on Published: January 13, 2023 - Last updated: January 15, 2023

Categories Writing

Writing can be intimidating for many people, but creative writing doesn’t have to be. Creative writing is a form of self-expression that allows writers to create stories, characters, and unique settings. But what exactly is creative writing? And why is it important in today’s society? Let’s explore this further.

How We Define Creative Writing

Creative writing is any form where writers can express their thoughts and feelings imaginatively. This type of writing allows authors to draw on their imagination when creating stories and characters and play with language and structure. While there are no boundaries in creative writing, most pieces will contain dialogue, description, and narrative elements.

The Importance of Creative Writing

Creative writing is important because:

It helps us express ourselves in ways we may not be able to do with other forms of communication.
It allows us to explore our creativity and think outside the box.
It can help us better understand our emotions by exploring them through storytelling or poetry.
Writing creatively can also provide much-needed escapism from everyday life, allowing us to escape into a world of our creation.
Creative writing helps us connect with others by sharing our experiences through stories or poems they can relate to. This way, we can gain insight into other people’s lives while giving them insight into ours.

Creative Writing: A Path to Mental and Emotional Wellness

Writing is more than just a way to express your thoughts on paper. It’s a powerful tool that can be used as a form of therapy. Creative writing has been shown to improve emotional and mental well-being.

Through creative writing, we can gain insight into our emotions, develop self-expression and communication skills, cultivate empathy and understanding of others, and boost our imagination and creativity.

Let’s examine how creative writing can relieve stress and emotional catharsis.

Stress Relief and Emotional Catharsis

Writing has the power to reduce stress levels significantly. Writing about our experiences or about things that are causing us anxiety or distress helps us to release those complicated feelings constructively. By expressing ourselves through creative writing, we can work through the emotions associated with stressful situations without having to confront them directly.

This is especially helpful for people who struggle to share their emotions verbally or in person.

Improved Communication and Self-Expression

Creative writing is also beneficial for improving communication skills. Through creative writing, we can explore our thoughts and feelings more intensely than by speaking them aloud. This allows us to think more clearly about what we want to say before actually saying it out loud or in written form, which leads to improved self-expression overall.

Additionally, writing out our thoughts before speaking aloud allows us to articulate ourselves better when communicating with others—which is essential for healthy personal and professional relationships.

Increased Empathy and Understanding of Others

Through creative writing, we can also increase our empathy towards others by exploring different perspectives on various topics that may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable for us—such as racism, homophobia, sexism, etc.—and allowing ourselves the opportunity to see the situation from someone else’s point of view without judgment or bias. This helps us become better communicators and more understanding individuals overall.

The Professional Benefits of Creative Writing

Creative writing is a powerful tool that can help you communicate better and more effectively in the professional world. It can also help you develop various skills that prove invaluable in many industries. Whether you’re looking to build your résumé or improve your communication, creative writing can effectively achieve both.

Let’s take a closer look at how creative writing can benefit your career.

Preparing Students for Careers in Writing, Editing, and Publishing

Creative writing is the perfect foundation for anyone interested in pursuing a career in writing, editing, or publishing. It teaches students the basics of grammar and composition while allowing them to express their ideas in imaginative ways.

Creative writing classes also allow students to learn from professionals who have experience as editors, agents, and publishers. They can use this knowledge to learn creative writing, refine their craft and gain valuable experience before entering the job market.

Improving Skills in Storytelling and Marketing for Various Careers

Creative writing teaches students to think critically about stories and craft compelling narratives that draw readers in. This skill is precious for those who wish to pursue careers outside traditional writing roles—such as marketing or advertising—where storytelling is key.

People who understand the fundamentals of creative writing will be able to create persuasive copy that resonates with readers and effectively conveys a message.

Enhancing Team Collaboration and Leadership Skills

Creative writing isn’t just about expressing yourself through words; it also provides an opportunity to practice working collaboratively with others on projects. Many creative writing classes require students to work together on group projects, which helps them develop essential teamwork skills such as communication, critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.

As they work together on these projects, they will also gain confidence in their ability to lead teams effectively—an invaluable asset no matter what industry they pursue after graduation.

Uncovering the Power of Creative Writing

Creative writing has become an increasingly powerful force in shaping our society. Creative writing has many uses, from preserving cultural heritage to promoting social change.

Preserving Cultural Heritage with Creative Writing

Creative writing has long been used to preserve and share cultural heritage stories. This is done through fictional stories or poetry that explore a particular culture or group’s history, values, and beliefs. By weaving these stories in an engaging way, writers can bring a culture’s history and traditions to life for readers worldwide. This helps bridge cultural gaps by providing insight into what makes each culture unique.

Promoting Social Change & Activism with Creative Writing

Creative writing can also be used for activism and social change. Writers can craft stories that help promote awareness about important issues such as poverty, race relations, gender equality, climate change, and more.

With the power of words, writers can inspire readers to take action on these issues and work towards creating positive change in their communities.

Through creative writing, writers can raise awareness about important topics while fostering empathy toward individuals who may be facing difficult or challenging situations.

Fostering Creativity & Innovation with Creative Writing

Finally, creative writing can foster creativity and innovation in various fields. For example, businesses can use creative copywriting techniques to create compelling content that captures the attention of customers or potential investors.

Aspiring entrepreneurs can use storytelling techniques when pitching their ideas or products to potential partners or investors to make their cases more persuasive and memorable.

By harnessing the power of words through creative writing techniques, businesses can create content that resonates with their target audience while inspiring them to take action on whatever message they’re trying to convey. It often aids the overall creative process.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of creative writing.

Creative writing has many benefits, both for the writer and the reader. For the writer, it can be therapeutic, helping them to explore their emotions and better understand themselves. It can also be used as entertainment or communication, allowing them to share their ideas with the world. For the reader, creative writing can provide enjoyment, escapism, and insights into the human condition.

How can I improve my creative writing skills?

There are several ways you can improve your creative writing skills. Firstly, make sure you allow yourself time to write regularly. Use a writing prompt to inspire a short story. Secondly, read as much as you can; great writers are also great readers. Thirdly, experiment with different styles and genres to find one that suits you best. Fourthly, join a writers’ group, writing workshop, or creative writing program to get feedback from other writers. Finally, keep a journal to track your progress and reflect on your work as a creative writer.

What is the importance of imagery in creative writing?

Imagery is an important element of creative writing, as it helps to create a more vivid picture for the reader. By using sensory and descriptive language, writers can transport readers into their stories and help them relate to their characters or themes. Imagery can bring a scene alive with detail and evoke emotion by helping readers create strong visual images in their minds. Furthermore, imagery can help make stories more memorable by giving readers a deeper connection with the characters or setting.

What are the elements of creative writing?

The elements of creative writing include plot, character, dialogue, setting, theme, and point of view. The plot is the structure or main storyline, while the character is the personage involved in this story. Dialogue includes conversations between characters to give insight into their emotions and relationships. Setting refers to the place or time in which a story takes place, while theme explores deeper meanings behind a story’s narrative. Finally, point of view defines how readers experience a story through first-person or third-person omniscient narration.

What’s the difference between creative writing and other types of writing?

The main difference between creative writing and other types of writing is that it allows the writer to create their own story, characters, settings, and themes. Creative writing also encourages writers to be inventive with their style and use descriptive language to evoke emotion or bring stories alive in readers’ minds. Other academic or technical writing types typically involve more research-based information and are usually more objective in their presentation. Additionally, most forms of non-creative writing will have stricter rules regarding grammar, structure, and syntax.

What is the golden rule of creative writing?

The golden rule of creative writing is to show, not tell. It’s the core creative writing skill. When it comes to creative writing, it’s essential to use descriptive language that immerses readers in the story and allows them to experience the events through their emotions and imaginations. This can be done through metaphors, similes, sensory language, and vivid imagery.

How important is creativity in writing?

Creativity is essential in writing as it allows writers to craft a unique story and evoke emotion from the reader. Creativity can bring stories alive with fresh perspectives and exciting plot lines while creating an escape for readers and giving them more profound insights into the human condition. Writers who combine creativity with technical aspects such as grammar, structure, language usage, and flow will create pieces that capture their audience’s attention and provide an enjoyable reading experience.

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Open access
Published: 05 February 2019

Teaching digital fiction: integrating experimental writing and current technologies

R. Lyle Skains ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8869-0215 1

Palgrave Communications volume 5 , Article number: 13 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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Cultural and media studies
Language and linguistics

Today’s creative writers are immersed in a multiplicative, multimodal—digital—universe. It requires “multiliteracies”, all in a constantly and rapidly evolving technological environment, which are not yet fundamentally integrated into the basic literacy skills entrenched in school learning. How can creative writing instructors in higher education best prepare their students for the real-world contexts of their creative practice? One approach is to integrate the creative writing workshop with a focus on digital and interactive design. This paper outlines a module incorporating multiple literacies into a creative writing course, Playable Fiction, noting the affordances, limitations, and benefits of teaching workshops for writing digital fiction (“born-digital” fiction, composed for and read on digital devices). The researcher took an ethnographical approach to the question, designing a module to encourage creative writing students to experiment with digital fiction, and observing the effects on the students’ attitudes and their coursework. Included is a discussion of the benefits to students of developing multiliteracies and considerations for teaching, including issues of technical know-how and the lack of infrastructural support. Finally, the paper describes the model class taught to second-year and third-year undergraduates in the ‘Games Design and Professional Writing' programs at Bangor University, in the UK, including marking recommendations and reading list advice.

The born-digital in future digital scholarly editing and publishing

James O’Sullivan & Michael Pidd

How humour travels in the new and dynamic mediascape: a case study of a short video platform, Little Red Book, and an online teaching platform, Rain Classroom

Chatgpt and the digitisation of writing.

Xin Zhao, Andrew Cox & Liang Cai

Introduction

The prevailing notion of creative writing workshops in higher education—that our creative writing students are all going to become short fiction writers and novelists—is not only shortsighted, it is backwards-facing. Today’s creative writers are immersed in a multiplicative, multimodal—digital—universe. To ignore the many different modes and methods of narrative storytelling they have at their fingertips is to render our classrooms as backwaters, excluding “significant student knowledge from the learning environment” (Ryan et al., 2010 , p. 477). In this paper I outline a module in which I incorporate multiple literacies into a creative writing course, Playable Fiction, noting the affordances, limitations, and benefits of teaching workshops for writing digital fiction Footnote 1 . For creative writers, digital fiction workshops offer a multiliteracies approach (Cazden et al., 1996 ; Cope and Kalantzis, 2009 ) that develops digital literacy, reflective practice, and audience awareness, as well as organically opening students up to fresh and even experimental techniques and perspectives in their writing practice.

As undergraduate creative writing instructors, our aims and learning objectives for our students have necessarily changed from the 20th century. As tuition costs rise, we are being asked more and more not only to develop critical thinking skills and, more specifically, creative writing skills in our students, but to help them gain vocational and transferable skills as well (Bok, 2009 ; Carr, 2009 ). In the 21st century, those include multimodal communication, which plays an increasingly important role in everyday life, the workplace, academia, citizenship, and even issues of agency and the self (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009 ; Archer and Breuer, 2016 ). Higher education, however, has been slow to engage in multimodal literary practices (Goodfellow, 2011 , p. 136), for whatever reason: lack of holistic teaching approaches in the academy; the quickly changing literary landscape; or insecurities about new technologies and practices. Arlene Archer and Esther Breuer make an eloquent case for embracing these multimodal and digital challenges in higher education:

…a multimodal approach has the potential to provide a healthy antidote to monolingual and logocentric approaches to meaning-making, enabling a metacognitive view of semiosis as occurring across languages and modes, as well as a successful way of enabling access to dominant and powerful forms ( 2016 , p. 14).

The future of writing is multiplicative: multimodal, collaborative, participatory, and distributed (Short and Kauffman, 2000 ; Clark, 2010 ; Jacobs, 2012 ). It is imperative that we engage our creative writing students with all of the sign systems available to them for meaning-making in digital contexts; not only will teaching digital fiction help them to be better writers with wider career opportunities, but it will also to enable them to develop some of the skills that are expected of them as 21st century citizens (Dogan and Robin, 2008 , p. 902).

While many instructors are reluctant to embrace the “digital” element of writing fiction, the form itself grew out of experimental and avant-garde literatures: OuLiPo, literary cubism, temporal contortionism, and both Modernism and postmodernism, standing on the shoulders of Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, to name a few (Ciccoricco, 2012 , p. 472). Its early forms are early video games: text adventures (a genre that is alive and well, now often called “interactive fiction”), which dominated the 1980s game industry (Briceno et al., 2000 ). As games moved toward visual graphics and first-person avatars, hypertext fictions began to circulate, with Michael Joyce’s afternoon ( 1987 ) generally noted as the first, preceding even the Internet (Ensslin and Skains, 2017 ). Digital writers proceeded to turn every software platform and distribution system to their own ends, including HTML, Macromedia/Adobe Flash, JavaScript, game engines, and mobile applications. Collectively, the narrative-focused, multimodal, digital works they create are termed “digital fiction” (a form of electronic literature):

fiction written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its esthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium (Bell et al., 2010 , p. np).

As a still emerging and evolving form of narrative storytelling, digital fiction offers creative writers an opportunity to create and develop literacies in the “visual and digital media they consume and produce in mass quantities on a daily basis” (Hergenrader, 2015 , p. 46). This paper offers a model for teaching digital fiction workshops for undergraduate instructors. The following sections establish the benefits to students of immersing them in this multimodal form, as they develop crucial multiliteracies in the creative writing classroom. Considerations for teaching are discussed, including issues of technical know-how and the lack of infrastructural support for these types of texts. Finally, I describe the model class I teach to second-year and third-year undergraduates in the Professional Writing program at Bangor University, in the UK, including marking recommendations and reading list advice.

The benefits of teaching digital fiction for creative writers

Twenty-first century writers face a wild and varied landscape unlike any previously known. Prior to written culture, crafting fiction involved memorization, appropriation, transformation, and recitation: an oral tradition that, while rich, was limited by the bounds of memory, language, and time. The era of print—a technological revolution itself—extended these boundaries, but introduced new boundaries in form, sequence, copyright, and commerciality. Moreover, print writers craft fiction using what has become an endemic or ‘neutral’ skill: communicating through written language. Comparatively, if print writing is a road well-traveled, the digital writing landscape is a barely explored wilderness. It requires “multiliteracies” (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009 ): writing; awareness of various film, music, Internet, and game conventions; awareness of cultural signs and references; video, image, and sound manipulation; HTML coding; and potentially much, much more, all in a constantly and rapidly evolving technological environment. These skills—with the exception of writing, reading, and hopefully some cultural dialogue—are not yet fundamentally integrated into the basic literacy skills entrenched in school learning. Nor can we expect our undergraduate students to undertake to learn them in the didactic teaching model that has dominated Western pedagogy for so long, by taking individual classes in computer programming, graphic design, sound design, web design, filmmaking, animation, and creative writing.

The current creative writing landscape calls for a more integrated approach, one that recognizes the wide variety of professional options for our students once they graduate. Less than 10% of creative writing students go on to stereotypical “writing” careers (fiction writing, publishing, translating); far more go into arts/design/media careers (17.7%) and marketing/public relations/sales (11.3%)—not to mention the significant numbers who enter professions such as education, health, business, information technology, and law (Logan and Prichard, 2016 ; What can I do with a creative writing degree? 2018 ). These fields—creative writing included—increasingly call for multiliterate professionals; we are failing to prepare our students properly for their careers if we restrict our teaching to the Raymond Carver “minimalist” prose and poetry workshop model (Koehler, 2015 ).

In defining the Multiliteracies Pedagogical Framework, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis argue for teaching design rather than the rules of language, grammar, and canon ( 2009 ). Like multimodality, a design-focused approach engages students in multiliteracies holistically, encouraging them to practice a process of development for their work that closely resembles the draft-workshop-revise creative writing process we have taught for decades. It reaches further, however, asking students to: develop awareness of all the methods of communication at their disposal; analyze their audience, market, and communication media; choose communication methods and modes that best suit their message and audience; construct texts that make the best use of these options—and, at their best, create a text that not only adds these media and modes together, but combines them in such a way that their meanings, when (re-)constructed by the reader, are multiplicative (Lemke, 1998 ), the whole more than the sum of its parts. This is the goal of multiliteracies pedagogy, onboarding students with interpretive strategies and flexible skillsets that not only enhance and progress the art of narrative fiction creation, but also outfit them with transferable skills valuable in modern careers across all professions.

While most students are certainly immersed in digital media, from social media and text messaging to web comics and gaming, most undergraduate students are largely unfamiliar with digital fiction as a creative writing endeavor. They may be familiar with the fringes of digital fiction that are part of the mainstream, such as walking simulators, YouTube mashups, and mobile app versions of classic texts (along with a range of virally/socially shared texts Leonardo Flores terms “3rd generation e-lit” [ 2018 ]); they rarely conceive of these texts, however, as falling under the banner of creative writing, even if they have dabbled in composing some themselves. Thus, the simple transition of the writing space from word processor (and, typically, some work in pen and paper) to HTML composer introduces a simple but significant change to their writing practice, an element of “trouble”, as Howard Garfinkel ( 1967 ) terms it, that brings their habitual practices and habits into relief, allowing for greater introspection, reflection, and experimentation.

The shift in the writing space brings with it a multimodal practice. Whereas prose comes with a relatively rigid presentation mode (codex, black text, white/cream page, left-to-right, top-to-bottom, first page to last), the nature of the digital medium opens a multitude of communicative potentialities. Their narratives can include multilinear plotlines relying on reader interactivity; they may incorporate color, image, sound, video, movement, music, and gameplay. Composing digitally increases the opportunity for writers to use these additional modes to convey narrative metaphor, character, and setting (Chisholm and Trent, 2013 ; Skains, 2017 ): “each sign system makes available different potentials for meaning” (Short and Kauffman, 2000 , p. 44). Further, the digital writer is faced with technological and mechanical challenges in the construction of their texts, regardless of their level of experience, resulting in a “heightened awareness of the act of construction and an output that breaks from the writer’s familiar style…[encouraging] the kind of intentional thinking that is just as useful in traditional writing” (Reed, 2015 , p. 143). The digital medium engages writers in a metacognitive approach to the creation of narrative, pushing their writing practice to previously underexplored heights.

Also inherent in digital composition is a shifted focus to the reader (or generally, the reader-player). Many writers, particularly student writers, write mainly for themselves or for assessments; I’ve found it difficult for most to “put their work out there”: to submit for publishing, to share with friends and family, or even to submit to my department’s end-of-year “showcase”, even when urged by their tutors Footnote 2 . Writing digital fiction requires them to do more than just write: it requires them to design (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009 ), to create a text and an interface that function in harmony for the desired reader experience. They have to consider what word, color, image, and/or sound choices might lead their reader to click one link over another—and what it may mean to the reader in terms of narrative interpretation when they do. They have to consider dead ends and broken links, timing of image downloads and volume (and potential for irritation) of background music. In digital texts, “the balance of agency in meaning construction has shifted in favor of the viewer” (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009 , p. 181). This shift requires digital writers to focus on the audience experience of their texts from the very first stages of composition, rather than merely at the end when they want to send query letters out and need to identify their work’s genre and market for potential agents and editors.

If digital writers are engaging multiplicatively in their texts for the sake of their audience, they are certainly more engaged in the text overall. Perhaps because of the unfamiliarity of the composition space, or perhaps because of the novelty of doing something new, I find my digital writers working up drafts earlier in the semester, rarely leaving their creative assessment to the night before (as happens so frequently on other modules). It is a repeating refrain in the literature on use of digital storytelling in classrooms, from elementary school students to higher education: students working in digital media have significantly increased levels of engagement in their coursework (Hull et al., 2010 ; Ryan et al., 2010 ; Letter, 2015 ; Williams, 2016 ). My own students have successfully negotiated, as a class, higher word counts for their digital work, so they can do more and push their digital fictions further. Students are interested in doing something new with their writing, in playing with technology, in being original . Likewise, they are excited to create texts that resonate with their peers, with the digitally-integrated spaces they engage in outside of academic realms (Williams, 2016 , p. 127). They gain confidence in creating something new and interesting in the technological world they most connect to. They read Jennifer Egan’s short fiction and lament they’ll never be good enough to publish in The New Yorker ; they read her same work as a Twitter novel and think, hey, I can do that, and it will be fun.

Given these perceptions in our students, it is important that we as creative writing tutors maintain environments that encourage creative writers to express themselves in variety of ways to suit different orientations, styles, and audiences.

It is both fascinating and important to consider how the opportunity to multiplicatively combine and design image, color, and text on a page, thereby exercising one’s artfulness and imagination as communicator and creator, can expand meaning-making strategies, opportunities, and motivations for youthful authors (Hull et al., 2010 , p. 347).

Multimodality is a democratizing force (Hull and Nelson, 2005 , p. 253): it enables writers to play to different strengths, whether their own communicative or artistic strengths, or the strengths of a chosen medium or genre. It allows students of different backgrounds, cultures, linguistic levels, areas of interest, fandoms, genre preferences, and communication styles to compose texts in a wide variety of methods—a multiplicity that we as instructors could never strictly delineate and define (and should not , in the interests of developing multiliteracies in our students). It allows us as instructors to engage students not only in the genres and forms we want them to learn, but to engage them in genres and forms they already navigate on a daily basis (Williams, 2016 , p. 122).

This democratization occurs not only between tutors and students, whose mediatized environments can be enormously different (given factors such as age, education, political affiliation, social networks, etc.), but also between students of different backgrounds. The divides between student experiences and capabilities are factors of culture, education history, and, mostly, socio-economic background (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009 ; Letter, 2015 ). At university level, most of our students are generally of a level, thanks to admissions procedures. As more and more (UK) universities, however, seek to expand admissions through international admissions, we find ourselves teaching increasing numbers of ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse students, as well as English as a Second Language (ESL) students. The latter in particular face significant communication and learning gaps, as they “must simultaneously learn both language and subject matter knowledge in a new sociocultural context” (Early and Marshall, 2008 , p. 378, emphasis original). Multiple studies have shown that multimodal analysis and assessment strategies not only connected better with these students, but also enabled more nuanced understandings of abstract concepts and theories (Early and Marshall, 2008 ; Skinner and Hagood, 2008 ; Ryan et al. 2010 ), as well as offering “psychological refuge” from the constant pressure and self-doubt that accompanies learning through an unfamiliar tongue (Choi and Yi, 2015 , p. 15).

Likewise, digitally-enabled multimodal practices offer students the opportunity for knowledge exchange on both cultural and informational fronts. The medium’s multimodality encourages expression through metaphoric and symbolic semiotics, which vary across cultures and backgrounds. By sharing works incorporating these various signs, not only amongst a classroom-based peer group but online as well, students “experience cross-cultural perspectives involving ‘cosmopolitan habits of mind’—the ability to recognize and negotiate differences between competing global cultural perspectives” (Beach, 2012 , p. 449; cf. Hull et al. 2010 ). In addition to this cultural sharing, students also engage in co-teaching (Short and Kauffman, 2000 , p. 56) as they turn to one another for operational or technical help with the software. Because an instructor leading a full class in unfamiliar skills development will necessarily have their attention divided, the students become active participants in trouble-shooting, teaching themselves how to solve a problem or accomplish a goal (through trial-and-error, tutorials, or web searches), then teach one another (Ryan et al. 2010 ; Beach, 2012 ; Letter, 2015 ). They become independent learners, “[participating] in the learning commons to share ideas and alternative perspectives for addressing problems leading to…an essential 21st-century digital literacy” (Beach, 2012 , p. 451).

Considerations for teachers

Multiliteracies, including digital literacy, are not yet standard pedagogical aims; we cannot expect our students to enter our classrooms possessing the necessary literacies to construct digital fiction in the same way we can for prose fiction. Even moreso, instructors are unlikely to possess these multiliteracies as a rule. I once had a workshop leader preclude science fiction submissions in her class—not necessarily because she looked down on the genre, but because, in her argument, she was not familiar enough with it to be able to comment on it or mark it. For teaching digital fiction, the problem is multiplied by the fact that not only may the instructors feel inadequate to teach it (Clancy, 2015 ), their students are unlikely to have much familiarity with it, either. With administrative pressures such as student evaluations, external examiners, Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and the National Student Survey (NSS) in the UK, university instructors are understandably reluctant to embark on a situation wherein the blind may be leading the blind, as it were. Yet the numerous instances where digital storytelling and other multimodal methods have been employed in classrooms (Ryan et al. 2010 ; Choi and Yi, 2015 ; Clancy, 2015 ; Letter, 2015 ; Williams, 2016 )—even by instructors at least initially unfamiliar with the technology—demonstrate that these concerns can be mediated, and the benefits outweigh any stumbles that might occur.

Regarding students and the literacies they bring in to the classroom, many instructors overestimate their students’ capabilities. The “digital divide” places age-based expectations on so-called “digital natives” that do not actually bear out; as Amy Letter points out, “[t]he only divide that has proven genuine is a socioeconomic one” ( 2015 , p. 179). As digital interfaces have evolved toward consumer accessibility, users actually have less incentive to get into the guts of the digital media they participate in on a daily basis; most of the creative activity in any community comes from a relatively small proportion of “super-users”. In the area of digital fiction, particularly, given the form has not (yet) significantly entered the mainstream, students are generally largely unfamiliar with it. Thus the good news: our students are unlikely to enter our digital writing classrooms knowing more than we do about digital fiction. And the bad news: our students are not entering into our digital writing classrooms already armed with the skills they need to create digital fiction, despite our expectations of them as “digital natives”.

If we are to implement a multiliteracies approach in creative writing workshops, incorporating digital fiction and writing, then mitigating approaches to close the gaps in instructor and student knowledge are required. The first of these is the multiliteracies approach itself: by embracing a teaching model that is open, flexible, and iterative, the classroom becomes a cooperative teaching and learning space. The instructor is not expected to be a pinnacle of knowledge; rather, they serve as a guide and mentor for the student to develop that knowledge through their own activities (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009 ; Letter, 2015 ). If the students are engaged, interested in creating a work that they can compare to those on a reading list or even from their own digital interactions outside the classroom, “we can have them engaged in a digital writing process that focuses first on the writer, then on the writing, and lastly on the technology” (Hicks, 2009 , p. 8). The process of learning the technology for creative purposes teaches critical problem-solving skills, develops the task-switching required for working in digital environments, and can even serve as a form of artistic restraint, inspiring new directions for their work (Letter, 2015 ).

What is required of the digital writing instructor, then, is not extensive knowledge of digital fiction softwares, but rather to serve a more Miyagi-like role: to ask analytical questions and pose creative challenges that encourage the students think more deeply about their work and approach it from relevant and fresh perspectives (Ryan et al., 2010 ). A first-person example: as a graduate teaching assistant in a media department, I was chosen to lead workshops on digital media modules merely because I had audited them the previous year; I barely managed to keep a week ahead of my students in terms of the skills I was teaching. Workshop sessions were a nightmare of trouble-shooting students’ issues with their work; if I could not suss the issue in-class, I worked on it on my own time and delivered the solution to the student in the next session. I spent many (unpaid) hours chasing down these issues, feeling inadequate and frustrated. In contrast, in my most recent Playable Fiction module, many of my students integrated elements into their digital fictions that I still have no idea how to do, and spent no time in learning. Instead, I created an expectation that their works only had to have the bare basics of digital fiction (hyperlinks); further functionality was via their own skills and intrepitude. As a result, they googled and followed tutorials and tested things out and shared amongst themselves. These students gained far greater abilities than my earlier students did, not only with the softwares, but also in problem-solving and cooperation.

Outside of the spheres of instructor and student literacies, a further constraint on the digital writing workshop remains: university infrastructure. As discussed above, digital fiction is intangible, evanescent, and appears in a wide array of forms, under just as many nomenclatures. Digital writers use any and every software platform available to them, from expensive professional creative suites to ubiquitous programs like PowerPoint. It is a form that cannot yet be cataloged and accessed via a library: as most is not commercial, it cannot be purchased; likewise, without commercial publishing streams, digital fiction is dispersed throughout the web, with no central distribution hub. Without these centralizing forces, digital fiction is difficult to track and archive: there is, as yet, no cataloging system such as ISBNs, and continually updating digital technology renders many works unreadable in devastatingly short periods. While groups such as the Electronic Literature Organization and the Electronic Literature Lab Footnote 3 are establishing archives and collections, these remain a small fraction of the wealth of digital fiction that exists, and rarely include the more “popular” forms that students are more likely to connect to in their introduction to digital fiction. Currently, the onus is on each individual instructor to construct and maintain an active reading list of digital fictions for students to engage with (suggestions for doing so are below).

As for platforms to use for creating digital fiction, these also have a quality of evanescence, depending on their cost, uptake, and, most importantly, continued development and support. Many that I employed in my digital media modules in the last few years have come and gone. On the upside, developers are continually introducing new platforms that make content creation ever cheaper (usually free) and ever easier; on the downside, technology is moving swifter than ever, as are user trends and habits. Even if a tech or platform remains, often our students perceive it as outdated and uninteresting (see their shift away from Facebook toward Instagram and SnapChat—which, by the time this article publishes, will likely be antiquated). Again, the onus is unfortunately on the individual instructor to find a platform that works best for their aims and students, and to seek out new ones on a regular basis (again, suggestions are below).

“Playable Fiction” as a model

In this section, I outline the digital fiction workshop that I teach regularly, offering it as a model (though not the model; many iterations are possible, of course). It is worth noting that I created this module for dual purposes: (1) to introduce a digital fiction workshop into my department’s undergraduate program, which had none at that stage, and (2) to conduct ethnographic research into the effects of digital composition on creative writers’ practice (Skains et al. 2016 ; paper in preparation). The structure of the module and its assessments are predicated upon this latter purpose.

Playable Fiction is a 12-week taught undergraduate module, taught in the spring semester of even-numbered years. It is designed as an exercise in experimental writing, aiming to “interrogate and analyze the effects of experimenting with unconventional/unnatural forms on conventional or commercial writing practices” Footnote 4 . As such, the first five weeks of the module focus on reading and writing Twine storygames; weeks 6–9 see the students transmediating their own storygames into prose; and the final three weeks are spent analyzing the process and narratives for insight into how writing in digital form affects the creative writer’s practice. The three assessments consist of a 2000-word “storygame” Footnote 5 , a 3000-word prose adaptation of the storygame, and a 2000-word analysis of the creative writing process. The module’s weekly meetings are split into a 1-hour lecture (incorporating theory from narratology, interactivity, and the evolution of narrative and play), a 1-hour study group session (collaborative discussion and exercises are given and recorded, usually relating the lecture discussion to their creative works), and a 1-hour seminar/workshop in a computer lab (for creative exercises, beta-testing, and workshopping). Creative readings include Twine games, hypertexts, interactive fiction, and print ergodic texts (e.g., Mark Danielewski’s 2000 House of Leaves ) (Aarseth 1997 ). Students complete weekly activities based on critical discussion questions and writing exercises, directed toward completion of their three assessments, and record them in research logs (Evernote notebooks shared with the instructor).

The digital fiction software I employ on this module is Twine ( http://twinery.org ). I have covered the history of this program elsewhere (Ensslin and Skains, 2017 ); the short version is that Chris Klimas created it expressly to compose digital fiction—unlike many other platforms that were appropriated from multimedia authoring tools—and indie game developer Anna Anthropy embraced it and promoted it ( 2012 ). The result was that a significant proportion of indie game developers who were under-represented in the games industry (LGBTQ+, women, religious and ethnic minorities) took up the platform for personal and portfolio development. Rather than letting it fade away into obscurity (as he nearly did), Klimas released Twine 2.0, which runs in any Internet browser and requires no download. As the Twine community grew, so too did its resources: it boasts extensive online tutorials, which grow all the time. It remains one of the simplest digital composition tools I have encountered to date, with the greatest capability for adding complexity and functionality (thanks to its JavaScript foundation). It outputs as HTML files, easily saved and easily published, with all the accessibility of the World Wide Web. At its most basic, it requires only two elements: passages and links. Passages form the text the reader will see, and links connect them together (see Figs. 1 – 3 ).

The Twine interface: Passages are represented as white boxes; links are represented as arrows between boxes

A Twine passage: users write their text in these passages. Links are created in this Twine “Story Format” by placing two square brackets around the text to be linked

The passage from Fig. 2 as displayed for a reader in an Internet browser

I have had elderly students create basic hypertext fictions using Twine 2.0 within 30 min, and teenagers create multimedia games over the course of a week. In their five weeks with the program, undergraduates on Playable Fiction go from complete unfamiliarity with it, to submitting a fully functional digital fiction:

Week 1: Introduction to Twine. Read a few Twine games, play with the software. Create a simple story, such as a joke or recent event, to get familiar with creating links and passages.

Week 2: Share and play your simple Twine games. Create a storygame “bible”, and “wireframe” your storygame (see Heussner et al., 2015 ).

Week 3: Share and discuss storygame bibles. Draft storygame.

Week 4: Beta-test storygame. Revise per feedback.

Week 5: Beta-test storygame. Revise per feedback. Submit final storygame in Week 6.

As noted, this module is designed as an experiment into practice; as such, digital writing occurs only in these five to six weeks. Without research constraints on a module, instructors can expand the workshop to include the full course of the term, incorporating further beta-tests, additional digital fictions, and alternative writing exercises.

One additional consideration to incorporate into any digital media module is that of intellectual property and copyright. Most students are immersed in their everyday lives in a culture of sharing and remix (Williams, 2016 , p. 120); the creation and sharing of memes and videos rarely entails proper attribution for creators of the various source materials. Yet proper assignment of intellectual property rights is a desirable learning outcome in academic settings. Integration of copyright discussions into digital writing classrooms is good practice, particularly as these students may move into professions where they are using digital materials, and need to use them appropriately, such as media creation, marketing, or creating web content. While using various materials for educational and/or transformative purposes typically constitutes “fair use”, students should develop a habit of checking the rights assigned to properties they access, save, and incorporate into their works, and using and attributing them appropriately.

Marking digital fiction writing

Unlike my old workshop leader, I embrace an open philosophy when it comes to student submissions; my concerns as a teacher are not that my students write what I know. Rather, I deem a work successful if it is meeting the needs of its (intended) audience. Students come to creative writing for many different purposes; the ones who seek out my classes are often those who, like Anna Anthropy and her community, feel shunted by the “literary” expectations of the Carver-modeled creative writing workshops (which often preclude writing outside of “literary fiction” and poetry) that dominate higher education programs. Frequently, my students are interested in or have already written fanfiction, comics, genre fiction, and scripts; most are also immersed in digital interactivity in some form, whether blogging, social media, or games. Attempting to dissuade them from these pursuits is not only disingenuous, it is detrimental to their futures as writers, whatever career path that may take.

Thus my marking model emphasizes the process of writing and design, rather than focusing solely on the end product. This is in line with Cope and Kalantzis’ Multiliteracies Pedagogy, which delineates a teaching model that guides students through the processes of experiencing (both the known and the new); conceptualizing (naming concepts and weaving them into interpretive frameworks); analyzing (both for functionality and for power relationships); and applying this experience, knowledge, and understanding to work (both appropriately for real world contexts, and creatively for innovation and new perspectives) ( 2009 , pp. 184–5). Shelley Tracey presents a very similar emphasis on process in her Model for Creative Reflection, with its four phases of preparation (enacting “threshold activities” that cross-reference between known and new experiences); play (encouraging creative thinking, interpretative approaches for new ideas); exploration (purposefully putting these interpretations into a new project); and synthesis (in which “experience and learning are synthesized into new understandings”) ( 2007 , p. 5).

I have transitioned my marking (on all modules, including Playable Fiction) from a model in which only the final creative artifact is marked, to one in which all of the activities leading up to that artifact are part of the marking scheme. This scheme is based in Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading model ( 2014 ), which provides a useful framework for focusing on processes and activities rather than a single final project (without making the marking into an odious task). In my application, the final artifact is the minimum required element of any assessment: if a student submits only this element, regardless of how outstanding it may be, the highest mark it can receive is a D + (working on a letter-grade system in which A is the highest band and D is the minimum pass level). All of the weekly exercises I assign leading up to that artifact constitute pass/fail exercises that pop their scores up with each one that is successfully completed and presented—on time—in class (i.e., the exercises as noted above: [1] simple storygame, [2] storygame bible, [3] draft storygame, [4] beta-testing results and feedback, [5] revised draft). I design my contact time so that I review their exercises while they are doing in-class activities such as group work or creative exploration, eliminating the need for extra time spent marking outside of contact hours—a consideration sorely needed in these times of increasing faculty workloads and student numbers.

One amendment I have made to Nilson’s model is to the pass/fail binary. Instead, I use a system of marks 0–3, as shown in Table 1 , ranging from “not submitted” (0) to “satisfactory-plus” (3) for exemplary, A-level work. Students who consistently receive 2 s on their work will earn a B-band mark on their overall assessment; students who consistently receive 3s, including on the final artifact, will earn an A-band mark. I give all students Nilson’s recommended “tokens” (usually 2–3 per module), which they can trade in to me in order to resubmit an exercise for a higher score, to submit an exercise late, or even for more creative uses such as negotiating a higher word count allowance on creative assessments.

As this paper is focused on the Playable Fiction module as a model of teaching digital fiction writing, and not a model of specifications grading Footnote 6 , it does not have the scope to analyze and evaluate this approach fully. Suffice it to note that the results of this implementation have been very positive: student engagement has increased, in terms of attendance and completion of weekly exercises. The final artifacts the students submit, for those who have engaged in the entire process, demonstrate more cohesion and polish on average than those I received under the previous marking model. Student evaluations are generally very positive: students like knowing exactly what they have to do to earn the mark they want, and they like the opportunities presented by the tokens to improve upon previous work. The few negative evaluations are typically from non-attenders who are otherwise good writers, and have previously coasted on their abilities, rather than their engagement with individual modules and learning outcomes. As creative writers, most students appreciate the incentive to engage with their writing practice on a more regular basis; they know it is a necessary part of improving their writing, but most have not yet developed sufficient self-discipline or time management skills to maintain a steady practice. For myself as an instructor, the benefits are that I see the students’ work more frequently, and can gauge much earlier if they (either as a group or as individuals) are struggling. I spend less time outside of contact hours marking work; as the students are getting regular measures of their work’s standards and participating in far more peer feedback, their final artifact is not so heavily weighted, and thus needs less of my feedback. Finally, from an institutional standpoint, students’ average performance on these modules has increased: students who work hard through the process almost always achieve a B-band mark, rather than the lower scores they might receive based on only one piece of work. Thus scores improve without need for artificial grade inflation or marking on a “curve”.

A final note on marking for instructors unsure of where the lines between “unsatisfactory”, “satisfactory”, and “satisfactory-plus” may fall in works of digital fiction. An excellent starting place for marking rubrics is Troy Hicks’ MMAPS heuristic, which he presents thoroughly in The Digital Writing Workshop ( 2009 , pp. 57–8). The text is aimed at primary and secondary school educators, but the concepts are applicable to undergraduate classrooms, particularly the heuristic, which places the marking evaluation on choices the student has made in terms of Media, communication Mode, meeting the Audience’s needs, demonstration and accomplishment of the text’s Purpose, and how the work addresses both the writ er ’s and the writ ing ’s Situation (MMAPS). This heuristic allows the instructor to evaluate a work not by their own standards, but by the standards of the work itself: how successful it is in defining and meeting its creator’s and audience’s needs. Mapping these criteria against the learning outcomes defined on an individual module provides a robust marking rubric that can be adaptable to any instructor’s level of knowledge and familiarity with their students’ chosen genres, audiences, and purposes.

Resources for teaching digital fiction writing

As discussed above, I (currently) recommend Twine as a software platform for creating digital fiction, particularly for the uninitiated. Twine has numerous qualities recommending it: it is free and open source, qualities not only in keeping with Internet culture and Creative Commons, but which make it cost-effective for any classroom regardless of budget. Twine 2.0 is browser-based, which makes it absolutely platform-independent, so no matter what machines are available to instructors or students, as long as they have internet access, they will be able to run it (it also has a desktop version for those without reliable internet connections). It has extensive online tutorials and communities, enabling students to seek out instructions for functionality they want, rather than relying on instructor know-how. It is extremely simple to use in its most basic functions (passages and hyperlinks), but its JavaScript foundation presents almost unlimited possibilities for media interactivity for the more advanced (a factor in the indie games scene’s approbation of it). Further, both the working files and the output files are HTML, making them easily sharable and readable on any machine (a relief for instructors like me, who prefer one platform or OS, while having to teach on another).

Nonetheless, Twine might not be for everyone. At its core, it is a hypertext machine, and not all digital fictions must be hypertexts. Because it is so user-friendly, little to no programming is required, leaving out a very useful literacy for today’s students. Depending on instructor preferences, program and module learning outcomes, and various other factors, other platforms may be more appropriate. Twine is certainly not the only tool available or already in use in classrooms; Table 2 outlines those that are (currently) most prominent, with a few of their features and considerations Footnote 7 .

Those most commonly used in undergraduate classrooms to create digital fiction (and games) include Inform7 (Reed, 2015 ), Quest (Ballentine, 2015 ), and Adobe Animate/Flash; the latter is frequently used for wider purposes, including animation, games development, and interactive websites, as it is an industry standard. Its costs, however, and high level of skill required, not to mention its deprecation on most mobile operating systems and many Internet browsers, put it at the bottom of the list for most digital fiction scenarios. Adobe Flash was the height of technology for digital fiction in the 2000s; once Apple announced it would not be supporting Flash on its platforms, however, digital writers turned to more open platforms based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript and HTML5. So while many students aiming for careers in media development may benefit from skills on this program, as a basic tool for digital fiction it is not worth the high cost, steep learning curve, and frequently buggy functionality in university IT infrastructures.

In terms of reading lists for students, there are many options, but as yet no definitive guides for selection. The AHRC-funded Reading Digital Fiction project has published a “Resources for Readers” page ( https://readingdigitalfiction.com/resources-for-readers/ ) ( 2016 ) that offers a few suggestions for starter readings in various digital fiction forms and genres, and includes a link to a “Beginner’s Guide”. The Electronic Literature Organization maintains a three-volume collection of e-lit (also including digital poetry) accessible at http://collection.eliterature.org/ . While this collection continues to grow, it is a “mirror of a specific moment in time occurring across continents, languages, and platforms” (Boluk et al., 2016 , p. np); as such, it lends itself to browsing rather than offering an easily searchable and filterable database for selection of works. The Interactive Fiction Database ( http://ifdb.tads.org/ ), on the other hand, is just that: a database of mostly parser-based and hypertext interactive fictions (built with Inform7, TADS, and Twine), though it is open to all forms of digital fiction. It includes a tagging and review system that better enable searching and selecting items for reading lists. Its limitations are in its community: it is far more populated by those creating puzzle-based games, interactive fictions, and Twine games than other forms of digital fiction. Nonetheless it is a solid option for seeking out texts to read. Other options include lists of winners and nominees for digital fiction prizes such as the New Media Writing Prize ( http://newmediawritingprize.co.uk/ ) and the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition ( http://openingup.wonderboxpublishing.com ). Branching further out, itch.io is a publishing site for indie games, many of which are constructed with Twine and cross boundaries between games and digital fiction, as do “walking simulator” games that are frequently published through Steam.

There is a general attitude around digital media that they are “killing” the book, or that they herald “a movement away from the traditional text-based methods of teaching and executing creative writing. The shift is unsettling for many instructors” (Clancy, 2015 , p. 165, emphasis original). Yet Donna Alvermann urges us to let go of this worry over the (perceived) loss of print culture, lest we risk short-changing the education and lives of our students ( 2009 , p. 23). Engaging in multimodal, digital creativity is just the sort of multiliteracies education we should be striving for—not the least of which is because it inevitably leads our creative writing students back to written text (Hicks, 2009 ; Clancy, 2015 ; Koehler, 2015 ) that enables continued renewal of print fiction, while also inspiring them to explore new territory and experiment with fresh techniques and perspectives.

Shifting our own pedagogical perspective to appreciate the meaning-making opportunities that have expanded beyond the page, thanks to digital media, enables a focus on design-centered narrative storytelling. It emphasizes attention to the reader and their experience, to the modes and methods of conveying meaning, and generates a naturally iterative and reflective practice. The Playable Fiction model described in this paper offers a holistic, multiliteracies approach to the creative writing workshop. It strengthens students’ communication, writing, and storytelling skills, as well as giving them a framework to deepen their creative practice. A marking scheme that centers on process rather than final artifact engenders a reflective, creative, developmental atmosphere that improves student work while relieving pressure on them to have a single high-earning performance.

These adaptations offer positive approaches to teaching creative writing, particularly given current pressures higher education instructors face. We are asked not only to engage our students in a basic learning process, to help them meet the learning outcomes of individual modules and programs, but also to earn positive feedback on module evaluations, to consistently return excellent NSS and TEF results, to maintain high levels of retention, to graduate students with competitive degree results, and to imbue our students with qualities that ensure job and career success. All the while facing higher workloads, more job insecurity, and greater pressures in other aspects of our roles. The model offered here is not a total solution to these pressures, of course, but it can alleviate some issues, such as the pressure to (sometimes artificially) inflate student marks, to offer the same level of instruction to more and more students (thus increasing time spent marking), and to better engage students in their modules—and, indeed, their own learning process.

Data availability:

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

This paper focuses on digital fiction, as opposed to electronically published prose fiction (such as ebooks), as the creative writing practice that leads to electronically published prose fiction is not fundamentally different from that leading to printed prose fiction.

Many, however, are more than happy to post fanfiction online. It is worth noting, however, that most fanfiction is posted under anonymizing pseudonyms.

Respectively, https://eliterature.org/electronic-literature-archives/ and http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/ell/ .

The fully validated module description can be found at https://www.bangor.ac.uk/ar/gazettes/module?gazyr=201718&module=UXS-2412&lang= .

I initially set the storygame to 1500 words; students overwhelmingly begged for more space to explore these texts, so it was rounded up to 2000. As the second assessment is a transmediation rather than a new assessment, most of those 3000 words are taken from the first assessment.

I maintain a full breakdown of my specifications grading module model, including links to sample module documents, here: http://lyleskains.blogspot.com/2018/09/my-take-on-specifications-grading-or.html .

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Acknowledgements

The research element of the Playable Fiction module was made possible, in part, by the AHRC-funded Reading Digital Fiction project (AH/K004174/1).

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Oct 29, 2021

Creative Writing 101: Into the Writer’s Creative Mind: Overview & Dynamics

([Photograph describing piles of opened books], 2021)

Creative Writing 101 articles serve as one of the academic courses in the field of Literary Theory and Literature. The course, which is a fundamental guide within the scope of general knowledge compared to the technical knowledge of Literary Theory and Literature, also addresses students and the general readership alike. With this goal in mind, the author has opted to write the article in very plain and basic English to convey just the necessary understanding of Creative Writing by making the article merely an introduction.

Creative Writing 101 is mainly divided into five chapters including:

- Creative Writing 101: Into the Writer’s Creative Mind: Overview & Dynamics

- Creative Writing 101: Theorizing Creative Writing as a Discipline

- Creative Writing 101: Insights on Writing Poetry

- Creative Writing 101: Insights on Writing Short Stories

- Creative Writing 101: Insights on Writing Novels

The creation of written content is a process, a state of brainstorming ideas, and a version of reality that the writer would present, fabricate, distort, or even reshape to invite the readership into a world where there are multiple versions of truth. The representation of truth is pieces of writings, regardless of their literary genre, inscribed on white papers or typed electronically to describe the dynamics of a writer’s mind—his ideas, his ideology, and his vision of the world—all combined to reflect the complexity of writing itself.

The quest for framing writing, if ever applicable to be framed, undergoes through a demystification of its process and principles, for which the act of writing is, undeniably, an act of creation. In other words, any attempt of shaping a literary written content is powered by the writer’s imagination and creative mind. Thus, the written output produced out of the mind is qualified as creative. The introductory concern in this first article will be to grasp writing shaped into a space proper to writing itself, before undergoing through instances of the dynamics of the writer’s creative mind.

The Space-Time Dimension in Writing

Creative Writing is an art that is performed through language. Unlike painting that reflects a visual description of the world no matter how it is portrayed on canvas, the act of writing comes to shape art in written and non-visual form, emphasizing the power of words. David Morley (2007), the Associate Professor in English at the University of Warwick, explains the rapport of the writer to the blank page as a space to map through words, for the emptiness of space delineated in an empty page is considered as “an open space” (p.1), inviting the writer to make the language exists through the use of words and imagination.

Moreover, Morley (2007) states, “by writing on that page, we are creating another version of time; We are playing out of new version of existence, of life even.” (p.1). The page becomes thus a space itself, designed by language and breaks through time and space to constitute what Morley (2007) names as “an entirely fresh piece of space-time, and another version of your self .” (p.1). Not only did Morley conceptualize the page as a space-time entity, but he also thinks that writing is framed through four dimensions: Three dimensions of space along with the dimension of time.

The piece of “space-time” writing that any writer fabricates all along a process of creative endeavor is presented to a reader, who becomes partially a reader-writer as well, participating in a way or another to the comprehension of the literary writing. That is to say, a well-experienced writer is considered to be a well-experienced reader as well. Writing and reading are entwined together because once the writer reads, the mind becomes stimulated by the linguistic and the thematic input that reading provides, and thus it makes the reader, who partly may become a writer afterwards, conceptualize what the eye reads into what the eye sees. Once the reader pictures the text, he/she travels through, what Morley (2007) describes as, “psychological fifth dimension.” (p.2).

The Dynamics of the Creative Mind

Controversy over the mechanisms used by creative writers to produce good creative outputs is centered on establishing writing as an asset, inherited as a talent or as a craftmanship, and which is further enhanced through practice and time as the French writer Anatole France states, “You become a good writer just as you become a good carpenter: by planning down your sentences.” (Morley, 2007). For many thinkers, such as Morley, the only way for creative writing to be taught as a discipline is that it has to be first of all a talent because it lies in the writer’s imagination to create worlds of literature. It would have never been possible for anyone to learn about writing, and being able to produce any creative writing content if it had not been about the power of the writer to conceive a literary world out of a system of language and lexis.

As a matter of fact, neuroscientists advocate that creative writers are endowed with a potential of imagination higher than other people willing to become writers because they have brain predispositions to that. The instance of parable, “a short and simple story, related to allegory and fable, which points a moral.” (Penguin Books, 1999), was referred by the neuroscientist Mark Turner in his book The Literary Mind (1996), whereby his approach to grasp the concept of the parable or the story, in general, is advocated and characterized as being the origin of the human reflection, knowledge, performance, creation, and language.

The parable in the creative writer’s mind is used not only to project a moral of a story into a reader’s mind but to invite also the reader to be a part of the writer’s world and the storyline space. Turner (1996) explains that, “in the space of the story narrated, the narrator does not exist and necessarily has no special powers there. In the space of narration, the narrator does exist. He has no special powers with respect to most of that space, but he does have special powers with respect to the story he is telling: He can shift the focus of time and place in the narration. In the blend, the narrator, the readers, and the characters can inhabit one world.” (p. 75). Presumably, this is where the power of the creative writer resides in transgressing the boundaries of narration by making the readership have a role to play in that space.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story entitled Leaf by Niggle (1945), the story is centered on the value of the artwork in human life in parallel with a reflection on the dualist themes of life/death and purgatory/heaven. Niggle, the main character in the story is portrayed as a humble painter, whose ambition in life is to make art. Tolkien’s fictional character Niggle started his project magnum opus, whereby his project was to paint a leaf which turned, afterwards, into a tree in spite of all the constraints the main character faced on his journey.

Leaf by Niggle. Leaf by Niggle , J.R.R Tolkien, HarperCollins Publishers, 2016. Front cover.

Many critics identify the short story Leaf by Niggle as an allegory to Tolkien’s life, depicting many similarities between the character of Niggle and the author himself. Tolkien’s short story is acknowledged as “ one of the most important works for understanding the author's mind and creative process. It is a vivid embodiment of the principles of Creation and Sub-creation.” ( Leaf by Niggle Background , n.d.).

The creative mind of the writer goes far beyond the limits of the four-dimensional space-time piece of writing, whereby a novel technique to approach the interpretation and reading of the literary writings is commonly experienced by the Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky’s literary concept known as defamiliarization, inciting the writer to alter “the reader’s habitual perceptions by drawing attention to the artifice of the text.” (p. 214). In 1917, defamiliarizing or making the familiar look unfamiliar to the reader came to revolutionize the traditionalist method of reading itself towards more focus on “the form of the text and not just its content or meaning.” (newworldencyclopedia.org, n.d.).

Coupled with the literary concept of defamiliarization, David Morley (2007) perceives the essence of creative writing as being derived from defamiliarization itself; For any artistic endeavors to flourish, they “often go through four stages of cognitive and creative process–attention to detail (of a problem) translation to metaphor→defamiliarization→receiving something at a different angle–in effect, perceiving it anew, as a child does.” (p.9).

Aristotle’s Poetics came to revolutionize the human mind at that period, upholding the efficiency of learning through imitation as a means of intellectual and societal upgrowth and prioritizing reason and logic over emotion to make that process of learning achievable through time; the work in itself is considered as a significantly literary creation at that era.

Aristotle’s Poetics . Aristotle’s Poetics: literally translated, with explanatory notes and an analysis , Aristotle., Golden, L., & Hardison, O.B., G. & W.B. Whittaker, 1819. Front cover.

In parallel, the idea of approaching art, in this case, the literary art, by using Shklovsky’s defamiliarization to enhance the experience of the reader rendering the familiar unfamiliar, strange to the mind for better re-interpretations of the work itself, is suggested by the writer Bourne (2018), to be an extension of the thematic aspect of Aristotle’s Poetics in re-experiencing life through art itself.

On the whole, the creation of any artistic work, precisely any literary genre, is a complex yet organized process through which creative writers thrive to present their own perception of the world through various four-dimensional spaces, inviting the reader to be part of perceiving the truth those writers claim through imagination and creativity. In Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle , the readership travels in a world of fantasy, depicting a human journey of a painter, driven by perseverance, creativity, and ambition, whereas in Aristotle’s Poetics the core of the subject is different as it highlights the importance of art as a creative and instructive means of communication and learning through mimesis.

Image Source:

G. & W.B. Whittaker. Aristotle’s Poetics . Aristotle’s Poetics: literally translated, with explanatory notes and an analysis , Aristotle., Golden, L., & Hardison, O.B., G. & W.B. Whittaker, 1819. Front cover.

HarperCollins. Leaf by Niggle. Leaf by Niggle , J.R.R Tolkien, HarperCollins Publishers, 2016. Front cover.

[Photograph describing piles of opened books]. (2021). https://evernote.com/blog/12-creative-writing-templates/

References:

Bourne, A. (2018, August 20). An Evening with Aristotle and Victor Shlovsky; How “Poetics” and “Art as Technique” Speak to One Another. Owlcation. https://owlcation.com/humanities/An-Evening-With-Aristotle-and-Victor-Shlovsky-How-Poetics-and-Art-as-Technique-Speak-to-One-Another

Defamiliarization (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Defamiliarization

GradeSaver. (n.d.). Leaf by Niggle Background. https://www.gradesaver.com/leaf-by-niggle

Morley, David. (2007). Introducing Creative Writing. The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing (pp. 1-35). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Penguin Books. (1999). Defamiliarization. In Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory (4th ed., p. 214).

Penguin Books. (1999). Parable. In Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory (4th ed., p. 634).

Turner, Mark. (1996). Creative Blends. The Literary Mind (pp. 57-84). New York: Oxford University Press.

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Teaching creative writing in primary schools: a systematic review of the literature through the lens of reflexivity

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Published: 17 June 2023

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Georgina Barton ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2703-238X 1 ,
Maryam Khosronejad 2 ,
Mary Ryan 2 ,
Lisa Kervin 3 &
Debra Myhill 4

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Teaching writing is complex and research related to approaches that support students’ understanding and outcomes in written assessment is prolific. Written aspects including text structure, purpose, and language conventions appear to be explicit elements teachers know how to teach. However, more qualitative and nuanced elements of writing such as authorial voice and creativity have received less attention. We conducted a systematic literature review on creativity and creative aspects of writing in primary classrooms by exploring research between 2011 and 2020. The review yielded 172 articles with 25 satisfying established criteria. Using Archer’s critical realist theory of reflexivity we report on personal, structural, and cultural emergent properties that surround the practice of creative writing. Implications and recommendations for improved practice are shared for school leaders, teachers, preservice teachers, students, and policy makers.

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Introduction

Creative writing in schools is an important part of learning, assessment, and reporting, however, there is evidence globally to suggest that such writing is often stifled in preference to quick on-demand writing, usually featured in high-stakes testing (Au & Gourd, 2013 ; Gibson & Ewing, 2020 ). Research points to this negatively impacting particularly on students from diverse backgrounds (Mahmood et al., 2020 ). When teachers teach on-demand writing typical pedagogical traits are revealed, those that are often referred to as formulaic (Ryan & Barton, 2014 ). When thinking about creative writing, however, Wyse et al. ( 2013 ) noted that it involves the absence of structure and teaching creative writing requires an ‘open’ pedagogical approach for students to be given imaginative choice. By this, they mean that teachers need to consider less formulaic ways to teach writing so that students can experience different opportunities and ways to write creatively. They argued that if students are not given the flexibility to experiment through writing then their creativity might be stifled. Similarly, Barbot et al. ( 2012 ), who carried out a study with a panel of 15 experts of creative writing, posited that creative writing is when students draw on their imagination and other creative processes to create fictional narratives or writing that is ‘unusually original’. They also noted that creative writing is important for the development of students’ critical and creative thinking skills and ways in which they can approach life in creative ways.

Creative writing is defined in various ways in literature. Wang ( 2019 ) defined creative writing as a form of original expression involving an author’s imagination to engage a reader. Other definitions of creative writing involve the notion of children’s imagination, choice, and originality and much research has explored the concept of creativity within and through the writing process.

While creative writing is defined in various ways, and the many ways that it is treated in literacy education, this article is not concerned with the nature of the term per se. Rather, it focusses on research about creative writing and creativity in writing to understand how research unpacks the personal and contextual characteristics that surround creative writing practices. To this aim, we adopt a broad definition of creative writing as a form of original writing involving an author’s imagination and self-expression to engage a reader (Wang, 2019 ). Creative writing is important for children’s development (Grainger et al., 2005 ), allowing them to use their imagination and broaden their ability to problem-solve and think deeply. Creativity in writing refers to specific aspects within a writing product that can be deemed creative. Some examples include the use of senses and how a writer might engage a reader (Deutsch, 2014 ; Smith, 2020 ).

International research on teaching writing has indicated a loss in innovative or creative pedagogical practices due to the pressure on teachers to teach prescribed writing skills that are assessed in high-stakes tests (Göçen, 2019 ; Stock & Molloy, 2020 ), often resulting in specific trends including teaching a genre approach to writing (Polesel et al., 2012 ; Ryan & Barton, 2014 ). A comprehensive meta-analysis by Graham et al ( 2012 ), designed to identify writing practices with evidence of effectiveness in primary classrooms, found that explicitly teaching imagery and creativity was an effective teaching practice in writing. In addition, a review of methods related to teaching writing conducted by Slavin et al. ( 2019 ) included studies that statistically reported causal relationships between teacher practice and student outcomes. Common themes in Slavin et al’s ( 2019 ) quest for improving writing included comprehensive teacher professional development, student engagement and enjoyment, and explicit teaching of grammar, punctuation, and usage. While they did not specifically cite creativity, motivating environments and cooperative learning were important characteristics of writing programs.

This systematic literature review aims to share empirical international research in the context of elementary/primary schools by exploring creativity in writing and the conditions that influence its emergence. It specifically aims to answer the question: What influences the teaching of creative writing in primary education? And how can reflexivity theorise these influences? The review shares scholarly work that attempts to define personal aspects of creative writing including imagination, and creative thinking; discusses creative approaches to teaching writing, and shows how these methods might support students’ creative writing or creative aspects of writing.

Writing is a complex process that involves students making decisions about word choice, sentence, and text structure, and ways in which to engage readers. Such decisions require a certain amount of reflection or at times deeper reflexive judgments by both teachers and students. Consequently, we draw on Archer’s ( 2012 ) critical realist theory of reflexivity to guide our review as research shows that reflexive thinking in practice can improve writing outcomes (Ryan et al., 2021 ). Archer ( 2007 ) highlights how reflexivity is an everyday activity involving mental processes whereby we think about ourselves in relation to our immediate personal, social, and cultural contexts. She suggests we make decisions through negotiating the connected emergences of personal properties (PEPs) related to the individual, structural properties (SEPs) related to the contextual happenings and cultural properties (CEPs) related to ideologies, each of which is influenced by the other developments. These decisions influence, and are influenced by, our subsequent actions. In applying reflexivity theory to writing (see Ryan, 2014 ), we cannot simply focus on the writing product, but should also interrogate the process of writing, that is, the influences on decision-making and design which are enabled or constrained through pedagogical practices in the classroom. Writing practices and outputs are formed through the interplay of personal, structural, and cultural conditions. Student decisions and actions about writing ensue through the mediation of personal (e.g. beliefs, motivations, interests, experiences), structural (e.g. curriculum, programs, testing regimes, teaching strategies, resources), and cultural (e.g. norms, expectations, ideologies, values) conditions. Therefore, teachers play an important role in facilitating the interplay of these conditions for their students and recontextualising curricula and policy (Ryan et al., 2021 ). For example, by enabling students’ agency and creating an authentic purpose for writing, teachers can balance the personal conditions of students (such as their motivation and interest) against the structural effects of the curriculum requirements. Using a reflexive approach to investigating the literature on creative writing we aim to reveal the personal, structural, and cultural conditions surrounding the study and the practice of creative writing. We argue that it is through the understanding of these conditions that we can theorise how a. students might make their writing more creative and b. how teachers might establish classroom conditions conducive to creativity.

The approach taken for this paper was guided by the PRISMA method (Moher et al., 2009 ) for conducting systematic literature reviews (see Table 1 ).

Our electronic search involved several databases: researchers’ library online catalogue, EBSCO host ultimate, ProQuest, Eric, Web of Science, Informit, and ScienceDirect. Using the following search terms: creativ* AND (‘teaching methods’ OR pedagog*) AND writing AND (elementary OR primary) to search titles and abstracts as well as limiting the search to peer-reviewed articles written in English within a 10-year timeframe (2011–2020), we initially retrieved 172 articles. Information about all 172 articles was input into a data spreadsheet including author, article title, journal title, volume and issue number, and abstract. Once completed, these articles were divided into two equal groups and two researchers were assigned to review the articles for relevancy against the following inclusion criteria:

Studies were peer-reviewed empirical research published in English;

Participants were primary students and/or teachers;

Students were not specifically English as a Second or Additional Language/Dialect learners (samples of culturally and linguistically diverse students in primary classrooms were included);

Studies were not carried out in curriculum areas other than English; and

Studies did not have a specific focus on digital technologies in the classroom.

For this systematic review, we were interested in the ways in which teachers thought about, understood, and taught the ‘creative’ aspect of writing.

The 25 studies that met the inclusion criteria were synthesised to review what influences the improvement of creative writing in primary education. We analysed the papers for how creative writing and/or creative aspects in writing were viewed as well as how teachers might best support students to develop reflexive capacities to improve the creative aspects of writing. We also identified any personal, structural, and/or cultural emergences that might impact on the effectiveness of students’ creative writing. Two of the authors read the entire articles and identified four main categories of research which were (1) understanding creative writing; (2) creative thinking and its contribution to writing; (3) creative pedagogy; and (4) what students can do to be more creative in their writing. These were cross-checked by the entire research team. Some of the papers fit more than one of these themes. In the next section, each theme is introduced and defined and then the articles that fall within the theme are reviewed.

Overall a total number of 25 articles had overlapping themes that included various personal and contextual aspects. Figure 1 shows what we have identified as the key themes under each category. In the next sections, we represent papers based on their main theme.

The personal, structural, and cultural conditions surrounding creative writing

Personal emergent properties

A total number of 13 articles were about what students can do to be more creative in their writing (Mendelowitz, 2014 ; Steele, 2016 ) and how teachers’ and students’ personal characteristics relate to the development of creative writing. These articles were mainly focussed on the personal emergent aspects of writing (Alhusaini & Maker, 2015 ; Barbot et al., 2012 ; Cremin et al., 2020 ; DeFauw, 2018 ; Dobson, 2015 ; Dobson & Stephenson, 2017 , 2020 ; Edwards-Groves, 2011 ; Healey, 2019 ; Lee & Enciso, 2017 ; Macken-Horarik, 2012 ; Ryan, 2014 ). The personal aspects identified in our review were (1) personal views about creative writing, (2) creative thinking, (3) writer identity, (4) learner motivation and engagement, and (5) knowledge and capabilities.

Personal views about creative writing

From our systematic review, we identified three articles exploring views about what creative writing is, and more specifically the role that it plays and the elements that make creative writing, in primary classrooms. One of these studies was focussed on the views and experiences of experts in writing (Barbot et al., 2012 ), whereas the other two investigated students’ perspectives and experiences (Alhusaini & Maker, 2015 ; Healey, 2019 ). Barbot et al’s ( 2012 ) work, for example, recognised that creative writing involves both cognitive and metacognitive abilities. This was determined by the expert panel of people whose work related to writing including teachers, linguists, psychologists, professional writers, and art educators. The panel were asked to complete an online survey that rated the relative importance of 28 identified skills needed to creatively write. Six broad categories were identified as a result of the responses and the rank given to each factor by the expert groups (See Table 2 ). They acknowledged that these features cross over various age groups from children to professional writers.

Findings suggested that each independent rater weighted different key components of creative writing as being more or less important for children. Overall, the findings showed.

a global ‘consensus’ across the expert groups indicated that creative writing skills are primarily supported by factors such as observation, generation of description, imagination, intrinsic motivation and perseverance, while the contributions of all of the other relevant factors seemed negligible (e.g. intelligence, working memory, extrinsic motivation and penmanship). (p. 218)

One factor that was ranked as critical by most respondents, but underemphasised by teachers, was imagination. Teachers’ work in classrooms around creative writing is complex due to the difficulty in defining imagination (Brill, 2004 ). Teachers also under-rated other aspects related to creative cognition.

Another study that explored students’ creativity in writing was conducted by Alhusaini and Maker ( 2015 ) in the south-west of the United States. Participants included 139 students with mixed ethnicities including White, Mexican American, and Navajo. This study involved six elementary/primary school teachers judging students’ writing samples of open-ended stories. To assess the work a Written Linguistic Assessment tool, which was based on the Consensual Assessment Technique [CAT] (Amabile, 1982 ) was implemented. According to Baer and McKool ( 2009 ), The CAT involves experts rating written artefacts or artistic objects by using their ‘sense of what is creative in the domain in question to rate the creativity of the products in relation to one another’ (p. 4). Interestingly, Alhusaini and Maker ( 2015 ) found the CAT to be effective in relation to interrater reliability. The authors do not share what the Judge’s Guidelines to Assess Students’ Stories entail. They mention the difference between technical quality and creativity and note that assessors were able to distinguish the differences between the two, but the reader is not made aware of the aspects of each quality. Overall, the study revealed that one of the most challenging problems in the field of creativity and writing is trying to measure creativity across cultures by using standardised tests. Such studies could have implications for other students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds as teachers become more aware of cultural nuances in constituting ‘creative’ in creative writing.

The final study we identified in this category was by Healey ( 2019 ). Healey employed an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and explored how eight children (11–12 Years of age) experienced creative writing in the classroom. He shared how children’s writing experiences were based on ‘the affect, embodiment, and materiality of their immediate engagement with activities in the classroom’ (p. 184). Results from student interviews showed three themes related to the experience of writing: the writing world (watching, ideas from elsewhere, flowing); the self (concealing and revealing, agency, adequacy); and schooled writing (standards, satisfying task requirements, rules of good writing). The author stated that children’s consciousness shifts between their imagination (The Writing World) and set assessment tasks (Schooled Writing). Both of these worlds affect the way children experience themselves as writers. Further findings from this work argued that originality of ideas and use of richer vocabulary improved students’ creative writing. Vocabulary improvement included diversity of word meanings, appropriate usage of words, words being in line with the purpose of the text; while originality of ideas featured creative and unusual (original) ideas—which in many ways is difficult to define.

Overall, when concerned with personal views and attitudes in creative writing, the two studies by Healey ( 2019 ) and Barbot et al. ( 2012 ) show contrasting findings about ‘imagination’ captured through the view of students and teachers, respectively. While Healey’s ( 2019 ) study suggests that children shift between their imagination and set assessment tasks in creative writing, Barbot et al. ( 2012 ) highlight the lack of attention to imagination among their participated teachers. Although these results cannot be generalised, they highlight the significance of understanding personal emergent properties that both students and teachers bring to the classroom and the way that they interact to affect the experience of creative writing for learners. From this theme, we suggest the importance of educators acknowledging students’ imagination through their definition of creative writing as well as providing quality time for students to choose what they write through imaginative thought. We now turn to creative thinking and related pedagogical approaches to teaching creative writing from the research literature.

Creative thinking

We identified two articles that were focussed on creative thinking and its contribution to writing (Copping, 2018 ; Cress & Holm, 2016 ). Copping ( 2018 ) explored writing pedagogy and the connections between children’s creative thinking, or a ‘new way of looking at something’ (p. 309), and their writing achievement. The study involved two primary schools in Lancashire, one in an affluent area and one in an underprivileged area. Approximately 28 children from each school were involved in two, 2-day writing workshops based on a murder mystery the children had to solve. Findings from this study revealed that to improve students’ writing achievement (1) a thinking environment needs to be created and maintained, (2) production processes should have value, (3) motivation and achievement increase when there is a tangible purpose, and (4) high expectations lead to higher attainment.

Cress and Holm’s ( 2016 ) study described a curricular approach implemented by a first-grade teacher and their class comprised 13 girls and 11 boys. The project known as the Creative Endeavours project aimed to develop creative thinking by (1) creating an environment of respect with a positive classroom climate. (2) offering new and challenging experiences, and (3) encouraging new ideas rather than praise. The authors argued that through peer collaboration and the flexibility to choose their own projects, children can become more authentically engaged in the writing process. The children wrote about their experiences and their choices, and reflected upon the projects undertaken. In this study, it was revealed that the children showed diversity in their writing assignments including presentation through sewing, photography, and drama. While there were only two papers in this particular theme, their findings are supported by systematic reviews (Graham et al., 2012 ; Slavin et al., 2019 ) that emphasise not only new ways of exploring a range of concepts for learning but also the creation of motivating environments for improving writing (Copping, 2018 ). In addition to the significance of positive and encouraging learning environments, these two studies suggest that setting ‘high expectations’ or ‘challenging experiences’ are conducive to creative thinking however, teachers would need to set appropriate, reflexive conditions for this to occur.

Writer identity

Studies in this category revolve around choice and learner writer identity. The study carried out by Dobson and Stephenson ( 2017 ) focussed on developing a community of writers involving 25 primary school pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds. The project was offered over 2 weeks and featured a number of creative writing workshops. The authors applied the theoretical frameworks of practitioner enquiry and discourse analysis to explore the children’s creative writing outputs. They argued that the workshops, which promoted intertextuality and freedom for the children as writers, enabled a shifting of their ‘writer’ identities (Holland et al., 1998). Dobson and Stephenson ( 2017 ) showed that allowing students to make decisions and choices in regard to authentic writing purposes supported a more flexible approach. They recommend stronger partnerships between schools and universities in relation to research on creative writing, however, it would be important for these relationships to be sustainable.

The second paper on this theme is by Ryan ( 2014 ) who noted that writing is a complex activity that requires appropriate thinking in relation to the purpose, audience, and medium of a variety of texts. Writers always make decisions about how they will present subject matter and/or feelings through all of the modes. Ryan ( 2014 ) suggested that writing is like a performance ‘whereby writers shape and represent their identities as they mediate social structures and personal considerations’ (p. 130). The study analysed writing samples of culturally and linguistically diverse Australian primary students to uncover the types of identities students shared. It found that three different types of writers existed—the school writers who followed teacher instructions or formulas to produce a product; the constrained writers who also followed instructions and formulas but were able to add in some authorical voice; and the reflexive writers who could show a definite command of writing and showed creative potential. Ryan ( 2014 ) argued that teachers’ practices in the classroom directly influence the ways in which students express these identities. She stated that when students are provided choices in writing, they are more able to shape and develop their voices. Such choices would need to include quality time and support to be reflexive in the decisions being made by the students.

The Teachers as Writers project (2015–2017) was conducted by Cremin, Myhill, Eyres, Nash, Wilson, and Oliver. In a recent paper ( 2020 ), the team reported on a collaborative partnership between two universities and a creative writing foundation. Professional writers were invited to engage with teachers in the writing process and the impact of these interactions on classroom teaching practices was determined. Data sets included observations, interviews, audio-capture (of workshops, tutorials and co-mentoring reflections), and audio-diaries from 16 teachers; and a randomised controlled trial (RCT) involving 32 primary and secondary classes. An intervention was carried out involving teachers writing in a week long residence with professional writers, one-on-one tutorials, and extra time and space to write. They also continued learning through two Continuing Professional Development (CPD) days. Results showed that teachers’ identities as writers shifted greatly due to their engagement with professional authors. The students responded positively in terms of their motivation, confidence, sense of ownership, and skills as writers. The professional authors also commented on positive impacts including their own contributions to schools. Conversely, these changes in practice did not improve the students’ final assessment results in any significant way. The authors noted that assuming a causal relationship between teachers’ engagement with writing workshops and students’ writing outcomes was spurious. They, therefore, developed further research building on this learning.

Knowledge and capabilities

The role of knowledge and capability is central to the articles in this category. In Australia, Macken-Horarik ( 2012 ) reported on the introduction of a national curriculum for English. This article drew on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) by investigating the potential of Halliday’s notion of grammatics for understanding students’ writing as acts of creative meaning in context. Macken-Horarik ( 2012 ) argued that students needed to know deeply about language so that they could make creative decisions with their writing. She outlined that a ‘good enough’ grammatics would assist teachers in becoming comfortable with ‘playful developments in students’ texts and to foster their control of literate discourse’ (p. 179).

A project carried out by Edwards-Groves in 2011 highlights the role of knowledge about digital technologies in writing practices. 17 teachers in primary classrooms in Australia were asked to use particular digital technologies with their students when constructing classroom texts. Findings showed that an extended perspective on what counts as writing including the writing process was needed. Results revealed that collaborative methods when constructing diverse texts required teachers to rethink pedagogies towards writing instruction and what they consider as writing. It was argued that technology can be used to enhance creative possibilities for students in the form of new and dynamic texts. In particular, it was noted that teachers and students should be aware that digital technologies can both constrain and/or enable text creation in the classroom depending on a number of variables including knowledge and understanding, locating resources and logistical issues such as connectivity and reliability.

In addition, Mendelowitz’s ( 2014 ) study argued that nurturing teachers’ own creativity assisted their ability to teach writing more generally. She noted several ‘interrelated variables and relationships that still need to be given attention in order to gain a more holistic understanding of the challenges of teaching creative writing’ (p. 164). According to Mendelowitz ( 2014 ), elements that impacted on these challenges include teachers’ school writing histories, conceptualisations of imagination, classroom discourses, and pedagogy. Documenting teachers’ work through interviews and classroom observations by the researcher, the study found that teachers need to be able to define imagination and imaginative writing and know what strategies work best with their students. She noted that the teacher’s approaches to teaching writing ‘powerfully shaped by the interactions between their conceptualisations and enactments of imaginative writing pedagogy’ (p. 181) and that these may either limit or create a space for students to be more creative with their writing.

Such Personal Emergent Properties show that individual attributes of both teachers and students are important in learning creative writing. The next section of the paper explores the articles that shared various structural and cultural properties.

Structural emergent properties

In the subset of structural emergent properties, we mainly identified pedagogical approaches for creative writing that explored primary school learning and teaching (Christianakis, 2011a ; Christianakis, 2011b ; Coles, 2017 ; DeFauw, 2018 ; Hall & Grisham-Brown, 2011 ; Portier et al., 2019 ; Rumney et al., 2016 ; Sears, 2012 ; Steele, 2016 ; Southern et al., 2020 ; Yoo & Carter, 2017 ). These pedagogical approaches were aimed at addressing issues related to personal emergent properties such as motivation and engagement, and confidence in writing. The two categories of writing pedagogies were those that engaged professional authors and artists in teaching about creative writing, and the approaches that involved play(ful) activities, and use of visual arts, and drama.

Engaging professional authors and artists

Interestingly, many of the studies used literary forms and/or professional creative authors to spike interest and motivation in the students. Coles’ ( 2017 ) study, for example, used a garden-themed poetry writing project to support 9–10-year-old children’s creative writing in a London primary school. The 5-week project partnered with a professional creative writing organisation that facilitated the Ministry for Stories (MoS) writing centres across the USA. The study found that the social relationships created through this partnership allowed for a more inclusive and socially generative model of creativity. This meant that teachers should not just include creative aspects in assessment rubrics but rather recognise that creativity is encouraged through imagination and working with others. The researchers found improvements in the children’s participation in classroom writing activities as well as diversity in the ways they expressed their writing. The approach valued ‘rich means of expression rather than a set of rules to be learnt’ (p. 396). They also acknowledged issues associated with school–community partnerships including the sustainability of the practice.

Similarly, Rumney et al. ( 2016 ) found that using creative multimodal activities increased students’ confidence and motivation for writing. The study implemented the Write Here project with over 900 children in 12 primary and secondary schools. The study involved the children visiting local art galleries to work with professional authors and artists. Case studies were presented about pre-writing activities, the actual gallery work and post-gallery follow-up sessions. It aimed to improve students’ social development and literacy outcomes through diverse learning activities such as visual art and play in different contexts such as art galleries and classrooms. Like Coles’ ( 2017 ) study, this project showed that creative activities (e.g. talking about and acting out pictures; using story maps; backwards writing and planning) engaged students more than just teaching skills.

In addition, DeFauw’s ( 2018 ) study had student-centred learning and leadership at the core when working with a children’s book author for one year. The collaboration involved three face-to-face sessions with the author as well as online communication through blog posts. Data included recorded interactions, readings and pre and post interviews with teachers ( n = 9), students ( n = 36), and the author. The partnership showed that students’ interest was activated and sustained due to the situational context as well as the extended time given to students to interact with the author. The project improved students’ interest in and motivation to write as a result of engaging with authors and hearing about their own experience and writing strategies. It also found that teachers gained more confidence to support students’ exploration of writing in more creative ways. The creative pedagogies were also used in addressing issues related to creative writing outcomes for students, including teachers’ lack of confidence about pedagogies (Southern et al., 2020 ). Through a creative social enterprise approach, the authors facilitated professional development and learning involving artist-led activities for students. The program called Zip Zap had been implemented in schools in Wales and England, and data were collected through focus groups with teachers, students, and parents/carers. Observations of some of the professional development workshops were also video recorded. Third space theory was used to describe the collaborative practice between educators and artists that supported students’ creative writing outcomes. It was noteworthy that involving ‘creative’ practitioners largely focussed on the specific strategies that could be used in classrooms, to which our next section now turns.

Play(ful) activities, visual arts, and drama

Much research explores how to best support students who find writing difficult. Sears’ research ( 2012 ) is a case in point. The author shared how visual arts may be an effective way to improve struggling students with writing. They argued that the visual arts can provide ways of ‘accessing and expressing [student] ideas and ultimately opening a world of creative possibilities’ (p. 17). In the study, six third-grade students engaged with drawing and painting as pre-writing strategies, leading to the creation of poems based on the artworks. The students’ final poems were assessed and showed improved knowledge of all 6 technical categories in writing: ideas, organisation, fluency, voice, word choice, and conventions. The author also argued that students’ motivation to write increased as a result of the visual art activities.

A study by Portier et al. ( 2019 ) investigated approaches to teaching writing that were motiving and engaging for students. Involving 10 northern rural communities in Canada, the project implemented collaborative, play(ful) learning activities alongside sixteen teachers and their students. Interestingly, the study, like many others in our review, found a disconnect ‘between the achievement of curricular objectives and the implementation of play(ful) learning activities’ (p. 20); an approach valued in early childhood education. The students were supported through action research projects in creating texts with different purposes. Students’ motivation as well as samples of work were analysed and showed that student interest areas and collaborative approaches benefited both teachers and students. Further research on how reflexive thinking might have influenced these benefits is recommended.

Similarly, Lee and Enciso ( 2017 ) highlighted the importance of motivation and engagement in their study. In a collaboration with Austin Theatre Alliance, Lee and Enciso ( 2017 ) investigated how dramatic approaches to teaching, such as through expanded imagination and improvisation, can improve students’ story writing. They argued that the students’ motivation to write was also increased. The study was carried out through a controlled quasi-experimental study over 8 weeks of story-writing and drama-based programs. 29 third-grade classrooms in various schools, located in an urban district of Texas, were involved. The study also pre- and post-tested the students’ writing self-efficacy through story building. The study found that students were more able to use their cultural knowledge such as ‘culturally formed repertoires of language and experience to explore and express new understandings of the world and themselves…’ (p. 160) for creative writing purposes but needed more quality resources to support opportunities such as the Literacy for Life program. A most important finding was that for children who experience poverty, drama-based activities developed and led by teaching artists were extremely powerful and allowed the students to express themselves in entertaining ways. We do note that ‘entertainment’ and or engagement might mean different things for different students so reflexive approaches to deciding what these are would be necessary.

Steele’s ( 2016 ) study also looked at supporting teachers’ work in the classroom. Involving 6 out of 20 teacher workshop participants in Hawaii, this exploratory case study utilised observations, interview, and portfolio analyses of teacher and student work. Findings from the study showed that some teachers relished moving away from everyday ‘typical’ practice and increased student voice and choice. Other teachers, however, found it difficult to take risks and hence respond to student needs and ideas.

Dobson and Stephenson’s ( 2020 ) study focussed on the professional development of primary school teachers using drama to develop creative writing across the curriculum. The project was sponsored by the United Kingdom Literacy Association and ran for two terms in a school year. Researchers based the research on a collaborative approach involving academics and four teachers working with theatre educators to use process drama. Data sets included lesson observations, notes taken during learning conversations, and interviews with the teachers. The findings showed that three of the four teachers resisted some of the methods used such as performance; resulting in a lack of child-centred learning. The remaining teacher could take on board innovative practice, which the researchers attributed to his disposition. The study argued that these teachers, while a small participant group, needed more support in feeling confident in implementing new and creative approaches to teaching writing.

The final study, identified as addressing creative pedagogies for creative writing, was carried out by Yoo and Carter ( 2017 ) as professional development for teachers. Data included teacher survey responses and field notes taken by the researchers at each workshop (note: number of workshops and participants is unknown). The program aimed to investigate how emotions play a role in teachers’ work when teaching creative writing. The researchers found that intuitive joint construction of meaning was important to meet the needs of both primary and secondary teachers. A community of practice was established to support teachers’ identities as writers (see also Cremin et al., 2020 ). Findings showed that teachers who already identified as writers engaged more positively in the workshop.

These studies presented some approaches for teachers to consider how to teach creative writing. For example, the need to value unique spaces for students to write, including authentic connections with people and places outside of school environments was shared. Further, the need for quality stimuli and time for writing was acknowledged. Several other studies identified that blended teaching approaches to support student learning outcomes in the area of creative writing is important for schools and teachers to consider. We do acknowledge there may be other methods available to support students in creative writing, however, understanding what types of SEPs are impacting on teaching creative writing is an important step in determining improvements in schools.

Cultural emergent properties

Christianakis ( 2011a , 2011b ) wrote two papers about children’s creative text development with an emphasis on the cultural aspects. The first was an ethnographic study across 8 months with a year five class in East San Francisco Bay. The study included audio recording the students’ conversations and analysing over 900 samples of work. In the classroom, students were involved in a range of meaning-making practices including those that were arts-based and multimodal. The conversations with the students involved the researcher asking questions such: tell me more about this drawing, how did you come up with the idea? or why did you make this choice? The study found that there was a need for schools to reconceptualise the teaching of writing ‘to include not only orthographic symbols, but also the wide array of communicative tools that children bring to writing’ (p. 22). The author argued that unless corresponding institutional practices and ideologies were interrogated then improved practice was unlikely.

Christianakis’ ( 2011b ) second article, from the same project, explored more specifically the creation of hybrid rap poems by the children. She explicated how educators needed to negotiate and challenge dominant practices in primary classroom literacy learning. Like many studies before, a strong recommendation was to be more inclusive of youth popular cultures and culturally relevant literacies for students to be more engaged in creative writing practices. For Christianakis, culturally relevant literacies meant practices that embraced diversity in class and race and accounted for, and challenged, the dominant hegemonic curriculum that ‘privileges a traditional canon’ (p. 1140).

In summary, we found several themes under PEPs that could be considered for further research including those outlined in Table 3 below.

Discussion and implications for classroom practice

From this systematic literature review, several positions were exposed about the personal, structural, and cultural influences (Archer, 2012 ; Ryan, 2014 ) on teaching creative writing. These include limited teacher and student knowledge of what constitutes creative writing (Personal Emergent Properties [PEPs]), and no shared understanding or expectation in relation to creative writing pedagogy in their context (Cultural Emergent Properties [CEPs]). The negative impact of standardised testing and trending approaches on how teachers teach writing (CEP; Structural Emergent Properties [SEPs]) could also be considered (see AUTHORS 1 and 3, 2014 for example). In addition, teachers’ poor self-efficacy in terms of teaching creative writing (PEP); a paucity of quality professional development about teaching and assessing creative writing (SEP); and issues related to the sustainability of creative approaches to teach writing (SEP; CEP) need to be considered by leaders and teachers in schools. Our literature review advances knowledge about creative writing by revealing two interconnected areas that affect creative writing practices. Findings suggest that a parallel focus on personal conditions and contextual conditions—including structural and cultural—has the potential to improve creative writing in general. Below, we share some implications and recommendations for improved practice by focussing on both (1) personal views about creative writing and (2) the structural and cultural aspects that affect creative writing practices at schools.

Focussing on personal views about creative writing

School leaders and teachers must clearly define what creative writing is, what key skills constitute creative writing.

From our search it was apparent that schools and their educators often do not have a clear idea or indeed a shared idea as to what constitutes creative writing in relation to their own context. Without a well-defined focus for creative writing students may find it difficult to know what is required in classroom tasks and assessment. In addition, when planning for creative writing in school programs, teachers should consider flexible learning opportunities and choice for their students when developing their creative writing skills. Such flexibility should also involve choice of topic, ways of working (e.g. peer collaboration, individual activities etc.), and open discussions led by students in the classroom as shown throughout this paper. It would also be important for leaders and teachers to interrogate current approaches to teaching writing which we argued in the introduction to be formulaic and genre based.

Improve teacher self-efficacy, confidence, and content knowledge in teaching writing

Many of our studies showed that teachers who lacked confidence about writing themselves had less knowledge and skills to teach writing than those that may have participated in projects encouraging ‘teachers as writers’. Further, improved knowledge of grammar (as highlighted in Macken-Horarik’s, 2012 work); talk about writing in the classroom and other spaces (Cremin et al., 2020 ) and the writing process (see Ryan, 2014 ) could assist teachers in becoming more confident to take risks in the classroom with their students. Above all being playful about writing through extended conversations and practices is required.

Focussing on the structural and cultural resources

Improve training and further professional development and learning about teaching and assessing creative writing.

In order for the above personal attributes to be improved, further professional development and learning are required. Many of the papers presented throughout this review demonstrated the powerful impact of immersive professional learning for teachers. Working alongside professional authors, researchers, drama practitioners, visual artists, poets, for example, provided positive opportunities for teachers to learn about writing but also to feel more confident to teach it without imposing strict boundaries on students. We argue for professional development to be both formal and informal including such approaches as coaching and mentoring in the classroom. Demonstrated practice alongside the teacher is also recommended. This, in turn, would address the ongoing issue of creative writing being stifled for students in the classroom context.

Consider sustainability of creative pedagogic approaches and spaces for creative writing in curriculum planning

Many of the studies throughout this paper shared creative approaches to teaching writing but there were concerns that some of these methods may not be sustainable. It is important for school leaders to support the work of teachers in relation to teaching creative writing. We acknowledge that there is increasing uncertainty and scrutiny surrounding teachers’ everyday work (Knight, 2020 ), however, continued engagement in learning about and participating in creative pedagogy for writing is highly recommended. In addition, the studies suggested the provision of appropriate and authentic spaces in which students could creatively write and these often included spaces outside of the normal classroom environment and arts-based approaches implemented in such spaces. Teachers should be encouraged to collaborate and take risks rather than follow predetermined strategies for every lesson. A whole of school practice can be developed with important conversations about the ideologies that inform the school’s approach to writing.

Schools should not stifle creativity in the classroom due to the infiltration of standardised and/or trending approaches to teaching and assessing writing

It is evident that pedagogical approaches to teaching writing have been stifled by more formulaic methods aiming to meet expectations of standardised tests despite other evidence showing the benefits of more productive, engaging, and creative approaches to teaching writing as highlighted above. This can be particularly the case for students from non-dominant backgrounds where writing about cultural and life experiences through innovative practices has been proven to empower their voices (Johnson, 2021 ). The research shows that when students are offered rigid structures of texts, no choice of genres, and indeed word lists, their own decisions about writing are diminished (Ryan & Barton, 2013 ). It has been proven that students’ engagement and motivation to write can increase when they are able to write directly from their own experience or in social groups. It is therefore recommended that school leaders and teachers reconsider their ideologies about writing and explicitly indicate the importance of real-world purposes for writing—not just formulised, quick writing as usually included in external tests—but also those that encourage students’ growth in imagination, creativity, and innovative thought.

This systematic review used a lens of reflexivity to situate writing as a process of active and creative design whereby students make conscious decisions about their writing, with guidance from their teachers. As explained, we see creative writing as writing that engages a reader and, therefore, requires knowledge of authorial voice and appropriate word choice. This involves reflexive decisions relating to personal, structural, and cultural emergent properties. Predominant in the literature was the striking influence of CEPs or the values and expectations ascribed to writing, which in turn influence the strategies and resources (SEPs) and the experiences and motivations of students and teachers in the classroom (PEPs). Writing is about more than a series of perfectly formed sentences in a recognisable structure, which dominates conceptions of writing through high-stakes testing globally. It is about engagement with the expressive self, emergent identities, and relationships to places and people and above all communicating to and/or entertaining a reader. Without quality education in creative writing, society is at risk of losing an art form that is important for cultural practice and expression (Watson, 2016 ).

We do foresee several limitations with such a review, largely related to the positive nature of the studies in relation to creative approaches to teaching writing as well as the relatively small numbers of participants in some of the studies. Most of the studies reported favourably on the approaches taken by teachers to influence student motivation towards writing with limited comments about adverse effects. In terms of contributions, the notion that students need to draw on creative thought and ideas when writing means that teachers and leaders must think about diverse ways to teach writing. We argue, on the basis of the findings, that inquiry-based and reflexive professional learning projects about creativity are crucial for primary classrooms: what creativity means in different contexts and for different writers; how it is enabled; and the decisions and actions that emerge when creative and reflexive design guide our approach to classroom writing. Without quality knowledge and understanding of what creative writing is and how it is taught, we would be at risk of diminishing students’ self-expression and ability to communicate meaning to others in literary forms.

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Barton, G., Khosronejad, M., Ryan, M. et al. Teaching creative writing in primary schools: a systematic review of the literature through the lens of reflexivity. Aust. Educ. Res. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00641-9

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100 Creative Writing Prompts for Middle & High School – 2024

April 15, 2024

creative writing prompts for high school and middle school teens

Some high school students dream of writing for a living, perhaps pursuing an English major in college, or even attending a creative writing MFA program later on. For other students, creative writing can be useful for school assignments, in English and other subjects, and also for preparing their Common App essays . In a less goal-oriented sense, daily freewriting in a journal can be a healthy life practice for many high schoolers. Not sure where to start? Continue reading for 100 creative writing prompts for middle school and high school students. These middle/high school writing prompts offer inspiration for getting started with writing in a number of genres and styles.

Click here to view the 35 Best Colleges for Creative Writing .

What are Creative Writing Prompts?

Similar to how an academic essay prompt provides a jumping-off point for forming and organizing an argument, creative writing prompts are points of initiation for writing a story, poem, or creative essay. Prompts can be useful for writers of all ages, helping many to get past writer’s block and just start (often one of the most difficult parts of a writing process).

Writing prompts come in a variety of forms. Sometimes they are phrases used to begin sentences. Other times they are questions, more like academic essay prompts Writing prompts can also involve objects such as photographs, or activities such as walking. Below, you will find high school writing prompts that use memories, objects, senses (smell/taste/touch), abstract ideas , and even songs as jumping-off points for creative writing. These prompts can be used to write in a variety of forms, from short stories to creative essays, to poems.

How to use Creative Writing Prompts

Before we get started with the list, are a few tips when using creative writing prompts:

Experiment with different formats : Prose is great, but there’s no need to limit yourself to full sentences, at least at first. A piece of creative writing can begin with a poem, or a dialogue, or even a list. You can always bring it back to prose later if needed.

Interpret the prompt broadly : The point of a creative writing prompt is not to answer it “correctly” or “precisely.” You might begin with the prompt, but then your ideas could take you in a completely different direction. The words in the prompt also don’t need to open your poem or essay, but could appear somewhere in the middle.

Switch up/pile up the prompts : Try using two or three prompts and combine them, or weave between them. Perhaps choose a main prompt, and a different “sub-prompt.” For example, your main prompt might be “write about being in transit from one place to another,” and within that prompt, you might use the prompt to “describe a physical sensation,” and/or one the dialogue prompts. This could be a fun way to find complexity as you write.

Creative Writing Prompts for Middle School & High School Students (Continued)

Write first, edit later : While you’re first getting started with a prompt, leave the typos and bad grammar. Obsessing over details can take away from your flow of thoughts. You will inevitably make many fixes when you go back through to edit.

Write consistently : It often becomes easier to write when it’s a practice , rather than a once-in-a-while kind of activity. For some, it’s useful to write daily. Others find time to write every few days, or every weekend. Sometimes, a word-count goal can help (100 words a day, 2,000 words a month, etc.). If you set a goal, make sure it’s realistic. Start small and build from there, rather than starting with an unachievable goal and quickly giving up.

100 Creative Writing Prompts for Middle School & High School Teens

Here are some prompts for getting started with your creative writing. These are organized by method, rather than genre, so they can inspire writing in a variety of forms. Pick and choose the ones that work best for you, and enjoy!

Prompts using memories

Begin each sentence or group of sentences with the phrase, “I remember…”
Describe a family ritual.
Choose an event in your life, and write about it from the perspective of someone else who was there.
Pick a pathway you take on a regular basis (to school, or to a friend’s house). Describe five landmarks that you remember from this pathway.
Write about your house or apartment using a memory from each room.
Write an imaginary history of the previous people who lived in your house or apartment.
Write about an ancestor based on stories you’ve heard from relatives.
What’s your earliest memory?
Who was your first friend?
Write a letter to someone you haven’t seen since childhood.
Write about yourself now from the perspective of yourself twenty, or eighty, years from now.
Write about the best month of the year.
Write about the worst day of the year.
Rant about something that has always annoyed you.
Write about the hottest or coldest day you can remember.
Visualize a fleeting moment in your life and as though it’s a photograph, and time yourself 5 minutes to write every detail you can remember about the scene.
Draw out a timeline of your life so far. Then choose three years to write about, as though you were writing for a history book.
Write about a historical event in the first person, as though you remember it.
Write about a memory of being in transit from one place to another.

Objects and photographs as creative writing prompts

Describe the first object you see in the room. What importance does it have in your life? What memories do you have with this object? What might it symbolize?
Pick up an object, and spend some time holding it/examining it. Write about how it looks, feels, and smells. Write about the material that it’s made from.
Choose a favorite family photograph. What could someone know just by looking at the photograph? What’s secretly happening in the photograph?
Choose a photograph and tell the story of this photograph from the perspective of someone or something in it.
Write about a color by describing three objects that are that color.
Tell the story of a piece of trash.
Tell the story of a pair of shoes.
Tell the story of your oldest piece of clothing.

Senses and observations as creative writing prompts

Describe a sound you hear in the room or outside. Choose the first sound you notice. What are its qualities? It’s rhythms? What other sounds does it remind you of?
Describe a physical sensation you feel right now, in as much detail as possible.
Listen to a conversation and write down a phrase that you hear someone say. Start a free-write with this phrase.
Write about a food by describing its qualities, but don’t say what it is.
Describe a flavor (salty, sweet, bitter, etc.) to someone who has never tasted it before.
Narrate your day through tastes you tasted.
Narrate your day through sounds you heard.
Narrate your day through physical sensations you felt.
Describe in detail the physical process of doing an action you consider simple or mundane, like walking or lying down or chopping vegetables.
Write about the sensation of doing an action you consider physically demanding or tiring, like running or lifting heavy boxes.
Describe something that gives you goosebumps.
Write a story that involves drinking a cold glass of water on a hot day.
Write a story that involves entering a warm house from a cold snowy day.
Describe someone’s facial features in as much detail as possible.

Songs, books, and other art

Choose a song quote, write it down, and free-write from there.
Choose a song, and write a story in which that song is playing in the car.
Choose a song, and write to the rhythm of that song.
Choose a character from a book, and describe an event in your life from the perspective of that character.
Go to a library and write down 10 book titles that catch your eye. Free-write for 5 minutes beginning with each one.
Go to a library and open to random book pages, and write down 5 sentences that catch your attention. Use those sentences as prompts and free-write for 5-minutes with each.
Choose a piece of abstract artwork. Jot down 10 words that come to mind from the painting or drawing, and free-write for 2 minutes based on each word.
Find a picture of a dramatic Renaissance painting online. Tell a story about what’s going on in the painting that has nothing to do with what the artist intended.
Write about your day in five acts, like a Shakespearean play. If your day were a play, what would be the introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution?
Narrate a complicated book or film plot using only short sentences.
Read a short poem. Then write a poem that could be a “sister” or “cousin” of that poem.

Abstract ideas as creative writing prompts

Write about an experience that demonstrates an abstract idea, such as “love” or “home” or “freedom” or “loss” without ever using the word itself.
Write a list of ways to say “hello” without actually saying “hello.”
Write a list of ways to say “I love you” without actually saying “I love you.”
Do you believe in ghosts? Describe a ghost.
Invent a mode of time travel.
Glass half-full/half-empty: Write about an event or situation with a positive outlook. Then write about it with a miserable outlook.
Free-write beginning with “my religion is…” (what comes next can have as much or as little to do with organized religion as you’d like).
Free-write beginning with “my gender is…” (what comes next can have as much or as little to do with common ideas of gender as you’d like).
Write about a person or character that is “good” and one that is “evil.” Then write about the “evil” in the good character and the “good” in the evil character.
Write like you’re telling a secret.
Describe a moment of beauty you witnessed. What makes something beautiful?

Prompts for playing with narrative and character

Begin writing with the phrase, “It all started when…”
Tell a story from the middle of the most dramatic part.
Write a story that begins with the ending.
Begin a story but give it 5 possible endings.
Write a list of ways to dramatically quit a terrible job.
Write about a character breaking a social rule or ritual (i.e., walking backwards, sitting on the floor of a restaurant, wearing a ballgown to the grocery store). What are the ramifications?
You are sent to the principal’s office. Justify your bad behavior.
Re-write a well-known fairytale but set it in your school.
Write your own version of the TV show trope where someone gets stuck in an elevator with a stranger, or a secret love interest, or a nemesis.
Imagine a day where you said everything you were thinking, and write about it.
Write about a scenario in which you have too much of a good thing.
Write about a scenario in which money can buy happiness.
Invent a bank or museum heist.
Invent a superhero, including an origin story.
Write using the form of the scientific method (question, hypothesis, test, analyze data conclusion).
Write using the form of a recipe.

Middle School & High School Creative writing prompts for playing with fact vs. fiction

Write something you know for sure is true, and then, “but maybe it isn’t.” Then explain why that thing may not be true.
Write a statement and contradict that statement. Then do it again.
Draft an email with an outlandish excuse as to why you didn’t do your homework or why you need an extension.
Write about your morning routine, and make it sound extravagant/luxurious (even if it isn’t).
You’ve just won an award for doing a very mundane and simple task. Write your acceptance speech.
Write about a non-athletic event as though it were a sports game.
Write about the most complicated way to complete a simple task.
Write a brief history of your life, and exaggerate everything.
Write about your day, but lie about some things.
Tell the story of your birth.
Choose a historical event and write an alternative outcome.
Write about a day in the life of a famous person in history.
Read an instructional manual, and change three instructions to include some kind of magical or otherwise impossible element.

Prompts for starting with dialogue

Write a texting conversation between two friends who haven’t spoken in years.
Write a texting conversation between two friends who speak every day and know each other better than anyone.
Watch two people on the street having a conversation, and imagine the conversation they’re having. Write it down.
Write an overheard conversation behind a closed door that you shouldn’t be listening to.
Write a conversation between two characters arguing about contradicting memories of what happened.
You have a difficult decision to make. Write a conversation about it with yourself.
Write a conversation with a total lack of communication.
Write a job interview gone badly.

Final Thoughts – Creative Writing Prompts for Middle School & High School

Hopefully you have found several of these creative writing prompts helpful. Remember that when writing creatively, especially on your own, you can mix, match, and change prompts. For more on writing for high school students, check out the following articles:

College Application Essay Topics to Avoid
160 Good Argumentative Essay Topics
150 Good Persuasive Speech Topics
Good Transition Words for Essays
High School Success

Sarah Mininsohn

With a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Sarah is a writer, educator, and artist. She served as a graduate instructor at the University of Illinois, a tutor at St Peter’s School in Philadelphia, and an academic writing tutor and thesis mentor at Wesleyan’s Writing Workshop.

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Note : When you cite a republished work, like the one above, in your text, it should appear with both dates: Plato (385-378/1989)

Edition Other Than the First

Article or chapter in an edited book.

Note : When you list the pages of the chapter or essay in parentheses after the book title, use "pp." before the numbers: (pp. 1-21). This abbreviation, however, does not appear before the page numbers in periodical references, except for newspapers. List any edition number in the same set of parentheses as the page numbers, separated by a comma: (2nd ed., pp. 66-72).

Multivolume Work

Articles in periodicals.

APA style dictates that authors are named with their last name followed by their initials; publication year goes between parentheses, followed by a period. The title of the article is in sentence-case, meaning only the first word and proper nouns in the title are capitalized. The periodical title is run in title case, and is followed by the volume number which, with the title, is also italicized. If a DOI has been assigned to the article that you are using, you should include this after the page numbers for the article. If no DOI has been assigned and you are accessing the periodical online, use the URL of the website from which you are retrieving the periodical.

Article in Print Journal

Note: APA 7 advises writers to include a DOI (if available), even when using the print source. The example above assumes no DOI is available.

Article in Electronic Journal

Note : This content also appears on Reference List: Online Media .

As noted above, when citing an article in an electronic journal, include a DOI if one is associated with the article.

DOIs may not always be available. In these cases, use a URL. Many academic journals provide stable URLs that function similarly to DOIs. These are preferable to ordinary URLs copied and pasted from the browser's address bar.

Article in a Magazine

Article in a newspaper.

Ava Moreci ‘25 (CCS Writing & Literature) receives an inaugural 2023-2024 M. Garren Tinney Travel Award

Ucsb undergraduate writers are inspired to pursue writing-related travel opportunities thanks to m. garren tinney memorial fund.

The Writing Program in the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) recently announced the inaugural 2023-2024 M. Garren Tinney Travel Award Recipients: Ava Moreci ‘25 (CCS Writing & Literature) and Jackie Jauregui ‘25 (L&S Spanish). Elora Shaw ’25 (L&S Psychological and Brain Sciences, Biological Anthropology) received an Honorable Mention. Thanks to the M. Garren Tinney Memorial Fund established in June 2023 in loving memory of M. Garren Tinney ‘01 (L&S English), talented students each year receive an award to support travel related to their writing.

Ava will use her award to attend the Puget Sound Bird Festival in Edmonds, Washington that attracts scholars, writers, and communities of birdwatchers for writing and research development in the areas of birds, nature writing, and climate change. Jackie will participate in ieiMedia's Berlin Project, a three-week journalism intensive program in Berlin, Germany led by professionals with storied careers.

Michael "Garren" Tinney ‘01 (L&S English); Photo Courtesy: Legacy.com

The College of Creative Studies (CCS) congratulates both recipients!

For more information:

“2023-2024 M. Garren Tinney Travel Award Recipients Announced,” UCSB Writing Program, Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, April 17, 2024

“ Writing Program names inaugural M. Garren Tinney Fellows ,” UCSB The Current, January 24, 2024

“Inaugural 2023-2024 M. Garren Tinney Writing Fellows,” UCSB Writing Program, Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, January 19, 2024

For inquiries and to make a gift in loving memory of Garren to the M. Garren Tinney Memorial Fund, contact Venilde Jeronimo ([email protected]). Gifts to this Fund can also be made online.

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creativecritical.net presents: The Forms of Criticism

27 April 2024, 9:30 am–5:00 pm

Can criticism be creative? And if so, should critics be writing in other forms as well as the article and monograph, the default forms of criticism in contemporary academia? Join us for a symposium.

This event is free.

Event Information

Availability.

Can criticism be creative? And if so, should critics be writing in other forms as well as the article and monograph, the default forms of criticism in contemporary academia? 2023 saw the publication of two seminal books, Criticism and Truth by Jonathan Kramnick, and Critical Forms by Ross Wilson, which raise crucial questions for the future of literary studies in and beyond the university. Can criticism be creative? Is criticism a craft? And should criticism always be written, as it is now, in the form of essays, articles, and monographs? What about the panoply of other forms in which criticism has long thrived, among them the preface, the selection, the review, the lecture, the dialogue, the letter, and the autobiography, to say nothing of the various forms of poetry and fiction, and the act of translation?

Join us for a discussion on these issues. We will hear 25-minute papers from Jonathan Kramnick, Ross Wilson, Irina Dumitrescu, Thomas Karshan, Yvette Siegert, Lucy Newlyn, Ryan Ruby, and there will be plenty of time and space for thoughtful and vigorous debate.

Admission is free but space is limited so please register to confirm your place. The event is sponsored by creativecritical.net , the Institute of Advanced Studies, and the School of Literature University of East Anglia .

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Amanda Hoover

Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI

Illustration of four hands holding pencils that are connected to a central brain

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows.

A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million papers have been reviewed by the detector, predominantly written by high school and college students. Turnitin found that 11 percent may contain AI-written language in 20 percent of its content, with 3 percent of the total papers reviewed getting flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. (Turnitin is owned by Advance, which also owns Condé Nast, publisher of WIRED.) Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less than 1 percent when analyzing full documents.

ChatGPT’s launch was met with knee-jerk fears that the English class essay would die . The chatbot can synthesize information and distill it near-instantly—but that doesn’t mean it always gets it right. Generative AI has been known to hallucinate , creating its own facts and citing academic references that don’t actually exist. Generative AI chatbots have also been caught spitting out biased text on gender and race . Despite those flaws, students have used chatbots for research, organizing ideas, and as a ghostwriter . Traces of chatbots have even been found in peer-reviewed, published academic writing .

Teachers understandably want to hold students accountable for using generative AI without permission or disclosure. But that requires a reliable way to prove AI was used in a given assignment. Instructors have tried at times to find their own solutions to detecting AI in writing, using messy, untested methods to enforce rules , and distressing students. Further complicating the issue, some teachers are even using generative AI in their grading processes.

Detecting the use of gen AI is tricky. It’s not as easy as flagging plagiarism, because generated text is still original text. Plus, there’s nuance to how students use gen AI; some may ask chatbots to write their papers for them in large chunks or in full, while others may use the tools as an aid or a brainstorm partner.

Students also aren't tempted by only ChatGPT and similar large language models. So-called word spinners are another type of AI software that rewrites text, and may make it less obvious to a teacher that work was plagiarized or generated by AI. Turnitin’s AI detector has also been updated to detect word spinners, says Annie Chechitelli, the company’s chief product officer. It can also flag work that was rewritten by services like spell checker Grammarly, which now has its own generative AI tool . As familiar software increasingly adds generative AI components, what students can and can’t use becomes more muddled.

Detection tools themselves have a risk of bias. English language learners may be more likely to set them off; a 2023 study found a 61.3 percent false positive rate when evaluating Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exams with seven different AI detectors. The study did not examine Turnitin’s version. The company says it has trained its detector on writing from English language learners as well as native English speakers. A study published in October found that Turnitin was among the most accurate of 16 AI language detectors in a test that had the tool examine undergraduate papers and AI-generated papers.

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Schools that use Turnitin had access to the AI detection software for a free pilot period, which ended at the start of this year. Chechitelli says a majority of the service’s clients have opted to purchase the AI detection. But the risks of false positives and bias against English learners have led some universities to ditch the tools for now. Montclair State University in New Jersey announced in November that it would pause use of Turnitin’s AI detector. Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University did the same last summer.

“This is hard. I understand why people want a tool,” says Emily Isaacs, executive director of the Office of Faculty Excellence at Montclair State. But Isaacs says the university is concerned about potentially biased results from AI detectors, as well as the fact that the tools can’t provide confirmation the way they can with plagiarism. Plus, Montclair State doesn’t want to put a blanket ban on AI, which will have some place in academia. With time and more trust in the tools, the policies could change. “It’s not a forever decision, it’s a now decision,” Isaacs says.

Chechitelli says the Turnitin tool shouldn’t be the only consideration in passing or failing a student. Instead, it’s a chance for teachers to start conversations with students that touch on all of the nuance in using generative AI. “People don’t really know where that line should be,” she says.

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IMAGES

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COMMENTS

What is Creative Writing? A Key Piece of the Writer's Toolbox
5 Key Characteristics of Creative Writing. Creative writing is marked by several defining characteristics, each working to create a distinct form of expression: 1. Imagination and Creativity:Creative writing is all about harnessing your creativity and imagination to create an engaging and compelling piece of work.
Creative Writing 101: Everything You Need to Get Started
Creative writing is writing meant to evoke emotion in a reader by communicating a theme. In storytelling (including literature, movies, graphic novels, creative nonfiction, and many video games), the theme is the central meaning the work communicates. Take the movie (and the novel upon which it's based) Jaws, for instance.
8 Tips for Getting Started With Creative Writing
Outside the world of business writing and hard journalism lies an entire realm of creative writing. Whether you're brand-new to the craft, a nonfiction writer looking to experiment, or a casual creative writer wanting to turn into a published author, honing your creative writing skills is key to your success. Articles.
What Is Creative Writing? Types, Techniques, and Tips
Types of Creative Writing. Examples of creative writing can be found pretty much everywhere. Some forms that you're probably familiar with and already enjoy include: • Fiction (of every genre, from sci-fi to historical dramas to romances) • Film and television scripts. • Songs. • Poetry.
Creative Writing 101: A Beginner's Guide to Creative Writing
Creative Writing 101. Creative writing is any form of writing which is written with the creativity of mind: fiction writing, poetry writing, creative nonfiction writing and more. The purpose is to express something, whether it be feelings, thoughts, or emotions. Rather than only giving information or inciting the reader to make an action ...
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2. Start journaling your days. Another easy way to get started with creative writing is to keep a journal. We're not talking about an hour-by-hour account of your day, but journaling as a way to express yourself without filters and find your 'voice in writing'. If you're unsure what to journal about, think of any daily experiences that ...
10 Types of Creative Writing (with Examples You'll Love)
A lot falls under the term 'creative writing': poetry, short fiction, plays, novels, personal essays, and songs, to name just a few. By virtue of the creativity that characterizes it, creative writing is an extremely versatile art. So instead of defining what creative writing is, it may be easier to understand what it does by looking at ...
Mastering the Art of Article Writing: A Comprehensive Guide
In the digital age, the written word continues to wield immense power. Whether you're a blogger, a journalist, or an aspiring writer, the ability to craft compelling articles is a valuable skill.
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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 ...
What Is Creative Writing? The ULTIMATE Guide!
Creative writing can even use persuasive writing styles in some formats. Many writers will combine persuasive writing with a narrative structure to come up with a creative way of telling a story to educate readers and provide new opinions for them to view or be convinced of. Expository writing can also be involved here, using creativity and ...
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Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Sep 3, 2021 • 3 min read. Bloggers, freelance writers, copywriters, and other content creators are often faced with a seemingly impossible task: producing a great article under a tight deadline. That's why it's important to develop writing skills that can help you create great content in a short ...
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Creative Writing is a catalyst that sparks our creativity and empowers us to breathe life into our ideas on the page. With Oxford Summer Courses, aspiring writers aged 16-24 can embark on an extraordinary journey of creative expression and growth. Immerse yourself in the captivating realms of Oxford and Cambridge as you explore our inspiring ...
How Creative Writing Can Increase Students'...
Reaping the benefits. To see how creative writing impacts students, I invite them to rate their resilience through a self-compassion survey at the start of the school year and again in the spring. Last year, two-thirds of students surveyed increased in self-compassion; Alejandro grew his self-compassion by 20 percent.
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Creative writing can help improve one's health: a South African study shows how. Dawn Garisch, University of Cape Town and Steve Reid, University of Cape Town. The benefits of creative writing ...
Creative Writing: What It Is and Why It Matters
How We Define Creative Writing. Creative writing is any form where writers can express their thoughts and feelings imaginatively. This type of writing allows authors to draw on their imagination when creating stories and characters and play with language and structure. While there are no boundaries in creative writing, most pieces will contain ...
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Less than 10% of creative writing students go on to stereotypical "writing" careers (fiction writing, publishing, translating); far more go into arts/design/media careers (17.7%) and marketing ...
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Creative Writing 101 articles serve as one of the academic courses in the field of Literary Theory and Literature. The course, which is a fundamental guide within the scope of general knowledge compared to the technical knowledge of Literary Theory and Literature, also addresses students and the general readership alike.
Teaching Creative Writing
Creative writing plays an important role in a child's literacy development. This article makes suggestions for the instruction and evaluation of children's stories. Most children enter school with a natural interest in writing, an inherent need to express themselves in words (Graves, 1983). Couple this with a child's love of stories and ...
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Creative Writing: Using the Epigram as a Literary Device. by Freelance Writing. The first epigrams were verses used by the Greeks for the inscriptions on statues or other monuments to the dead. The Romans were the first to use epigrams...
New Writing
New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing is a leading international journal in the field of Creative Writing Studies and publishes both critical and creative work. Work accepted for New Writing is published both in paper and electronically. Through the global professional and creative services of the publisher, Routledge/Taylor and Francis, the ...
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Bogen, Don. "Beyond the Workshop: Suggestions for a Process-Oriented Creative Writing Course.". Journal of Advanced Composition 5 (1984): 149-161. Bradbury, Malcolm. "The Bridgeable Gap: Bringing Together the Creative Writer and the Critical Theorist in an Authorless World.". TLS (Jan. 1992): 7-9.
How to Boost Creativity and Improve Your Creative Writing
A creative writer strives to tell unique stories in a distinctive voice. Yet with all the fiction writing already out there in the world, it can be hard to feel that your work is legitimately creative compared to the competition. You could be a first-time writer completing in a high school creative writing course, a hobbyist working on your ...
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Creative writing in schools is an important part of learning, assessment, and reporting, however, there is evidence globally to suggest that such writing is often stifled in preference to quick on-demand writing, usually featured in high-stakes testing (Au & Gourd, 2013; Gibson & Ewing, 2020).Research points to this negatively impacting particularly on students from diverse backgrounds ...
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Some high school students dream of writing for a living, perhaps pursuing an English major in college, or even attending a creative writing MFA program later on. For other students, creative writing can be useful for school assignments, in English and other subjects, and also for preparing their Common App essays.In a less goal-oriented sense, daily freewriting in a journal can be a healthy ...
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Find the best Creative Writing jobs It takes just one job to develop a successful relationship that can propel your career forward. Find work Interested in hiring? Professionals on Upwork rate clients. Rating is 4.9 out of 5. 4.9/5 on average from 2M+ reviews Trusted by. Check out a sample of the 2,698 Creative Writers jobs posted on Upwork ...
Reference List: Textual Sources
As noted above, when citing an article in an electronic journal, include a DOI if one is associated with the article. Baniya, S., & Weech, S. (2019). Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning.
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Emporia High School students were the guests of honor at an author reception on Sunday afternoon, hosted by the Emporia Public Library. Students in Matthew Gesner's creative writing class read
Ava Moreci '25 (CCS Writing & Literature) receives an inaugural 2023
The UCSB Writing Program in the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) recently announced the inaugural 2023-2024 M. Garren Tinney Travel Award Recipients: Ava Moreci '25 (CCS Writing & Literature) and Jackie Jauregui '25 (L&S Spanish). Elora Shaw '25 (L&S Psychological and Brain Sciences, Biological Anthropology) received an Honorable ...
creativecritical.net presents: The Forms of Criticism
And if so, should critics be writing in other forms as well as the article and monograph, the default forms of criticism in contemporary academia? 2023 saw the publication of two seminal books, Criticism and Truth by Jonathan Kramnick, and Critical Forms by Ross Wilson, which raise crucial questions for the future of literary studies in and ...
Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI
A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million ...

What is Creative Writing? A Key Piece of the Writer’s Toolbox

What is Creative Writing?

5 Key Characteristics of Creative Writing

Styles of Creative Writing

Short Stories

Screenplays

Importance of Creative Writing

Developing Creativity and Imagination

Enhancing Communication Skills

Exploring Emotions and Ideas

4 Steps to Start Creative Writing

1. Finding Inspiration

2. Planning Your Piece

3. Writing Your First Draft

4. Editing and Revising Your Work

Tips to Improve Creative Writing Skills

Read Widely

Practice Regularly

Attend Writing Workshops and Courses

Joining Writing Groups and Communities

Seeking Feedback on Your Work

Start Creative Writing Today!

Brooks Manley

Inspiring Ink: Expert Tips on How to Teach Creative Writing

What Exactly is a Junk Journal and How to Use It

Creative Writing 101

For novelists: do you want to write compelling opening chapters?

Need more writing tips?

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10 Types of Creative Writing (with Examples You’ll Love)

“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Trying to Raise the Dead” by Dorianne Laux

Song Lyrics

“Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen

“I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie

Plays and Screenplays

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

“Everything is Fine” by Michael Schur ( The Good Place )

Personal essays

“On Selling Your First Novel After 11 Years” by Min Jin Lee (Literary Hub)

“A Cyclist on the English Landscape” by Roff Smith (New York Times)

Short Fiction

“An MFA Story” by Paul Dalla Rosa (Electric Literature)

“Flowering Walrus” by Scott Skinner (Reedsy)

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Erasure by Percival Everett

Creative Nonfiction

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

Illustrated Narratives (Comics, graphic novels)

Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

Video Games and RPGs

80 Days by inkle studios

What Remains of Edith Finch by Giant Sparrow

‘How You Hope Your Extended Family Will React When You Explain Your Job to Them’ by Mike Lacher (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

‘Not a Foodie’ by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell (Electric Literature)

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What is creative writing?

What are the main forms of writing?

What is the purpose of creative writing?

What are the different forms of creative writing?

Poetry & Songs

What’s needed to make a piece of creative writing?

A target audience

A story of sorts

A good imagination

How can creative writing skills benefit you?

How to improve your creative writing

Conclusion: What is creative writing

A Look Into Creative Writing | Oxford Summer Courses

Defining Creative Writing

The Magic of Imagination

What Are the Different Types of Creative Writing?

The Benefits of Creative Writing with Oxford Summer Courses

Embracing the Journey

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