Debunking the Myths of Creative Writing

by Barbara Shoup

Why most English teachers avoid teaching creative writing—and a rationale for changing their minds:

It takes time away from “real” writing.  “Real” writing is clear, focused, logically organized, grammatically correct.  It has stance or point of view.  It persuades.  Good creative writing has all these traits, too.   Well-taught, creative writing underpins and expands a student’s general writing skills.

It’s fluff.  We need to be concentrating on more important things.  The way students must think to write a story or poem mirrors the way they must think to solve life problems. The give and take of the writing process, the constant widening and narrowing of focus in order to be able to identify and experiment with alternatives, the periodic realignment of dream and reality are excellent preparation for facing the complex, ambiguous problems of adulthood to which there are rarely easy, totally satisfactory solutions.  Creative writing is a lens for looking at the real world and at their own lives.

The insight that writing stories and poems brings makes students better able to read, understand, and discuss literature, as well.  Engaging in the creative process themselves, they learn to read as writers read, noting how a story or poem is made as well as its content. 

Teachers should be expected to teach creative writing because they aren’t creative themselves.  We are all creative to some degree—and can learn to become more creative.  Creativity is a process, not a trait.  Writing teachers who engage in the writing process themselves find this easier to remember.

The results are always so disappointing.  After the first week in a creative writing class for teachers, one woman observed that, often, she’d realize that her students hadn’t done anything “creative” in weeks, so she’d come up with an assignment that “felt” creative…with disappointing results.  Until taking the class, she hadn’t realized that creative writing skills could be taught.  In fact, they can—and should—be taught.  Like all skills, they must be practiced regularly, if students are to master them.  When teachers understand creative process and engage in it themselves, they become better able to construct creative writing assignments that will yield rich results. 

 A-students freak out at creative writing assignments.  There’s no formula for creative writing, no hoops to jump through that will ensure and “A”. In fact, this is good for them!  It makes them think in new ways.  It makes them consider the possibility that the most important questions in life don’t have easy—or any—answers.

Some “A” students will argue that it’s unfair to give creative assignments to those who aren’t creative.  But we give math assignments to those with math phobias and vocabulary tests to those who have difficulty with memorization.  Teaching creative writing gives value to a different, very important kind of intelligence—one that is important to cultivate.

Creative kids (or kids who think they’re creative) freak out at creative writing assignments.  Assignments thwart their creativity, they argue.  The must be inspired to write well.  Creativity can’t happen on demand.  As musicians must learn how to play an instrument and spend hours practicing, no matter how proficient they become, fiction writers, poets and playwrights must learn the craft of writing and constantly exercise their knowledge through practice.  There is not a middle school or high school student alive—no matter how “creative”—who cannot benefit from focused, well-constructed creative writing assignments. 
 
Creative work can’t really be evaluated.  The work of novelists, short story writers and poets is evaluated by editors, who have the option to accept or reject it.  If published, it is evaluated by critics, whose job it is to point out its strengths and weaknesses.  Student work can and must be evaluated, too.  It is not at all unreasonable to give creative work a grade, assuming the grade is given based on whether the work reflects what the assignment set out to measure.    The more a teacher learns about process and engages it herself, the better able she’ll be to create assignments that teach specific skills and that can be evaluated in a way that will give students useful information about themselves as writers. 

In fact, creative writing and expository writing are more alike than different.

All good writing is clear.  Strong, specific nouns and verbs give it muscle.  It makes use of figurative language that suits its purpose and tone.  It uses language in a way that keeps the reader curious and engaged—not confused.  It requires smooth transitions from one section to the next.  It’s logically organized, leading the reader to a conclusion that makes sense because it has been prepared for throughout with fact and detail.

All good writing tells the truth, emotionally and intellectually.  It reflects the depth of the writer’s understanding of facts, ideas, and experience.  Stories, poems, and plays require the same accuracy of detail and fact that essays and reports do.  (One middle school teacher cleverly tested the depth of her students’ understanding of an expository writing project, which required them to research a phobia and write a report on it, by pairing it with a creative writing assignment, in which they were asked to create a character who suffered from the phobia and write a scene that showed the phobia in play, without naming or giving a description of it.) 

All good writing reflects the writer’s conscious and unconscious selection and ordering of facts, details, and ideas as he shaped and focused the piece.  Even the fattest, most comprehensive history book can’t contain every single piece of information about its time; nor can a novel include every single scene from a character’s life.  Writer’ make choices about what to put in a book, article, or essay and what to leave out.  They make choices about how to order information, consciously or subconsciously slanting the reader’s perception.  No matter how objective, the choices a writer makes have a profound effect on the reader’s conclusions.

All good writing has a stance, or point of view.  It is a lens through which the writer sees the world and tries to understand it.  Even the most objective writing reflects the writer behind the words to some degree.  Tone, word choice, sentence rhythms, and the nature and order of thought contribute to the individuality of a good piece of writing, the sense that it could not have been written just that way by anyone else. 

All good writing persuades.  The environmentalist writes to persuade you to come around to his way of thinking, the fiction writer sets out to persuade you that the story in his head is real.  In each case, the authority of the writer’s voice and the accuracy of fact and detail are crucial to making the reader trust the words on the page.

All good writing uses strong, vivid detail to draw readers in and illuminate facts and ideas.  Journalist, essayists, historians—all kinds of nonfiction writers—use many of the same techniques that fiction writers use to bring their words alive on the page.

All good writing is an act of discovery and reflects a curious, open mind.  Expository writing offers surprises and insights in process, just as creative writing does.  As they write to discover what they think, students experience interesting shifts in focus.  Sometimes they write something they didn’t know they knew.  The writer’s sense of discovery is there, between the lines, and draws the reader through the piece as the story of the writer thinking about his topic is revealed. 

All good writing is born of frustration and ambiguity.  It makes the writer think—hard. A student must constantly readjust his ideas about what’s possible as he works to narrow the gap between the idea in his heads and the words on the page. 

All good writing is difficult—if not impossible—to summarize.  The whole is greater, more mysterious than the sum of its parts.

Whether students are writing a term paper, poem—or, most likely, something in between, the dread they all too often feel approaching the blank page will begin to dissolve as they gain greater understanding of the creative process and learn ways of thinking of themselves as writers and talking about their work  

Barbara Shoup

Barbara Shoup is the author of five novels: Night Watch, Wish You Were Here, Stranded in Harmony, Faithful Women and Vermeer’s Daughter, and two non-fiction books co-authored with Margaret-Love Denman, Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process and Story Matters, a college writing workshop text. A new novel, Everything You Want, is forthcoming from FLUX in 2008.

Shoup is the program director for the Writers’ Center of Indiana, an associate faculty member at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and a contributing editor to the Chicago fiction magazine, Other Voices. Her young adult novels, Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony, were selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. Vermeer’s Daughter was a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for High School Students in 2003. She is the recipient of the 2006 PEN Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship. Visit her web site at www.barbarashoup.com/.

This featured article appeared in Volume 2, Number 2 issue of the Write Connections quarterly newsletter. View other archived newsletters , a topical organization of all newsletters, or sign-up to receive notification when the next newsletters are ready to download.