What is creative writing?
How is ordinary writing different from creative writing? What is it suitable for, and why is it appropriate to develop it in a university environment? What does an essay have to do with creativity?
Creative writing is a discipline that is more than a hundred years old and aims to develop the imaginative power of the author to foster his creativity and interest in the world. At the same time, it can also be used as a tool for psychotherapy or psychoanalysis and is part of both school and after-school education. Generally speaking, it will have about three basic dimensions for most people:
- Developing the ability to write - a person usually knows all the letters by age six. Still, the ability to produce text with a certain amount of ease, consistency and meaningfulness is not equally developed in everyone. Usually, students engage in creative writing when they need to write a text and have a "creative block" they don't know how to start. When they write a sentence, they delete it, etc.
- Development of specific text skills - the course will not cover this area. Still, it is usually the focus of commercial creative writing courses, which teach how to construct dialogue work with description or characters. It is, therefore, a set of knowledge and skills leading to producing a good quality, usually artistic text.
- Self-development - creative writing is essential for personal development, fostering creativity, sensitivity and many other areas. For example, writing a journal allows one to see one's life from a particular perspective and stop and reflect on it.
Fišer then lists ten areas in which he applies creative writing in terms of shaping the author's personality:
- Practical mastery of techniques in formulating a writing topic.
- Valuable acquisition of the ability to write.
- Removing creative blocks and fears.
- Acquiring the skills to optimize the text according to given criteria.
- Developing your writing without using schemes and clichés.
- The release of fantasy.
- Development of sensory perception.
- Removing the fear of writing promotes confidence and independence.
- Writing as a means of entertainment and self-therapy.
- Support and development of the moral and accessible side of the author, development of creativity.
Creative writing can be approached differently, depending on your motivation for writing. Sometimes, it is thought that creative writing has little to do with professional writing. After all, most exercises try to work with topics that are funny, quirky, entertaining, and "wacky", not with scientific rigour, precision and methodological correctness. But it turns out that such an objection is not generally valid. Creative writing, as Fischer, quoted above, shows, naturally promotes competencies in writing and creative thinking, competencies that are needed in science and scientific settings. The goal of creative writing is not - at least not. In our course - to master diary-making and story-writing, but precisely to develop the thinking structures necessary for scientific work and living in the information society in general.
Creative writing should work similarly to the creative process discussed in the previous module - from initial idea to evaluation. This is also why it is an activity that is commonly considered part of the curriculum in universities in the US. At the same time, the more one reads and writes, the better one works. It is, therefore, one of the motivations for writing so that one does not encounter difficulties in formulating sentences, arguments, and the writing itself - and thus can concentrate fully on one's scientific content.
There are several ways to approach creative writing - one can encounter comprehensive courses, a set of techniques, or just a recommendation that one "write it out." There is undoubtedly something to each approach. We will focus on some specific activities (deliberately chosen to cover the broadest possible range of areas of creative writing) on which imaginative writing can be practised.
If we go back to Fischer, he gives an excellent overview of the so-called creative blocks (blockades), i.e. cognitive or emotional limitations that prevent a person from creating. One of the essential tasks of creative writing is precisely removing and overcoming such blocks, first consciously and systematically, later completely automatically and intrinsically. Many of them are removed as one acquires the competence to write. Nevertheless, having a table at the beginning is advantageous to help you remove the basic ones.
