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Can Writing Be Taught?

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By Rivka Galchen and Zoe Heller

Aug. 19, 2014

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Rivka Galchen and Zoë Heller discuss whether writing can be taught.

By Rivka Galchen

Is it somehow flattering to feel one’s endeavor is more gift than labor, and are writers more in need of such flattery than others?

I wonder if we can really teach someone to be a biologist. I mean, sure, we can say, This is what a cell is, and here’s this thing called RNA, and here’s this thing called DNA, and here’s this technique called agarose gel electrophoresis that will separate your DNA and RNA fragments by size — but will teaching really produce the next Charles Darwin or Rachel Carson or Francis Crick? A real scientist follows her own visionary gleam. Penicillin was discovered when Alexander Fleming returned to his messy lab after a long vacation and made sense of a moldy petri dish most people would have thrown out as contaminated. The structure of the benzene ring came to the chemist Friedrich August Kekule after a daydream about a snake biting its own tail. You can’t teach that kind of dreaming.

Yet we know we can teach biology, we know we can teach chemistry. Or, at the very least, we teach those subjects every day, in every school system and at every level without finding ourselves in sinusoidal crisis about the subjects’ transmissibility. Somehow, with the sciences — with most every subject — we don’t think that the measure of teaching is its production of masters. I remember learning about RNA transcriptase and about the peppered moth that turned black in adapting to the soot of the Industrial Revolution, and although I never found in myself the inner calling or natural talent that would make me a professional biologist, I didn’t think, What’s the point and to hell with the whole project. And even as these were college-level courses, I didn’t get the sense that my teachers were agonized as to why they were teaching this not-a-prodigy-in-biology person. It was as if interest and pleasure were reason enough.

I take the sciences, and in particular the less glorified of the sciences, as an example here not only to counter the common misconception among bookish people that the sciences are for grinders with no imagination, but also because I think it’s illuminating how relatively unconflicted we are in this country about teaching the teachable part of the sciences. I don’t think that’s explainable simply by “usefulness,” since so few Americans work in areas that require scientific expertise. With a similar calm, we teach the magic-infused fields of music, soccer, mathematics, history, even ethics.

They say that Milton wrote much of “Paradise Lost” from a kind of sleep, and I believe it. But I believe that in most every intellectual endeavor, the extremes of its work come from an unteachable dark. A discipline like mathematics, known especially for its young prodigies who have less to offer as they get older, seems more dominated by the dark than writing does, yet there’s still a substantial teachable remainder.

So the question of whether writing can be taught for me metamorphoses into the question of why it is, when thinking about writing, we are disproportionately detained by the question of teachability. Is it just that it’s somehow flattering to feel one’s endeavor is more gift than labor, and are writers more in need of such flattery than others? Possibly.

But maybe it’s an older, simpler story. Our species has spent so long thinking of the word as the Word. Even the simplest of words, with their uncanny resemblance to the Word, can seem suffused with outsize meaning. (I confess, for example, to having at times been strangely moved by the phrase “Caution: Contents May Be Hot.”) Maybe especially for the least religious among us, who rarely read a designated holy book, this holy sense can go general. Like the children of Depression-era parents unthinkingly filling cabinets with canned food, we latter-day non-saints are still waiting for a message. Unbelieving in teachers, we expect to hear this message directly. Why doesn’t this ever change? “Let’s go,” says one of the two clowns in Samuel Beckett’s most famous play.

“We can’t.”

“We’re waiting for Godot.”

Rivka Galchen is a recipient of a William J. Saroyan International Prize for Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Berlin Prize, among other distinctions. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper’s and The New Yorker, which selected her for their list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed “Atmospheric Disturbances,” was published in 2008. Her second book, a story collection titled “American Innovations,” was published in May.

By Zoë Heller

No one at my daughter’s school has ever told her that the use of the word “incredibly” is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

The other night I took a look at my daughter’s English essay and suggested that she try excising the words “extremely,” “totally” and “incredibly” wherever they appeared in her prose. She did this and was surprised to discover that not only were the intensifiers superfluous, but that her sentences were stronger without them.

The question of whether writing can be taught is often framed as a “great” or “perennial” debate, when in fact it is neither. No one seriously disputes that good writing has certain demonstrable rules, principles and techniques. (All writers, insofar as they are readers, have been “taught” by the example of other writers.) What passes for controversy on this issue turns out, in most cases, to be some smaller and more specific disagreement — usually having to do with the efficacy of creative writing courses and whether they foster false hope in students without literary promise.

This is a reasonable subject for discussion; it is certainly useful to point out that an M.F.A. is not a passport to becoming a great novelist, or even a published one. (The former depends on something numinous called talent; the latter has to do with the exigencies of the marketplace.) But the transformative capacity of teaching in any discipline has its limits: A ballet school undertakes to teach ballet, not to invest its students with the genius of Darcey Bussell or to give them all jobs in the corps. And to focus on what one rarefied branch of postgraduate tuition cannot do for aspiring artists is to ignore all the things that writing instruction can do for everyone else.

Modern educators often talk of wanting to encourage “critical thinking” in students. A crucial part of that mission is — or should be — teaching young people how to organize and present their ideas in lucid prose. Most people will not end up writing essays or novels for a living, but at some point they will probably want to write a job application, send a condolence letter (O.K., perhaps just a condolence text), or compose an email to a colleague explaining why something went wrong at work. Knowing how to write — understanding the basics of what used to be called “rhetoric” — still matters, even in the Internet age. So it’s a sad thing that in a great many American public high schools, writing instruction amounts to little more than inculcating the dreary requirements of the SAT essay.

No one at my daughter’s school has ever mentioned to her that the use of the word “incredibly” is subject to the law of diminishing returns. No one has ever talked to her intelligently about structure or style. Instead, she has been given a single, graceless formula for writing a book report and told that any departure from it will result in the automatic subtraction of marks: “In the first sentence, state your general theme; in the second sentence, state your thesis; in the third sentence, provide a road map of how you will advance your thesis throughout the rest of the essay and make sure that all subsequent paragraphs correspond accordingly.”

Composing an essay that conforms to this sort of template is the prose equivalent of wearing a too small, too stiff bridesmaid’s dress: It’s a joyless exercise, and the results are never pretty. Writing can be taught, but it deserves to be taught better than this.

Zoë Heller is the author of three novels: “Everything You Know”; “Notes on a Scandal,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and “The Believers.” She has written feature articles and criticism for a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

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How to Teach Creative Writing | 7 Steps to Get Students Wordsmithing

“I don’t have any ideas!”

“I can’t think of anything!”

While we see creative writing as a world of limitless imagination, our students often see an overwhelming desert of “no idea.”

But when you teach creative writing effectively, you’ll notice that every student is brimming over with ideas that just have to get out.

So what does teaching creative writing effectively look like?

We’ve outlined a seven-step method that will scaffold your students through each phase of the creative process from idea generation through to final edits.

7. Create inspiring and original prompts

Use the following formats to generate prompts that get students inspired:

personal memories (“Write about a person who taught you an important lesson”)
imaginative scenarios
prompts based on a familiar mentor text (e.g. “Write an alternative ending to your favorite book”). These are especially useful for giving struggling students an easy starting point.
lead-in sentences (“I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Somehow overnight I…”).
fascinating or thought-provoking images with a directive (“Who do you think lives in this mountain cabin? Tell their story”).

Don’t have the time or stuck for ideas? Check out our list of 100 student writing prompts

6. unpack the prompts together.

Explicitly teach your students how to dig deeper into the prompt for engaging and original ideas.

Probing questions are an effective strategy for digging into a prompt. Take this one for example:

“I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Somehow overnight I…”

Ask “What questions need answering here?” The first thing students will want to know is:

What happened overnight?

No doubt they’ll be able to come up with plenty of zany answers to that question, but there’s another one they could ask to make things much more interesting:

Who might “I” be?

In this way, you subtly push students to go beyond the obvious and into more original and thoughtful territory. It’s even more useful with a deep prompt:

“Write a story where the main character starts to question something they’ve always believed.”

Here students could ask:

What sorts of beliefs do people take for granted?
What might make us question those beliefs?
What happens when we question something we’ve always thought is true?
How do we feel when we discover that something isn’t true?

Try splitting students into groups, having each group come up with probing questions for a prompt, and then discussing potential “answers” to these questions as a class.

The most important lesson at this point should be that good ideas take time to generate. So don’t rush this step!

5. Warm-up for writing

A quick warm-up activity will:

allow students to see what their discussed ideas look like on paper
help fix the “I don’t know how to start” problem
warm up writing muscles quite literally (especially important for young learners who are still developing handwriting and fine motor skills).

Freewriting is a particularly effective warm-up. Give students 5–10 minutes to “dump” all their ideas for a prompt onto the page for without worrying about structure, spelling, or grammar.

After about five minutes you’ll notice them starting to get into the groove, and when you call time, they’ll have a better idea of what captures their interest.

Did you know? The Story Factory in Reading Eggs allows your students to write and publish their own storybooks using an easy step-by-step guide.

4. Start planning

Now it’s time for students to piece all these raw ideas together and generate a plan. This will synthesize disjointed ideas and give them a roadmap for the writing process.

Note: at this stage your strong writers might be more than ready to get started on a creative piece. If so, let them go for it – use planning for students who are still puzzling things out.

Here are four ideas for planning:

Graphic organisers

A graphic organiser will allow your students to plan out the overall structure of their writing. They’re also particularly useful in “chunking” the writing process, so students don’t see it as one big wall of text.

Storyboards and illustrations

These will engage your artistically-minded students and give greater depth to settings and characters. Just make sure that drawing doesn’t overshadow the writing process.

Voice recordings

If you have students who are hesitant to commit words to paper, tell them to think out loud and record it on their device. Often they’ll be surprised at how well their spoken words translate to the page.

Write a blurb

This takes a bit more explicit teaching, but it gets students to concisely summarize all their main ideas (without giving away spoilers). Look at some blurbs on the back of published books before getting them to write their own. Afterward they could test it out on a friend – based on the blurb, would they borrow it from the library?

3. Produce rough drafts

Warmed up and with a plan at the ready, your students are now ready to start wordsmithing. But before they start on a draft, remind them of what a draft is supposed to be:

a work in progress.

Remind them that if they wait for the perfect words to come, they’ll end up with blank pages .

Instead, it’s time to take some writing risks and get messy. Encourage this by:

demonstrating the writing process to students yourself
taking the focus off spelling and grammar (during the drafting stage)
providing meaningful and in-depth feedback (using words, not ticks!).

Reading Eggs also gives you access to an ever-expanding collection of over 3,500 online books!

2. share drafts for peer feedback.

Don’t saddle yourself with 30 drafts for marking. Peer assessment is a better (and less exhausting) way to ensure everyone receives the feedback they need.

Why? Because for something as personal as creative writing, feedback often translates better when it’s in the familiar and friendly language that only a peer can produce. Looking at each other’s work will also give students more ideas about how they can improve their own.

Scaffold peer feedback to ensure it’s constructive. The following methods work well:

Student rubrics

A simple rubric allows students to deliver more in-depth feedback than “It was pretty good.” The criteria will depend on what you are ultimately looking for, but students could assess each other’s:

use of language.

Whatever you opt for, just make sure the language you use in the rubric is student-friendly.

Two positives and a focus area

Have students identify two things their peer did well, and one area that they could focus on further, then turn this into written feedback. Model the process for creating specific comments so you get something more constructive than “It was pretty good.” It helps to use stems such as:

I really liked this character because…

I found this idea interesting because it made me think…

I was a bit confused by…

I wonder why you… Maybe you could… instead.

1. The editing stage

Now that students have a draft and feedback, here’s where we teachers often tell them to “go over it” or “give it some final touches.”

But our students don’t always know how to edit.

Scaffold the process with questions that encourage students to think critically about their writing, such as:

Are there any parts that would be confusing if I wasn’t there to explain them?
Are there any parts that seem irrelevant to the rest?
Which parts am I most uncertain about?
Does the whole thing flow together, or are there parts that seem out of place?
Are there places where I could have used a better word?
Are there any grammatical or spelling errors I notice?

Key to this process is getting students to read their creative writing from start to finish .

Important note: if your students are using a word processor, show them where the spell-check is and how to use it. Sounds obvious, but in the age of autocorrect, many students simply don’t know.

A final word on teaching creative writing

Remember that the best writers write regularly.

Incorporate them into your lessons as often as possible, and soon enough, you’ll have just as much fun marking your students’ creative writing as they do producing it.

Need more help supporting your students’ writing?

Read up on how to get reluctant writers writing , strategies for supporting struggling secondary writers , or check out our huge list of writing prompts for kids .

Watch your students get excited about writing and publishing their own storybooks in the Story Factory

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About the author (2017).

Stephanie Vanderslice is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Arkansas Writer's MFA Workshop at the University of Central Arkansas, USA and is the Chairperson of the Creative Writing Studies Organization. Her column, The Geek's Guide to the Writing Life appears regularly in the Huffington Post. She publishes fiction, nonfiction and creative writing criticism including Can It Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy, Teaching Creative Writing to Undergraduates: A Guide and Sourcebook and Rethinking Creative Writing

Rebecca Manery teaches creative and academic writing at Ball State University, USA. A published poet and non-fiction writer she is co-author (with Tonya Perry) of Supporting Students in a Time of Common Core Standards (6-8) (2011).

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Inspiring Ink: Expert Tips on How to Teach Creative Writing

The world of creative writing is as vast as it is rewarding. It’s a form of expression that allows the writer to explore different worlds, characters, and narratives – all within the power of their pen.

But what exactly is creative writing and why is it important? Let’s explore the value of creative writing and how to inspire young (or old!) minds to embark on the curious and exciting journey of writing creatively – it’s easier than you think!

What is Creative Writing?

Creative writing, in its simplest form, is writing that goes beyond the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature.

It’s characterized by its emphasis on:

narrative craft
character development
the use of literary devices

From poetry to plays, scripts to sonnets, creative writing covers a wide range of genres . It’s about painting pictures with words, invoking emotions, and bringing ideas to life . It’s about crafting stories that are compelling, engaging, and thought-provoking.

Whether you’re penning a novel or jotting down a journal entry, creative writing encourages you to unleash your imagination and express your thoughts in a unique, artistic way. For a deeper dive into the realm of creative writing, you can visit our article on what is creative writing .

Benefits of Developing Creative Writing Skills

The benefits of creative writing extend beyond the page.

It’s not just about creating captivating stories or crafting beautiful prose. The skills developed through creative writing are invaluable in many aspects of life and work.

1. Creative writing fosters creativity and imagination.

It encourages you to think outside the box, broaden your perspective, and explore new ideas. It also enhances your ability to communicate effectively, as it involves conveying thoughts, emotions, and narratives in a clear and compelling manner.

2. Creative writing aids in improving critical thinking skills.

It prompts you to analyze characters, plotlines, and themes, and make connections between different ideas. This process activates different parts of the mind, drawing on personal experiences, the imagination, logical plot development, and emotional intelligence.

3. Creative writing is also a valuable tool for self-expression and personal growth.

It allows you to explore your feelings, experiences, and observations, providing an outlet for self-reflection and introspection. By both reading and writing about different characters in different situations, readers develop empathy in a gentle but effective way.

4. Creative writing skills can open up a host of career opportunities.

From authors and editors to content creators and copywriters, the demand for creative writers is vast and varied. You can learn more about potential career paths in our article on creative writing jobs and what you can do with a creative writing degree .

In essence, creative writing is more than just an art—it’s a skill, a craft, and a powerful tool for communication and self-expression. Whether you’re teaching creative writing or learning it, understanding its value is the first step towards mastering the art.

The 3 Roles of a Creative Writing Teacher

Amongst the many facets of a creative writing teacher’s role, three vital aspects stand out: inspiring creativity , nurturing talent , and providing constructive criticism . These elements play a significant role in shaping budding writers and fostering their passion for the craft.

1. Inspiring Creativity

The primary function of a creative writing teacher is to inspire creativity.

They must foster an environment that encourages students to think outside the box and explore new possibilities . This includes presenting students with creative writing prompts that challenge their thinking, promoting lively discussions around various topics, and providing opportunities for students to engage in creative writing activities for kids .

Teachers should also expose students to a range of literary genres , styles, and techniques to broaden their understanding and appreciation of the craft. This exposure not only enhances their knowledge but also stimulates their creativity, encouraging them to experiment with different writing styles .

2. Nurturing Talent

Nurturing talent involves recognizing the unique abilities of each student and providing the necessary support and guidance to help them develop these skills. A creative writing teacher needs to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each student and tailor their approach accordingly.

This means:

offering personalized feedback
setting realistic yet challenging goals
providing opportunities for students to showcase their work

Encouraging students to participate in writing competitions or to publish their work can give them a confidence boost and motivate them to improve. Furthermore, teachers should educate students about various creative writing jobs and what you can do with a creative writing degree . This knowledge can inspire students to pursue their passion for writing and explore career opportunities in the field.

3. Providing Constructive Criticism

Providing constructive criticism is a critical aspect of teaching creative writing. It involves assessing students’ work objectively and providing feedback that helps them improve .

Teachers should:

highlight the strengths of the work
address the areas that need improvement
suggest ways to make the piece better

Constructive criticism should be specific, actionable, and encouraging . It’s important to remember that the goal is to help the student improve, not to discourage them. Therefore, teachers need to communicate their feedback in a respectful and supportive manner.

In essence, a teacher’s role in teaching creative writing extends beyond mere instruction. They are mentors who inspire, nurture, and shape the minds of budding writers. By fostering a supportive and stimulating environment, they can help students unlock their creative potential and develop a lifelong love for writing.

3 Techniques for Teaching Creative Writing

When it comes to understanding how to teach creative writing, there are several effective techniques that can help inspire students and foster their writing skills.

1. Encouraging Free Writing Exercises

Free writing is a technique that encourages students to write continuously for a set amount of time without worrying about grammar, punctuation, or topic. This type of exercise can help unleash creativity, as it allows students to freely express their thoughts and ideas without judgment or constraint.

As a teacher, you can set a specific theme or provide creative writing prompts to guide the writing session. Alternatively, you can allow students to write about any topic that comes to mind. The key is to create an environment that encourages creative exploration and expression.

2. Exploring Different Genres

Another effective technique is to expose students to a wide range of writing genres. This can include fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, fantasy, mystery, and more. By exploring different genres, students can discover their unique writing styles and interests. This variety also offers the chance to expand their writing skills and apply them to various writing formats.

To facilitate this exploration, you can assign writing projects in different genres, conduct genre-specific writing workshops, or invite guest speakers who specialize in different genres. You can also encourage students to critically analyze how different authors approach their work.

3. Analyzing Published Works

Analyzing published works is a powerful way to teach creative writing. This technique allows students to learn from established authors by studying their:

writing styles
narrative structures
use of language.

It also provides a practical context for understanding writing concepts and techniques.

As a teacher, you can select diverse pieces of literature for analysis , ranging from classic novels to contemporary short stories. Encourage students to identify elements they admire in these works and discuss how they can incorporate similar techniques into their own writing.

These techniques for teaching creative writing are effective ways to inspire creativity, encourage self-expression, and develop writing skills. As a teacher, your role is crucial in guiding students through their creative journey and helping them realize their potential as writers.

Creative Writing Workshops and Exercises

One effective method on how to teach creative writing is through the use of targeted workshops and exercises. These interactive sessions can stimulate creativity, foster character development , and help in understanding story structures .

Idea Generation Workshops

Idea generation is a crucial aspect of creative writing. It is the starting point that provides a springboard for writers to explore and develop their narratives. Idea generation workshops can be an interactive and fun way to help writers come up with fresh ideas.

Workshops can include brainstorming sessions , where writers are encouraged to think freely and note down all ideas, no matter how unconventional they may seem. Another method is the use of writing prompts , which can serve as a creative spark.

A prompt could be:

even an image

Editor’s Note : Encourage children to create a big scribble on a scrap piece of paper and then look for an image in it (like looking for pictures in the clouds). This can be a great creative writing prompt and students will love sharing their writing with each other! Expect lots of giggles and fun!

Character Development Exercises

Characters are the heart of any story. They drive the narrative and engage the readers. Character development exercises can help writers create well-rounded and relatable characters.

Such exercises can include character questionnaires , where writers answer a series of questions about their characters to gain a deeper understanding of their personalities, backgrounds, and motivations. Role-playing activities can also be useful, allowing writers to step into their characters’ shoes and explore their reactions in different scenarios.

Story Structure Workshops

Understanding story structure is vital for creating a compelling narrative. Story structure workshops can guide writers on how to effectively structure their stories to engage readers from start to finish .

These workshops can cover essential elements of story structures like:

rising action
falling action

In addition to understanding the basics, writers should be encouraged to experiment with different story structures to find what works best for their narrative style. An understanding of story structure can also help in analyzing and learning from published works .

Providing writers with the right tools and techniques, through workshops and exercises, can significantly improve their creative writing skills. It’s important to remember that creativity flourishes with practice and patience .

As a teacher, nurturing this process is one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching creative writing. For more insights and tips on teaching creative writing, continue exploring our articles on creative writing .

Tips to Enhance Creative Writing Skills

The process of teaching creative writing is as much about honing one’s own skills as it is about imparting knowledge to others. Here are some key strategies that can help in enhancing your creative writing abilities and make your teaching methods more effective.

Regular Practice

Like any other skill, creative writing requires regular practice . Foster the habit of writing daily, even if it’s just a few lines. This will help you stay in touch with your creative side and continually improve your writing skills. Encourage your students to do the same.

Introduce them to various creative writing prompts to stimulate their imagination and make their writing practice more engaging.

Reading Widely

Reading is an essential part of becoming a better writer. By reading widely, you expose yourself to a variety of styles, tones, and genres . This not only broadens your literary horizons but also provides a wealth of ideas for your own writing.

Encourage your students to read extensively as well. Analyzing and discussing different works can be an excellent learning exercise and can spark creative ideas .

Exploring Various Writing Styles

The beauty of creative writing lies in its diversity. From poetic verses to gripping narratives, there’s a wide range of styles to explore. Encourage your students to try their hand at different forms of writing. This not only enhances their versatility but also helps them discover their unique voice as a writer.

To help them get started, you can introduce a variety of creative writing activities for kids . These tasks can be tailored to suit different age groups and proficiency levels. Remember, the goal is to foster a love for writing, so keep the activities fun and engaging .

Have Fun Teaching Creative Writing!

Enhancing creative writing skills is a continuous journey. It requires persistence, curiosity, and a willingness to step out of your comfort zone. As a teacher, your role is to guide your students on this journey, providing them with the tools and encouragement they need to flourish as writers – and most of all – enjoy the process!

For more insights on creative writing, be sure to explore our articles on what is creative writing and creative writing jobs and what you can do with a creative writing degree .

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!

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Why the teaching of creative writing matters

Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Bolton

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Simon Holloway lectures in Creative Writing at The University of Bolton

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For the last 30 years or so the rise of creative writing programmes in universities has been met with seemingly unending howls of derision from all quarters. Hanif Kureishi, novelist, screenwriter – and professor of creative writing at Kingston University – described them as a “waste of time”. But universities around the world beg to differ, as the increasing number of courses and students testify.

The recent Sunday Times league tables for universities ranked the quality of teaching in creative writing at The University of Bolton as the best in the country. The programme there also boasts the highest ranking in terms of student experience.

Given that I am the only full-time lecturer in creative writing at Bolton – and also led the programme for two of the three years the recent figures cover – I should be able easily to explain our success, and why our students rate our teaching so highly. I say “should”, because I’m not sure of the answer.

There are easy ways to get students to rate teaching highly. We can tailor the classes to their personal needs and wants, and give them all high marks. Or we can teach them at a lower level than we should so that they feel a greater sense of achievement. But at Bolton we do none of these. So what’s the secret?

The measure of a mark

How you actually go about judging the quality of teaching – particularly with a subject like creative writing – is tricky. There are the normal ways that universities use: peer-assessment, student feedback, the evaluation of staff by professionals who specialise in methods of teaching and learning and staff development programmes. And as Bolton is a teaching intensive, research informed university we do a lot of these things, and I think we do them very well.

But I wonder whether what is being measured or evaluated in these assessments is more the style of the teacher, rather than the content. Most assessors are experts in teaching methods and practices – and it’s unreasonable to expect them to have detailed knowledge of every subject.

As non-specialists they are able to measure the levels of student engagement, of academic challenge, of whether the “learning outcomes” which plague university teaching in creative writing are being met. And if you measure it this way, then it’s quite possible that detractors such as Kureishi are right.

A place for play

Except that the teaching of creative writing, when done well, is about more than the skills and craft and technique, important as these things are. And as the writer and lecturer Liam Murray Bell describes, writers must find and use a consistency of tone, style and voice.

It’s also about encouraging students to play, to move beyond their normal styles and subjects of writing, beyond their use of traditional structural, narrative and poetic forms – and to ask them to see what happens. In this sense university is a place for play . Teacher and game designer Eric Zimmerman has defined play as:

The free space of movement within a more rigid structure. Play exists both because of and also despite the more rigid structures of a system.

If students are not actively encouraged to play then we are simply encouraging them to remain as static as they were when they entered higher education – even if they are more adept at using “writerly” skills and techniques.

The secret of success

To me it seems there is no “secret” to good teaching. You do the basics, and you do them as well as you possibly can. You limit class numbers. You give student-writers the individual attention they crave. You make sure that your teachers are good writers and that your writers are good teachers, so that expertise can be shared effectively.

And you make students read widely. They should read the classics, I suppose, but they should also read the “non-classics” – what many academics see as trash fiction. And they should read their peers and contemporaries too.

Importantly, they should read things such as advertising billboards and street signs, the shapes of buildings, the colour of the pavement, the weather, the look in people’s faces. Writers need to breathe in so that they can breathe out their own individual reactions and responses. At Bolton we spend time reading and breathing, and that helps students find voices and interactions which can blend with the craft of writing to produce work which means something to them.

Very few students will earn a living as a writer. But writing is about more than that, and the ability to communicate effectively is a rare and precious thing. Good teaching should not be measured in the texts which students produce, then, but in the knowledge gained through the actions of writing – knowledge which lasts forever.

In the end, if students enjoy their studies, and believe that they’re gaining skills which are transferable in the workplace and will last them well beyond university, then perhaps that is what they see as ‘good teaching’. And perhaps too they’re the best ones to judge.

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Creativity and Innovation in the Writing Classroom

Learn more about how to teach creativity and innovation along with, and as an important part of, traditional writing and research skills.

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” —Maya Angelou

Creativity is fundamental to the teaching of writing. Although WR 153 focuses specifically on creativity and innovation, all WR courses ask students to approach their reading, viewing, writing, and research in creative ways. One important approach to creativity is “design thinking,” which emphasizes that creativity is a non-linear, iterative process. Design thinking is based on two foundational assumptions:

Everyone can be creative.
Creativity can be taught.

The principles of design thinking can be used in any WR course to teach students that creativity is a process of asking questions, using multiple strategies and approaches in answering those questions, taking risks in conceiving and executing original work, developing and refining ideas in response to feedback, and learning from productive failure. The metacognitive aspects of design thinking invite students to think about their own creative processes and identify factors that promote creativity.

Although WR 153 is structured by the steps of the design process (understand, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, assess/reflect), all WR courses can benefit from incorporating elements of design thinking and an emphasis on creativity and innovation. Approaching writing instruction in this way can:

Increase student engagement by focusing on creative responses to problems that students care about;
Give students a sense of agency as a result of greater choice in what to write and how to write about it;
Encourage taking intellectual risks and reward productive failure as a means of learning;
Help students develop skills that are transferrable to other academic situations and their professional lives; and
Enhance students’ personal lives by allowing them to learn about themselves and their own creative potential.

Principles of Design Thinking

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative approach to creativity that involves between three and seven steps. Although it is based on theories of design practice that go back to the early twentieth century, it has most recently been popularized by the design firm IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, commonly known as the d.school. The process involves understanding the issues involved in a design project, empathizing with the audience for an end product, defining the scope of the project, generating ideas for and creating prototypes of the product, testing and assessing those ideas and prototypes, and revisiting the steps of the design process until a final product is created.

The complete set of seven steps can be applied to the writing process in a WR course:

Understand: Students develop a foundation for their work by exploring issues and approaches relevant to the course topic, as well as previous work in the field.

Empathize: Students practice empathy by demonstrating their awareness and understanding of the audience for whom they write or create.

Define: Based on their observations and insights, students articulate a problem or question that will motivate their work over the course of the semester.

Ideate: Students generate new ideas and possible solutions by challenging assumptions and engaging in a variety of creative activities.

Prototype: Students start to create solutions and implement their ideas into written, digital or other forms in order to capture ideas, but also redefine choices.

Test: Students share drafts with others in order to gain feedback and insight into improving final versions.

Assess/Reflect: Students reflect on and evaluate their peers’ and their own processes and final outcomes.

The steps of the design thinking process are not meant to be followed in a rigid way. They should be flexible and customizable to the particular project: students may need to define, ideate, and prototype multiple times and in various modes/genres before they are ready to create a final draft. The skills students gain in going though these steps should be transferrable to other projects and courses.

Learn more about design thinking:

“What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?” by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang provides an overview of design thinking.
David Kelly of IDEO explains the history of design thinking in “How to Design Breakthrough Inventions,” an interview with 60 Minutes .
“How to Solve Problems Like a Designer,” which includes an interview with Tim Brown of IDEO, explains the basic principles of design thinking.

Understand and Empathize

The first step of the design process asks students to understand not only the course material, but also the resources necessary for their particular project. Since this usually involves additional reading/viewing, the “understand” step is part of the research and information literacy component of WR15X. Assignments that focus on this step may include conducting library or online research, categorizing research material using BEAM/BEAT, and creating annotated bibliographies.

Define, Ideate, and Prototype

Before they begin the process of generating ideas, it is often useful for students to define, at least in a preliminary way, what question or problem their paper/project is addressing. Assignments that help students define their projects may include questionnaires that ask students to state what they intend to work on and why, as well as more formal paper/project proposals.

In the IDEO design process, the goal of ideation is to generate a multitude of ideas without rejecting those that may seem impractical or even silly. Ideas can be rejected later, after a sufficient number of ideas have been generated. The most common ideation assignment involves various forms of brainstorming, often in teams. Ideas should be written down in some way, such as on sticky notes or index cards. To encourage divergent thinking in the brainstorming process, consider posting some fundamental principles in the classroom, such as these from IDEO:

Defer judgment.
Encourage wild ideas.
Stay focused on the topic.
Build on the ideas of others .

In the IDEO design process, prototypes are models that can be easily revised and even discarded if necessary. Prototypes for writing courses might include outlines, storyboards, slide decks, oral or video presentations, and preliminary drafts. Prototypes should be tested and assessed in some way that allows for reconsideration and revision before students turn in their final products.

Learn more about brainstorming and prototyping:

“What is Brainstorming?” by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang provides helpful information and ideas for the ideation step of the design process.
This example of “Brainstorming at IDEO” shows one popular way of brainstorming with sticky notes.

Test and Assess/Reflect

The final steps of the design process, testing and assessing/reflecting, are not meant to be the final steps in completing a student’s paper/project. After testing and assessing a prototype, students will likely need to reconsider and revise their papers/projects, which will take them back to earlier steps—they may need to conduct further research, generate additional ideas, or refine their prototypes. The design process is meant to be iterative, with students returning to steps in the process as needed until they have completed a final draft.

Just as designers test their prototypes, students should test drafts of their papers/projects by sharing them with others. Assignments that focus on this step usually involve workshopping with one or more peers, but testing may also include making an oral or video presentation to the class, meeting with the professor or a writing tutor, or sharing the student’s work with any other reader/viewer capable of providing feedback. Students may also test their papers/projects using techniques such as reverse outlining to assess the strength and clarity of their arguments.

The final step in the design process, assessing the student’s work, may lead back to any earlier step as students come to understand what they still need to work on to complete their papers/projects. This step may also involve the broader metacognitive task of reflecting on the student’s creative process. Assignments that focus on this step may include a variety of reflective exercises, including a final reflection for the course.

A Note on Assessment

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” —Samuel Beckett

Because WR 153 courses can include such a wide range of papers and project, contract grading is recommended. Other WR courses that incorporate creativity and innovation may also wish to use contract grading, either for specific assignments or the course as a whole. More information on contract grading can be found here .

An important component of creativity and innovation is productive failure. We learn to create new things or develop new skills by failing and trying again until we succeed. Productive failure is failure that leads to new knowledge, insight, or innovation. Courses that focus on creativity can encourage productive failure by requiring prototypes that will be reconsidered and revised extensively, asking students to share examples of failure as valuable learning experiences, and assigning reflective work on how students have grown through failure over the course of the semester.

Learn more about productive failure:

Both readings below argue for the importance of productive failure. The Burger article contains specific examples of how to validate and reward productive failure in the classroom.

“Next Time, Fail Better” by Paula M. Krebs, The Chronicle of Higher Education , May 11, 2012.

Why Does It Matter How Creative Writing Is Taught?

First Online: 28 July 2019

Cite this chapter

Zoe Charalambous 4

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture ((PASCC))

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Charalambous provides a comprehensive review of Creative Writing pedagogies to date with the objective of allowing the reader to consider the assumptions behind the Creative Writing courses they have been taught and pointing to the scarce qualitative research about students’ Creative Writing texts and Creative Writing exercises currently in the field. Three distinct strands in the literature of Creative Writing are discussed: Creative Writing in relation to Literature, to the self (or shift of self) and to research. The first section deals with the conceptual bases of Creative Writing, referring to its relationship to Romanticism, New Criticism, Theory and the workshop. Next follows an analytical account of the literary, the therapeutic, the political and the research conceptions of Creative Writing.

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The study of Creative Writing as a subject is interlinked with its scholarship and the ideologies espoused about writing (studies). By “writing ideologies,” I mean here a particular line of logic followed with regard to the function of writing: for example, we might say that our practice is informed by the ideology that writing is an art form that can be used for raising political awareness or that writing is an art that does not have to have a specific purpose.

Interestingly, the concept of ‘creativity accessible to all’ became the symbol for democracy and ‘ capitalist productivity ,’ during the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, in a post-industrial narrative, the ethos of a creative class is an argued ‘force for economic growth’ (Dawson 2005 , p. 46; see also Webb 2012 on a further critique). This aspect of “artistic spirit,” then, by the name of “creativity,” might be perceived both as a mode of social expression and suppression.

The Ancient Greek connotations to ‘mimesis’ are a matter of debate, however.

Attesting to the complex interstices of links in literary theory, New Criticism, which arose in the middle decades of the twentieth century, is connected to Formalism, defined as the study of the literary text concerned with the purposes of the text focusing on form, not external influences (Waugh, 2006 , see pp. 212–22, and pp. 165–75). It arose as a reaction to Romanticist theories of the individual writer and genius, originating from Russian formalism, and afterward Anglo-American New Criticism (ibid.).

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Charalambous, Z. (2019). Why Does It Matter How Creative Writing Is Taught?. In: Writing Fantasy and the Identity of the Writer. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20263-7_2

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The Teachable Talent: Why Creative Writing Can Be Taught

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Why learn creative writing? Truthfully, creative writing is one of the most misunderstood disciplines in the 21st century. When people think of a creative writing course, they often imagine a group of lofty, out-of-touch people who wear argyle sweater vests and have unproductive conversations about abstract concepts.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth: the best writing classes remain engaged with the real world, and the skills gained in a creative writing course apply to nearly every facet of daily life.

If you’re wondering whether it’s worth picking up a course in fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, we have five reasons to learn creative writing. But first, let’s talk about what actually happens in a creative writing course.

The Basics of a Writing Workshop

Whether you’re enrolled in a poetry, fiction, or nonfiction writing class, you can expect the following writing process – at least in a quality writing course like the ones at Writers.com.

Weekly prompts and writing exercises to sharpen the precision and necessity of each word you use.
Constructive critiques from a community of writers who are each growing their writing skills alongside you.
A creative space to explore new ideas, experiment with language, and arrange words in new and exciting ways.
Focused writing instruction from a master of the craft.

The benefits of creative writing come from engaging with the course material, the writing prompts, and the other class members. These elements help you become a better writer, both in creative realms and in everyday life. How? No matter what form of writing, a creative writing class pushes you to connect ideas and create effective narratives using the best words – and that skill translates into real world success.

The Benefits of Creative Writing

1. why learn creative writing: improved self-expression.

Improving your writing skills leads to stronger communication. When you practice finding the right word in a story or poem, you engage the same parts of your brain that are active in everyday writing and speaking. A creative writing course subconsciously turns you into a more effective communicator.

The importance of precise language and self-advocacy translates well into both interpersonal relationships and working environments. Take it from this expert on how writing and self-advocacy results in career and leadership success.

2. Why Learn Creative Writing: Job Success

This brings us to our next point: great writing leads to job success. Of course, your boss probably isn’t expecting you to write emails in the form of a short story or a sonnet – though if they are expecting this, you have a pretty cool boss.

In reality, almost every job requires some sort of written work, whether that’s simple written communication or something more elaborate, like publishing data or marketing materials. In a creative writing class, you practice the style and grammar rules necessary for effective writing, both within the realms of literature and in career-related writing. Sharpening your writing and creativity skills might just land you your next promotion.

3. Why Learn Creative Writing: Improved Thinking Skills

Strong writing leads to strong thinking. No matter what type of writing you pursue, learning how to write is another form of learning how to think.

That might seem like a bold claim, so think about it this way. Without language, our thoughts wouldn’t have form. We might not need language to think “I’m hungry” or “I like cats,” but when it comes to more abstract concepts, language is key. How would you think about things like justice, revenge, or equality without the words to express them?

When you hone in on your ability to find choice, specific words, and when you work on the skills of effective storytelling and rhetoric , you improve your ability to think in general. Good writing yields great thinking!

4. Why Learn Creative Writing: Empathy

Reading and writing both rely on empathy, especially when it comes to being an effective workshop participant. When we read and write stories, we situate ourselves in the shoes of other people; when we read and write poetry, we let language navigate us through emotion.

The importance of creative writing relies on empathy. We practice empathy whenever we listen to another person’s life story, when someone tells us about their day, and when we sit down with a client or work partner. When we write, we practice the ability to listen as well as to speak, making us more effective communicators and more compassionate human beings.

5. Why Learn Creative Writing: It’s Fun!

In case you’re not convinced that a writing course is right for you, let’s clarify one more fact: creative writing is fun. Whether you’re in a fiction writing course, starting a memoir, crafting a poem, or writing for the silver screen, you’re creating new worlds and characters. In the sandbox of literature, you’re in control, and when you invest yourself into the craft of writing, something beautiful emerges.

The Importance of Creative Writing

Simply put, creative writing helps us preserve our humanity. What better medium to explore the human experience?

To learn creative writing, like any art form, requires compassion, contemplation, and curiosity. Writers preserve the world as they observe it in stories and poetry, and they imagine a better world by creating it in their works.

Through the decades, literature has explored society’s profound changes. Literary eons like the Naturalist movement and the Beat poets responded to the increase in Western Industrialization. Confessional poets like Virginia Woolf helped transform poetry into a medium for emotional exploration and excavation. And, genre movements like the cyberpunk writers of science fiction helped popularize the idea of an “information economy.”

Thus, the importance of creative writing lies in its ability to describe the world through an honest and unfiltered lens. Anyone who engages in creative writing, no matter the genre or style, helps us explore the human experience, share new ideas, and advocate for a better society. Whether you write your stories for yourself or share them with a wide audience, creative writing makes the world a better place.

Jobs for Creative Writers

Because creative writing isn’t a STEM discipline, many people don’t think that learning it will help their job prospects. Why learn creative writing if it doesn’t make any money?

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Creative writing skills are much sought after on resumes, since both creativity and the ability to write are soft skills in decline. Additionally, if you’re considering a career change—or ready to start one!—these are some popular jobs for creative writers.

Average Starting Salary: $51,000
Demand: High
Skills needed: creativity, grammar, timeliness

Copywriters help companies put their branding into words. A copywriter might write emails, blogs, website content, or ad copy that encompasses the company’s voice and purpose. Copywriting requires you to write in a mix of styles and forms, flexing your writing muscles in new and exciting ways.

Grant Writer

Average Starting Salary: $50,000
Skills needed: storytelling, research, argumentation

Nonprofits and research facilities rely on local and national grants to fund their projects. Grant writers help secure that funding, writing engaging grants that tell the organization’s story in an engaging, tailored, and convincing way. Creative writers will enjoy the opportunity to tell a meaningful story and create positive community change through this career.

Communications/Public Relations Specialist

Skills needed: creativity, communications, social media

A communications specialist helps drive a company’s image through various social channels. They may help create a positive narrative for their company through blogs, journalist outreach, social media, and other public-facing avenues. Much like copywriting, a PR specialist helps weave an effective story for a company.

Average Starting Salary: $55,000
Demand: Medium/High
Skills needed: creativity, storytelling, organization, self-reliance

The dream job for many writers is to write and sell books. Being a novelist is an admirable career choice—and also requires the most work. Not only do you have to write your stories, but you also have to market yourself in the literary industry and maintain a social presence so that publishers and readers actually read your work. It’s a tough business, but also incredibly rewarding!

Reasons to Learn Creative Writing: Finding a Writing Community

Finally, creative writing communities make the writing struggle worth it. The relationships you foster with other creative writers can last a lifetime, as no other group of people has the same appreciation for the written word. Creative writing communities create transformative experiences and encourage growth in your writing; if there’s one reason to study creative writing craft, it’s the friendships you make in the process.

You don’t need a class to start writing, but it’s never a waste of time to learn the tools of the trade. Creative writing requires the skills that can help you in everyday life, and a creative writing course can help.

At Writers.com, we believe that creative writing can transform both individual lives and the world at large. See the importance of creative writing for yourself: check out what makes our creative writing courses different , then take a look at our upcoming course calendar today.

Sean Glatch

Would like to apply for a course to write a novel.

I’d be happy to help! Please email [email protected] with any questions, and we’ll find the right course for your writing.

[…] Sean. “Why Learn Creative Writing.” writers.com. June 7, 2020. https://writers.com/why-learn-creative-writing . Accessed November 7, […]

[…] And last of all it’s fun! I hope to live my life doing the things I love, with like-minded creative people who I love. I have many exciting things upcoming as I continue with the process of completing my first novel, Les Année Folles, such as publishing to my first magazine, journal, and working on the millions of short story ideas I have stored in my head. Stay tuned! References: Glatch, S. (2020, June 7). WHY LEARN CREATIVE WRITING? Retrieved from Writers.com: https://writers.com/why-learn-creative-writing […]

How Creative Writing Can Increase Students’ Resilience

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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Close Reading

Learning to write by learning to read

Can creative writing be taught?

It’s a reasonable question, but no matter how often I’ve been asked it, I never know quite what to say. Because if what people mean is: Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? then the answer is no. Which may be why the question is so often asked in a skeptical tone implying that, unlike the multiplication tables or the principles of auto mechanics, creativity can’t be transmitted from teacher to student. Imagine Milton enrolling in a graduate program for help with Paradise Lost , or Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he’s a giant bug.

What confuses me is not the sensibleness of the question but the fact that, when addressed to me, it’s being asked of a writer who has taught writing, on and off, for almost twenty years. What would it say about me, my students, and the hours we’ve spent in the classroom if I said that any attempt to teach the writing of fiction is a complete waste of time? I should probably just go ahead and admit that I’ve been committing criminal fraud.

Instead I answer by recalling my own most valuable experience, not as a teacher, but as a student in one of the few fiction workshops I have ever taken. This was in the 1970s, during my brief career as a graduate student in medieval English literature, when I was allowed the indulgence of taking one fiction class. Its generous teacher showed me, among other things, how to line-edit my work. For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

Meanwhile, my classmates were providing me with my first real audience. In that prehistory, before mass photocopying enabled students to distribute manuscripts in advance, we read our work aloud. That year I was beginning what would become my first novel. And what made an important difference to me was the attention I felt in the room as the others listened. I was very encouraged by their eagerness to hear more.

That’s the experience I describe, the answer I give to people who ask about teaching creative writing: A workshop can be useful. A good teacher can show you how to edit your work. The right class can encourage you and form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you.

But that class, as helpful as it was, is not where I learned to write.

Like most—maybe all—writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, from reading books.

Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be?

Though writers have learned from the masters in a formal, methodical way—Harry Crews has described taking apart a Graham Greene novel to see how many chapters it contained, how much time it covered, how Greene handled pacing, tone, and point of view—the truth is that this sort of education more often involves a kind of osmosis. After I’ve written an essay in which I’ve quoted at length from great writers, so that I’ve had to copy out long passages of their work, I’ve noticed that my own work becomes, however briefly, just a little more fluent.

In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and reread the authors I most loved. I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue. And as I wrote, I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls “putting every word on trial for its life”: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma and putting the comma back in.

I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made. And though I can’t recall every source of inspiration and instruction, I can remember the novels and stories that seemed to me revelations: wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks, courses of private lessons in the art of fiction.

When I was a high school junior, our English teacher assigned a term paper on the theme of blindness in Oedipus Rex and King Lear . We were supposed to go through the two tragedies and circle every reference to eyes, light, darkness, and vision, then draw some conclusion on which we would base our final essay.

The exercise seemed to us dull, mechanical. We felt we were way beyond it. All of us knew that blindness played a starring role in both dramas.

Still, we liked our English teacher, and we wanted to please him. And searching for every relevant word turned out to have an enjoyable treasure-hunt aspect, a Where’s Waldo detective thrill. Once we started looking for eyes, we found them everywhere, glinting at us, winking from every page.

Long before the blinding of Oedipus or Gloucester, the language of vision and its opposite was preparing us, consciously or unconsciously, for those violent mutilations. It asked us to consider what it meant to be clear-sighted or obtuse, short-sighted or prescient, to heed the signs and warnings, to see or deny what was right in front of one’s eyes. Teiresias, Oedipus, Goneril, Kent—all of them could be defined by the sincerity or falseness with which they mused or ranted on the subject of literal or metaphorical blindness.

Tracing those patterns and making those connections was fun. Like cracking a code that the playwright had embedded in the text, a riddle that existed just for me to decipher. I felt as if I were engaged in some intimate communication with the writer, as if the ghosts of Sophocles and Shakespeare had been waiting patiently all those centuries for a bookish sixteen-year-old to come along and find them.

I believed that I was learning to read in a whole new way. But this was only partly true. Because in fact I was merely relearning to read in an old way that I had learned, but forgotten.

We all begin as close readers. Even before we learn to read, the process of being read aloud to, and of listening, is one in which we are taking in one word after another, one phrase at a time, in which we are paying attention to whatever each word or phrase is transmitting. Word by word is how we learn to hear and then read, which seems only fitting, because that is how the books we are reading were written in the first place.

The more we read, the faster we can perform that magic trick of seeing how the letters have been combined into words that have meaning. The more we read, the more we comprehend, the more likely we are to discover new ways to read, each one tailored to the reason why we are reading a particular book.

At first, the thrill of our own brand-new expertise is all we ask or expect from Dick and Jane . But soon we begin to ask what else those marks on the page can give us. We begin to want information, entertainment, invention, even truth and beauty. We concentrate, we skim, we skip words, put down the book and daydream, start over, and reread. We finish a book and return to it years later to see what we might have missed, or the ways in which time and age have affected our understanding.

As a child, I was drawn to the works of the great escapist children’s writers. Especially if I could return to my own bed in time to turn off the lights, I liked trading my familiar world for the London of the four children whose nanny parachuted into their lives on her umbrella and who turned the most routine shopping trip into a magical outing. I would have gladly followed the white rabbit down into the rabbit hole and had tea with the Mad Hatter. I loved novels in which children stepped through portals—a garden, a wardrobe—into an alternate universe.

Children love the imagination, with its kaleidoscopic possibilities and its protest against the way that children are always being told exactly what’s true and false, what’s real and what’s illusion. Perhaps my taste in reading had something to do with the limitations I was discovering, day by day: the brick walls of time and space, science and probability, to say nothing of whatever messages I was picking up from the culture. I liked novels with plucky heroines like Pippi Longstocking, the astringent Jane Eyre, and the daughters in Little Women , girls whose resourcefulness and intelligence don’t automatically exclude them from the pleasures of male attention.

Each word of these novels was a yellow brick in the road to Oz. Some chapters I read and reread so as to repeat the dependable, out-of-body sensation of being somewhere else . I read addictively, constantly. On one family vacation my father pleaded with me to close my book long enough to look at the Grand Canyon. I borrowed stacks of books from the public library: novels, biographies, history, anything that looked even remotely engaging.

Along with pre-adolescence came a more pressing desire for escape. I read more widely, more indiscriminately, and mostly with an interest in how far a book could take me from my life and how long it could keep me there. Gone With the Wind . Pearl Buck. Edna Ferber. Fat James Michener best-sellers with a dash of history sprinkled in to cool down the steamy love scenes between the Hawaiian girls and the missionaries, the geishas and the GIs. I also appreciated these books for the often misleading nuggets of information they provided about sex in that innocent era, the 1950s. I turned the pages of these page-turners as fast as I could. Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.

I was fortunate to have good teachers, and friends who were also readers. The books I read became more challenging, better written, more substantial. Steinbeck, Camus. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Twain, Salinger, Anne Frank. Little beatniks, my friends and I were passionate fans of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. We read Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and the proto-hippie classics of Herman Hesse, Carlos Castenada— Mary Poppins for people who thought they’d outgrown the flying nanny. I must have been vaguely aware of the power of language, but only dimly, and only as it applied to whatever effect the book was having on me.

All of that changed with every mark I made on the pages of King Lear and Oedipus Rex . I still have my old copy of Sophocles, heavily underlined, covered with sweet, embarrassing notes-to-self (“irony?” “recognition of fate?”) written in my rounded, heartbreakingly neat, schoolgirl print. Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering a handwriting that you know was once yours, but that now seems only dimly familiar, can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

Focusing on language proved to be a practical skill, useful the way sight-reading with ease can come in handy for a musician. My high school English teacher had only recently graduated from a college where his own English professors taught what was called New Criticism, a school of thought that favored reading what was on the page with only passing reference to the biography of the writer or the period in which the text was written. Luckily for me, that approach to literature was still in fashion when I graduated and went on to college. At my university the faculty included a well-known professor and critic whose belief in close reading trickled down and influenced the entire humanities program. In French class we spent an hour each Friday afternoon working our way from The Song of Roland to Sartre, paragraph by paragraph, focusing on small sections for what was called the explication de texte .

On many occasions, of course, I had to skim as rapidly as I could to get through those survey courses that gave us two weeks to finish Don Quixote , ten days for War and Peace —courses designed to produce college graduates who could say they’d read the classics. By then I knew enough to regret having to read those books that way. And I promised myself that I would revisit them as soon as I could give them the time and attention they deserved.

Only once did my passion for reading steer me in the wrong direction, and that was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I had trouble understanding what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading “texts” in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer actually wrote.

I left graduate school and became a writer. I wrote my first novel in India, in Bombay, where I read as omnivorously as I had as a child, rereading classics that I borrowed from the old-fashioned, musty, beautiful university library that seemed to have acquired almost nothing written after 1920. Afraid of running out of books, I decided to slow myself down by reading Proust in French.

Reading a masterpiece in a language for which you need a dictionary is in itself a course in reading word by word. And as I puzzled out the gorgeous, labyrinthine sentences, I discovered how reading a masterpiece can make you want to write one.

A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction. But the relationship between reading and writing is rarely so clear-cut, and in fact my first novel could hardly have been less Proustian.

More often the connection has to do with whatever mysterious promptings make you want to write. It’s like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your own room, trying out a few steps. I often think of learning to write by reading as something like the way I first began to read. I had a few picture books I’d memorized and pretended I could read, as a sort of party trick that I did repeatedly for my parents, who were also pretending—in their case, to be amused. I never knew exactly when I crossed the line from pretending to actually being able, but that was how it happened.

Not long ago a friend told me that her students complained that reading masterpieces made them feel stupid. But I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter. I’ve also heard fellow writers say that they cannot read while working on a book of their own, for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I’ve always hoped they would influence me, and I wonder if I would have taken so happily to being a writer if it meant that I couldn’t read during the years I might need to complete a novel.

To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy I have found is to read the work of a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.

A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Can Creativity Be Taught?

August 27, 2014 • 14 min read.

Can creativity be fostered in the workplace, and if so, how can it be managed?

Human Resources

The usual image of how creativity happens: A composer inadvertently hears a melody rising from a babbling brook, or an ad agency creative director crumples page after page of aborted ideas ripped from the typewriter until the right one lands. But creativity, some claim, can come from a far less elusive muse — from a structured process, one that opens up the ranks of the creative to a wider swath than the Steve Jobs, Jonas Salks and Franz Schuberts of the universe.

“I think there are individual differences in our propensity to be creative,” says Wharton marketing professor Rom Schrift, “but having said that, it’s like a muscle. If you train yourself, and there are different methods for doing this, you can become more creative. There are individual differences in people, but I would argue that it is also something that can be developed, and therefore, taught.”

Wharton marketing professor Jerry (Yoram) Wind has in fact taught a course in creativity at Wharton for years, and says that “in any population, basically the distribution of creativity follows the normal curve. At the absolute extreme you have Einstein and Picasso, and you don’t have to teach them — they are the geniuses. Nearly everyone else in the distribution, and the type of people you would deal with at leading universities and companies, can learn creativity.”

Does creativity need the right conditions to flourish? Jennifer Mueller, a management professor at the University of San Diego and former Wharton professor who has researched creativity, sees evidence that it does. “Every theorist that exists today on the planet will tell you creativity is an ability that ranges in the population, and I think in a given context, creativity can be shut off — or turned on, if the environment supports creativity.”

John Maeda, former president of Rhode Island School of Design, believes creativity can be taught — though he qualifies that belief. “I wouldn’t say it can be taught in the normal sense of adding knowledge and wisdom to someone. I would say instead it can be re-kindled in people — all children are creative. They just lose their capability to be creative by growing up,” notes Maeda, now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and chair of eBay’s design advisory board. Creativity in a child, he adds, “is the ability to diverge. In a productive adult, it’s the ability to diverge and converge, with emphasis on the converging.”

Anyone called upon to tap creativity has his or her own method, but photorealist painter and photographer Chuck Close suggests the matter is actually less mysterious than the muse-chasers might believe. “Inspiration,” he has said, “is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

Working with Boxes, Inside and Out

In whatever the sector or discipline — product development, exploitation of networks, music or education — creativity shares certain traits, experts say. Jacob Goldenberg, professor of marketing at the Arison School of Business at the IDC Herzliya in Israel, says creativity has more than 200 definitions in the literature. “However, if you ask people to grade ideas, the agreement is very high,” he notes. “This means that even if it is difficult to define creativity, it is easy to identify it. One of the reasons why it is difficult to define is the fact that creativity exists in many different domains.” Still, he says: “Most creative ideas share a common structure of being highly original and at the same time highly useful.”

“If you train yourself, and there are different methods for doing this, you can become more creative.” — Rom Schrift

In Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results , Goldenberg and co-author Drew Boyd make the case that all inventive solutions share certain common patterns. Working within parameters, rather than through free-associative brainstorming, leads to greater creativity, the book says. This method, called Systematic Inventive Thinking, has found application at Procter & Gamble and SAP, among others. “We shouldn’t confuse innovation and creativity,” Goldenberg says. “Creativity refers to the idea, not to the system [product, service, process, etc.] that was built around it. For example, online banking is a great innovation, but the idea [of using the Internet to replace the branch] was not creative. It was expected years before it was implemented.”

Similarly, he adds, “cell phone technology is one of the most innovative developments, but the need was defined years before, and we just waited for the technology. In my view, a creative idea that is still changing our lives is the concept of letting users develop the software they need on a platform [that a particular] firm sells: the apps concept. This means that consumers develop and determine the value of the smartphone and tablets.”

This example, Goldenberg says, fits one of the templates for creativity described in Inside the Box : “Where you subtract one of the resources” — such as engineers and marketers — “and replace them with a resource that exists inside a closure (box), in this case your consumers.”

Schrift has used a different template from Inside the Box in his classes: The idea of building a matrix of characteristics of two unrelated products, and creating new dependencies. Such examples, he says, include an air freshener that changes scent every 10 minutes (remixing the concepts of time and fragrance), or a gym with a fee that is structured to increase if you don’t work out enough (fitness and incentive). “A lot of the time, looking for a new dependency gives you a creative idea,” Schrift notes.

Wind says that in whatever discipline, creativity is primarily “an ability to challenge the status quo and come up with new and better solutions. In art, the most creative figures are those who came up with new perspectives — Brancusi, who broke away from Rodin; Picasso, who broke away from the Impressionists; Duchamp, who took readymades [ordinary manufactured objects, a porcelain urinal being the most infamous] and said, ‘this is art.’ Anyone who primarily breaks the current status quo and creates a new dimension — the first person to think about understanding medicine in terms of a person’s DNA; in advertising it is [William] Bernbach, who came up with the slogan for Volkswagen, [or] Frank Gehry, who basically broke the tradition of the four-wall museum and came up with a dramatically different structure in Bilbao.”

Making Space for the Troublemakers

Corporate culture is no less hungry for creative leaders. Or is it? Any company would eagerly embrace the next iPhone, but it is far from clear that companies tolerate the cost of doing business when it comes to generating creativity. In an IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries in 33 industries released in 2010, creativity was cited as the most important organization-wide trait required for navigating the business environment. And yet, as Mueller found in a 2010 study published in Psychological Science , people often espouse creativity as an abstract goal, but then, when presented with it, spurn it. In The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas , co-authored by Mueller with Shimul Melwani and Jack A. Goncalo, experiments suggest that the desire for creativity is often overshadowed by a need to reduce uncertainty — even as subjects rate their attitudes toward creativity as positive. Moreover, this bias contributes toward people being less able to even recognize creativity.

Additional research underway by Mueller suggests that creative personalities are often dismissed as trouble. “They are seen as difficult, not as efficient or able to present their ideas with focus, and are also seen as naïve,” she says. “People, either rightly or wrongly, have this stereotype that creative people are high maintenance and emotionally volatile. And where it gets problematic, the moment the organization suffers, is when creative people are discounted for not being seen as team players. And that is the dark side of being tagged as a creative type.” And yet: “Why would you want somebody who doesn’t produce creative work [just because] they are less trouble to manage?”

“The stereotype is that creativity just has to be unleashed, and it’s not true. It has to be tightly managed. You have to know how to foster it.” –Jennifer Mueller

The bias against creativity even extends to the classroom, Mueller says. “There is the reality that any teacher needs a rubric in order to give a good grade, and creativity in being new or different creates uncertainty in the mind of the students about whether it fits the answer the teacher is looking for,” she notes. “Teachers think of creative students as disobedient. There is lots of focus on reducing ambiguity, especially in college where the student is your customer. You now have to answer to what the customer wants, and what the customer wants is to get a good grade — and the best way to get a good grade is to reduce ambiguity.”

Americans are not showing the kind of creative expression that might otherwise be bubbling away — in college, but also grade school. Scores from the widely administered Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking have been declining since 1990 among the nation’s youngest students, according to a study by College of William & Mary assistant professor Kyung-Hee Kim of nearly 300,000 test scores between 1968 and 2008. “The decline is steady and persistent, from 1990 to present, and ranges across the various components tested by the TTCT,” the study finds. “The decline begins in young children, which is especially concerning as it stunts abilities which are supposed to mature over a lifetime.”

“There is an understanding that this is happening in China and India as well,” Mueller adds, “and the fact that it is happening in the U.S. is troubling people, but I don’t think they know what to do about it. I, myself, have tried to do stuff students don’t like, and they will hate you. If student ratings aren’t high, then you’re not going to get tenure.”

One environment Mueller admires for its healthy creative process is IDEO, the multinational design consulting firm. Creativity is begun in brainstorming sessions — which is certainly not novel — but it is then shepherded through a more structured route. “They have their initial session, called ‘deep dive,’ and that session is very short. Then they break the problem apart by assigning people specific pieces. Then there is a focus session, so there is chaos and focus, and interplay between these two things is always going on. There is a person whose full responsibility is to structure it, and I think in that process you learn, you ask the customer certain things, you tweak it some more,” Mueller notes. “The stereotype is that creativity just has to be unleashed, and it’s not true. It has to be tightly managed. You have to know how to foster it.”

Creative Safe Haven

The willingness to “foster it” is a challenge in many corporate environments. According to Schrift, one way to manage creative forces is to manage talent wisely. “Maybe we don’t want creative people in certain positions,” he says. “One of the obstacles for innovation is not necessarily the process of coming up with the idea, but is more cultural — a lot of companies do not incentivize employees to do things differently.” Sometimes, workers are evaluated on a relatively short cycle, and “when you are innovating, that involves a lot of failure.”

“Mind-wandering seems to be essential to the creative process, and I don’t think a lot of businesses are aware of that fact.” — Scott Barry Kaufman

Changes in corporate culture, such as giving workers permission to question authority, can be efficacious, says Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of the Imagination Institute at Penn’s Positive Psychology Center . The salient question isn’t whether creativity can be taught, notes Kaufman, since everyone is creative, but rather demonstrating faith in the creativity of workers. “I am not talking about rebelliousness, but giving people time for constructive internal reflection and even daydreaming. A lot of research is suggesting that the more that you demand people’s external attention, the less chance you are allowing them to dip into the default mode where daydreams and reflection happen — and lot of great ideas are not going to come from the brute force of work but from personal life experience. Mind-wandering seems to be essential to the creative process, and I don’t think a lot of businesses are aware of that fact.”

Neither are most multitaskers — which means, these days, most people. In a recent New York Times op-ed piece , neuroscientist and musician Daniel J. Levitin made the case that tweeting, Facebooking and emailing your way through the day saps creativity. “Daydreaming leads to creativity, and creative activities teach us agency, the ability to change the world, to mold it to our liking, to have a positive effect on our environment,” wrote Levitin, author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload . In other words, we need time to hear the music in a babbling brook.

Measuring Creative Success

Is commercial viability the only gauge of creativity’s success? Wind points out that there are innovations in the arts whose value is best judged by other artists, and Goldenberg says peer expertise is sometimes required. “The only way to measure creativity is to use judges who grade many cases including the idea you want to grade,” notes Goldenberg. “This is a complex process and usually done in a research setup and not in practice. This means that a creative person repeats his or her success, and this is not an after-the-fact judgment of one random event.”

But Wind points out that in general, newness and usefulness are the main indicators of acts of great creativity. “I would take the extreme position that creativity has to have value to be successful,” he says. “You can come up with a lot of ideas, but if you are not adding value to the stakeholders, then they are not creative ideas.”

Airbnb certainly meets the criterion of adding value to stakeholders, and, according to Maeda of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the self-listing lodging clearinghouse stands an example of spectacularly creative thinking. “There are more people staying in Airbnb lodgings on any given night than all Hilton hotels combined,” Maeda notes of the company founded by the young and now-wealthy trio of Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia. “It showed plasticity in their creativity that went beyond their design training in making physical goods. They recognized the excess capacity available in everyone’s home, and they designed a scalable service to enable anyone to access that capacity. Their successful design for a service solved the trust barriers inherent to a peer-to-peer economy.”

Wind cites Uber as his example. “Uber is a truly creative approach as opposed to the traditional taxi,” he says. “How wonderful it is that you could leverage the network idea and create a new business.” The Uber model is now being emulated and adapted to other sectors — Ubers for laundry, snowplows and even wine delivery. But while imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, Uber’s success is actually a cue for the genuinely creative types to move on to other ideas. Says Wind: “The first one [to establish the model] is the example of creativity. The secondary companies following Uber — they are not.”

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What's creative about creative writing?

This page was published over 1 year ago. Please be aware that due to the passage of time, the information provided on this page may be out of date or otherwise inaccurate, and any views or opinions expressed may no longer be relevant. Some technical elements such as audio-visual and interactive media may no longer work. For more detail, see how we deal with older content .

This collection of interviews with writers, literary agents, educators and translators looks at what creativity means in the context of ‘creative writing’. We hear leading figures from the world of literature consider questions such as: Can creativity be taught? In what ways is translation creative? What part do culture and collaboration play in the creative process?

Andrew Cowan on creativity and creative writing

Toby litt on genre and creative writing.

Sally O'Reilly & Emma Darwin on the relationship between history and historical fiction
Jutta Schettler, Jaime Bulloch & Jeremy Munday on the art and craft of translation

Xiaolu Guo on cultural translation and more

Jonny Geller on the role of the literary agent

Andrew Cowan, novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, discusses the notion of creativity, and how it’s taught in creative writing workshops.

Read a transcript of Andrew Cowan's insights

The writer Toby Litt discusses the short story, how creativity relates to genre and language, and uses of the term ‘creative writing’.

Read a transcript of Toby Litt's discussion

Sally O'Reilly & Emma Darwin on the relationship between history and historical fiction

Novelists Sally O’Reilly and Emma Darwin discuss the relationship between historical ‘truth’ and historical ‘fiction’.

Read a transcript of this conversation

Jutta Schettler, Jaime Bulloch & Jeremy Munday on the art and craft of translation

Professor Jeremy Munday, and professional translators Jutta Schettler and Jamie Bulloch talk about creativity in translation.

Jeremy Munday, Jutta Schettler and Jamie Bulloch

Read a transcript of these insights

The novelist Xiaolu Guo discusses the writing process and issues of cultural translation.

Read a transcript of this piece

Jonny Geller on the role of the literary agent

Jonny Geller, Chief Executive of the literary agency Curtis Brown, discusses the relationship between creativity and commerce in publishing.

Find out more about literature, writing and creativity

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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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Can Writing Be Taught?
Rivka Galchen and Zoë Heller discuss whether writing can be taught. ... having to do with the efficacy of creative writing courses and whether they foster false hope in students without literary ...
Why Teach Creative Writing? Examining the Challenges of Its Pedagogies
Francis Gilbert is a Lecturer in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Head of MA Education Programmes and the MA in Creative Writing and Education as well as being course leader for PGCE English. He has taught creative writing for many years and has published novels, memoirs, social polemics and educational guides. Before becoming an academic, he worked for a quarter of a ...
How to Teach Creative Writing
We've outlined a seven-step method that will scaffold your students through each phase of the creative process from idea generation through to final edits. 7. Create inspiring and original prompts. Use the following formats to generate prompts that get students inspired: personal memories ("Write about a person who taught you an important ...
Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught?
Revised and updated throughout, this 10th-anniversary edition of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? is a significantly expanded guide to key issues and practices in creative writing teaching today.Challenging the myths of creative writing teaching, experienced and up-and-coming teachers explore what works in the classroom and workshop and what does not.
Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught?
Revised and updated throughout, this 10th-anniversary edition of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? is a significantly expanded guide to key issues and practices in creative writing teaching today. Challenging the myths of creative writing teaching, experienced and up-and-coming teachers explore what works in the classroom and workshop and ...
Inspiring Ink: Expert Tips on How to Teach Creative Writing
1. Creative writing fosters creativity and imagination. It encourages you to think outside the box, broaden your perspective, and explore new ideas. It also enhances your ability to communicate effectively, as it involves conveying thoughts, emotions, and narratives in a clear and compelling manner. 2.
Why the teaching of creative writing matters
The recent Sunday Times league tables for universities ranked the quality of teaching in creative writing at The University of Bolton as the best in the country. The programme there also boasts ...
PDF 7 Creative Writing: Can It Be Taught?
Creative Writing: Can It Be Taught? 137 process of comment and discussion and invariable argument and sometimes drastic disagreement and occasional consensus of either censure or praise, both writer and discussants and instruc tor (so-called) are really being taught all they will ever be taught: exactly as much as they want to learn.
Critical-Creative Literacy and Creative Writing Pedagogy
ature can benefit creative writing students, it offers inroads for how creative ... was the long-standing skepticism about whether creative writing could be taught. What Mayers calls the "institutional-conventional wisdom" of creative 52 glenn clifton university of toronto quarterly, volume 91, number 1, winter 2022 ...
Can Creative Writing Be Taught?
When someone asks, "Can creative writing be taught?" the. questioner is usually a self-made writer or a critic, like John W. Aldridge who in the current issue ofAmerican Scholar ("The New American Assembly-Line Fiction/An Empty Blue Cen. ter") blames the contemporary low estate of literature on the safety and homogenization of writers' workshops.
Can creative writing really be taught?: New Writing: Vol 15, No 1
When Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? was first published 10 years ago, creative writing studies was in its infancy. As a landmark volume, it has been referenced ever since. Scholars of creat...
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the more you have.". —Maya Angelou. Creativity is fundamental to the teaching of writing. Although WR 153 focuses specifically on creativity and innovation, all WR courses ask students to approach their reading, viewing, writing, and research in creative ways. One important approach to creativity is "design thinking," which emphasizes ...
Why Does It Matter How Creative Writing Is Taught?
28) explains that pedagogical strategies in Creative Writing include: 'generative techniques to stimulate creativity or to produce material,' for example, automatic writing. 'exercises in form to develop technical proficiency,' for example, writing in genres, for instance, the form of a sonnet.
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English teaching could be updated and refined for teachers of creative writing. In the third section, I empirically test my ideas and illustrate how my reinterpretation of the Cox Report played out when I taught my Masters' creative writing students. Finally, in my conclusion, I sum up the different reasons why we might teach creative writing.
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The Benefits of Creative Writing. 1. Why Learn Creative Writing: Improved Self-Expression. Improving your writing skills leads to stronger communication. When you practice finding the right word in a story or poem, you engage the same parts of your brain that are active in everyday writing and speaking.
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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.
Close Reading
That's the experience I describe, the answer I give to people who ask about teaching creative writing: A workshop can be useful. A good teacher can show you how to edit your work. The right ...
Changing How Writing Is Taught
Making writing a part of reading instruction further enhances how well students read ( Graham, Liu, Aitken, et al., 2018 ). In essence, students are unlikely to maximize their growth in other school subjects if writing is notably absent. Writing is equally important to students' future success.
Can Creativity Be Taught?
The salient question isn't whether creativity can be taught, notes Kaufman, since everyone is creative, but rather demonstrating faith in the creativity of workers.
What's creative about creative writing?
Andrew Cowan on creativity and creative writing. Andrew Cowan, novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, discusses the notion of creativity, and how it's taught in creative writing workshops. Andew Cowan. Read a transcript of Andrew Cowan's insights.
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Synonymous with the word potential, talent is defined as a natural ability or skill. Just as most people can read a book, do basic mathematics and write sentences, writing is a skill most educated ...
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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 ...

Can Writing Be Taught?

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Inspiring Ink: Expert Tips on How to Teach Creative Writing

What is Creative Writing?

Benefits of Developing Creative Writing Skills

The 3 Roles of a Creative Writing Teacher

1. Inspiring Creativity

2. Nurturing Talent

3. Providing Constructive Criticism

3 Techniques for Teaching Creative Writing

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2. Exploring Different Genres

3. Analyzing Published Works

Creative Writing Workshops and Exercises

Idea Generation Workshops

Character Development Exercises

Story Structure Workshops

Tips to Enhance Creative Writing Skills

Regular Practice

Reading Widely

Exploring Various Writing Styles

Have Fun Teaching Creative Writing!

Brooks Manley

Enriching Creative Writing Activities for Kids

How to Journal Daily: Making Journaling a Habit

Why the teaching of creative writing matters

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The Teachable Talent: Why Creative Writing Can Be Taught

The Basics of a Writing Workshop

The Benefits of Creative Writing

2. Why Learn Creative Writing: Job Success

3. Why Learn Creative Writing: Improved Thinking Skills

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