What are we creating in creative writing?
Before trying to answer the question in my title, I want to say something about why I thought it was worth asking the question in the first place? Creative Writing is something that happens in English and literacy classes right through schooling, from kids in prep making up a story to Year 12 students producing a Writing Folio, and yet, there is not currently a lot that is written about it, at least in a theoretical way. There are books that give ideas for creative writing classes , and the odd article in the journals, usually descriptive of practice, but it’s not something that is talked about very much at all. Certainly, after the furore of the process/genre debates in the eighties, the nineties on the whole were remarkably silent on the matter of creative writing , and that seems to be continuing into the new century. Now when there is this kind of shift in the questions people are asking, what in a subject they think is worth talking about, it's always interesting to ask why ...