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 and what the implications are, particularly when, as I think is the case here, the actual classroom practice hasn't varied much: there is as much creative writing going on in schools now as there ever was. Asking such questions can help us to break open the boxes we're currently thinking in, and move through to a new and richer conception of what the subject might be.


You'll notice too that a number of times through what I am saying here, my strategy is to try to break down some of the binary oppositions that structure our thinking. It's a simple version of a deconstructive strategy: I try to show that the opposition is not absolute, but the two terms are involved in each other. I think this too is useful in breaking us out of constraining boxes. However, I also think this collapsing of opposites can be done so easily because writing is an art form, and, as I've argued elsewhere, it's of the nature of the aesthetic to hold in tension what might be binary opposites in other domains. We'll return to this notion of writing as an art form a couple of times.

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