Wikipedia Deep Dive

Creative writing

12 min read

The Strange Place Where Art Meets Academia

Here's something remarkable that happened in the twentieth century: writers were finally welcomed into universities. For most of human history, the people who created literature and the people who studied it occupied completely different worlds. Scholars dissected novels; novelists wrote them. The two rarely met, and when they did, it was often awkward.

Then everything changed.

In 1970, two British novelists named Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson did something unprecedented at the University of East Anglia in England. They created the first formal creative writing program in the United Kingdom, offering a Master of Arts degree that would teach students not just to analyze literature, but to make it.

As one observer put it at the time: "For the first time in the sad and enchanting history of literature, for the first time in the glorious and dreadful history of the world, the writer was welcome in the academic place. If the mind could be honored there, why not the imagination?"

What Makes Writing "Creative"?

The term itself might seem redundant. Isn't all writing creative to some degree? The answer depends on what we mean by the word.

Creative writing refers to any writing that ventures beyond the conventional boundaries of professional, journalistic, academic, or technical writing. What distinguishes it is an emphasis on craft and technique—things like narrative structure, character development, literary devices, and the musical qualities of language itself.

This encompasses an enormous range of work. Novels. Short stories. Poetry. Memoirs. Even some journalism, when it breaks from the straightforward reporting of facts to tell stories in more artful ways. Screenwriting and playwriting belong to this family too, though they're often taught in separate departments because of their close ties to film and theater production.

The key distinction lies in purpose and method. Academic writing follows rules: cite your sources, make your thesis clear, support your arguments with evidence. Technical writing prioritizes clarity and precision above all else. Journalism adheres to conventions of objectivity and the inverted pyramid structure, where the most important information comes first.

Creative writing inverts these priorities. Self-expression matters more than adherence to rules. Voice—that elusive quality that makes one writer's sentences sound different from another's—becomes paramount. The goal isn't necessarily to inform or persuade. It's to create an experience, to make readers feel something, to capture some truth about human existence that can't be conveyed through straightforward exposition.

The Workshop Model

Walk into almost any creative writing class at any university in the English-speaking world, and you'll encounter something called the workshop. This is the dominant method for teaching creative writing, and it works like this:

A student submits an original piece of writing—a short story, a poem, a chapter of a novel. Copies go out to everyone in the class. Then the group gathers to discuss the work while the author sits in silence, listening.

The silence is crucial. It forces the writer to hear how their words land without being able to explain or defend their intentions. Your story might be crystal clear in your own head, but if your readers are confused, that confusion is real data. The workshop teaches writers to separate what they meant to put on the page from what actually ended up there.

Beyond the workshop itself, creative writing programs teach a range of skills: how to develop ideas, how to structure narratives, how to edit ruthlessly, how to overcome that peculiar paralysis known as writer's block. Students study literary techniques and genres. They read voraciously. And they write. Constantly.

The list of writers who emerged from these programs reads like a roster of contemporary literature's brightest stars. Michael Chabon, whose novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" won the Pulitzer Prize. Kazuo Ishiguro, the British-Japanese author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ian McEwan, master of psychological suspense. Rose Tremain, Kevin Brockmeier, David Benioff. Television showrunner Darren Star, who created "Sex and the City." Peter Farrelly, who would go on to direct films like "Green Book."

The Eternal Debate: Can Writing Be Taught?

Not everyone believes in the enterprise.

Kay Boyle directed the creative writing program at San Francisco State University for sixteen years. You might expect someone in her position to be a fierce advocate for creative writing education. Instead, she declared that "all creative-writing programs ought to be abolished by law."

The sentiment echoes through generations of writers and critics. Some argue that writing is an innate gift, like having perfect pitch in music. You either have it or you don't, and no amount of instruction will make the difference. Others suggest that while technique can be taught, the deeper qualities that distinguish great writing—original vision, emotional depth, a distinctive voice—cannot be transmitted in a classroom.

There's also a more pointed critique emerging from contemporary scholars. They argue that traditional creative writing pedagogy—with its emphasis on daily writing requirements and workshop attendance—discriminates against students with disabilities. If you have a chronic illness that makes consistent daily practice impossible, or mental health challenges that interfere with group critique sessions, or neurodivergent traits that make conventional writing advice counterproductive, the standard creative writing curriculum may be designed to exclude you.

Scholar Caleb González has gone further, arguing that the entire Western literary canon underlying creative writing education is "historically rooted and linked to exclusion and structural racism."

Defenders of creative writing programs respond with pragmatic arguments. Yes, perhaps certain ineffable qualities can't be taught. But craft certainly can be. Understanding how narrative structure works, how to develop compelling characters, how to create tension and release—these are learnable skills. Even if programs can't manufacture genius, they can help talented writers develop their abilities more quickly and avoid common mistakes.

As one advocate put it: "To say that the creative has no part in education is to argue that a university is not universal."

Beyond the Ivory Tower

Something interesting happened in American prisons in the late 1960s. Following the prisoner rights movement—galvanized by events like the 1971 Attica Prison uprising in New York, where forty-three people died—correctional facilities began introducing creative writing programs.

The logic was straightforward: incarcerated people need productive outlets. Writing offers a way to process difficult experiences, develop marketable skills, and build the kind of self-reflection necessary for rehabilitation. It costs relatively little, requires minimal equipment, and can be done in almost any setting.

The Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors and Novelists—an organization known by its acronym PEN—became one of the most significant forces behind this movement. In 1971, PEN established the Prison Writing Committee specifically to advocate for and support creative writing programs behind bars. They improved prison libraries, recruited volunteer teachers, persuaded established authors to host workshops, and created an annual literary competition for incarcerated writers.

The results have been striking. One California study of prison arts programs found that participation in creative writing increased emotional control and decreased disciplinary infractions. Inmates reported improved mental health, better relationships with family members, and a more positive facility environment overall. Writing skills developed in these programs transferred to other academic areas.

Perhaps most importantly, the programs seemed to ease the difficult process of reentry into society. Prisoners who had developed their writing skills, built self-esteem through creative achievement, and formed healthy social connections in workshops appeared to reoffend at lower rates.

Juvenile facilities have seen similar benefits. In Alabama, a program called Writing Our Stories launched in 1997 as an anti-violence initiative for incarcerated young people. Participants gained confidence, developed empathy, and came to see their peers in a more positive light. Many expressed increased motivation to return to society and live productive lives.

The Science of Storytelling

Why does creative writing seem to have such profound effects? The answer may lie in the brain.

When we set and achieve small goals consistently—like completing a poem or finishing a chapter—our brains release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation. The act of completing creative work creates a positive feedback loop: accomplishment leads to good feelings, which lead to increased motivation, which leads to more accomplishment.

There's also something psychologically powerful about narrative itself. When students document and analyze their experiences through writing, they often gain new perspectives on situations that once felt overwhelming. The simple act of structuring chaos into story can help people sort through difficult emotions and find meaning in challenging circumstances.

This may explain why creative writing seems to boost what psychologists call resilience—the ability to recover from setbacks and adapt to adversity. Writing creates distance between the self and experience, transforming raw emotion into something that can be examined, shaped, and ultimately understood.

An International Classroom

Scholar Youngjoo Yi spent two years following a Korean student enrolled in an American creative writing program. What he discovered challenged assumptions about who benefits from creative writing education and how.

The student hadn't grown up speaking English. She came to creative writing as an international student, someone for whom the language itself presented an additional barrier. But the creative writing classroom gave her something unexpected: permission to draw on her own heritage, experiences, and values.

By the end of the program, she had become a more confident writer—not just in English, but in Korean as well. The skills she developed, the confidence she built, transferred across languages. Creative writing hadn't just taught her to write better in her second language; it had made her a better writer period.

This hints at something deeper about what creative writing programs actually teach. It's not just technique or craft or the rules of English grammar. It's a relationship with language itself, a willingness to experiment, a tolerance for the vulnerability that comes with putting your thoughts into words for others to judge.

The Voice Problem

Gregory Stephens teaches at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, primarily working with students studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—what educators call STEM fields. These students arrive trained in a particular kind of writing: technical, precise, objective, rule-governed.

Stephens noticed something troubling. The heavy emphasis on academic writing seemed to prevent his students from developing their own unique voices and styles. They could write competent reports, but something was missing—the spark of individual personality that makes writing memorable.

So he tried an experiment. He introduced creative writing techniques into his STEM curriculum. Exercises in self-characterization. Storytelling assignments. Work that forced students to break free from what he called "the constraints of formal thinking and writing."

The results surprised him. His engineering and science students developed not just better writing skills, but increased empathy and self-awareness. They began to find their narrative voices—that quality that makes one person's sentences sound different from another's. And these skills, Stephens argues, transfer directly to professional settings. Being able to tell your story, to connect with audiences, to communicate with personality rather than just precision—these matter in the workplace as much as they do in the creative writing workshop.

A Discipline of Its Own

In some countries, creative writing still exists primarily as an extension of English studies—a practical application of literary knowledge, subordinate to the serious work of criticism and analysis. Some academics see it as a challenge to the tradition of studying literary forms rather than creating them, an interloper in departments devoted to scholarship.

But in the United Kingdom, Australia, and increasingly throughout the world, creative writing has established itself as an independent discipline with its own methods, its own body of knowledge, and its own professional community. Programs have spun off from English departments entirely, housed in their own dedicated spaces with their own faculty lines and their own hierarchies of degrees: bachelor's, master's, and increasingly, doctorates.

This evolution reflects a broader shift in how we think about artistic production. For centuries, writing was something mysterious, a gift from the muses, an inexplicable spark that either visited you or didn't. The idea that it could be studied systematically, broken down into teachable components, cultivated through deliberate practice—this was genuinely new.

The workshop model pioneered at Iowa and East Anglia has become nearly universal. The techniques developed for teaching fiction and poetry have spread to screenwriting and playwriting, to memoir and creative nonfiction, even to forms that didn't exist when the first programs were founded: video game writing, podcast scripting, content creation for digital platforms.

Whether creative writing can truly be taught remains an open question. Perhaps the better question is what happens when you give aspiring writers a community of peers, exposure to techniques, time to practice, and permission to fail. The graduates of creative writing programs have reshaped contemporary literature, television, and film. Whatever these programs are doing, something seems to be working.

The Courage to Create

At its heart, creative writing education offers something that might be even more valuable than technique: permission. Permission to take yourself seriously as a writer. Permission to devote time to your craft without having to justify it in practical terms. Permission to fail repeatedly while you figure out what you're trying to say and how to say it.

Mary Lee Marksberry, in her foundational work on creativity, identified three fundamental needs that creative writing serves: the need to keep records of significant experience, the need to share experience with an interested group, and the need for free individual expression that contributes to mental and physical health.

Notice what's missing from that list. Fame. Fortune. Publication. These may come eventually, but they're not the point. The point is the writing itself—the act of wrestling experience into words, of making sense of the world through language, of reaching toward something true and finding, against all odds, a way to say it.

That's what creative writing programs offer at their best: a space where the imagination is honored alongside the mind, where the creative is recognized as essential to education, where writers of all backgrounds can come to learn their craft.

The debate over whether writing can be taught will likely never be resolved. But the debate over whether it matters—that one was settled long ago, in prisons and universities, in workshops and classrooms, wherever people gather to share what they've written and listen to what others have to say.