What Is Creative Writing?

A lively examination of what creative writing is, how it is practiced and how it can be better understood, Graeme Harper explores the very nature of the art form in this book, outlining its key components, discussing its methods and breaking down the implications of why writers write, and why it matters that they do.

Locating a starting point for knowledge within the practice of writing itself, and as something anyone can undertake, Harper lays out how creative writing relates to personal, cultural, artistic and psychological enrichment, posits how individual choice is intrinsic, and shows how a definition of creative writing can assist action. Uniquely combining practice-perspective with a critical one, the creative writing process is disentangled from its end product here and presented as constantly forming, wherein craft, or the ’how to’, should not be applied prescriptively but as a node and used to generate communicative flows.

In showing how to understand creative writing, and in suggesting much of what we have been told about it has hidden its true nature, Harper makes a radical case for a universal creative writing; he declares our practice of writing creatively as evidence of an informed humanity, equally devoted to the arts and sciences, and all informed by our individual abilities to empathize, communicate and to create the world.

Graeme Harper is Professor of Creative Writing and Dean of The Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan, USA. He is Editor of the Approaches to Writing Series at Bloomsbury, Editor of the New Writing journal and is Chair of the Creative Writing Studies Organization (CWSO) in the USA. He was also inaugural Chair of HE at the UK’s National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) and is an award-winning fiction writer, Professor and Honorary Professor.