What Does Creative Writing Involve?

Creative writing is basically expressive writing and does not involve writing articles or any other form of technical writing. Creative writing includes poetry, fiction, drama, film writing (screenwriting), autobiographies.

Creative writing can be studied at university, and usually lasts for three to four years. These courses can help writers to gain knowledge of how the publishing industry works, as well as helping them to learn how to gain ideas.

You do not need a creative writing degree to be an author, though it may worth considering taking a course to gain some knowledge of what creative writing involves and how to structure your work.

There are also short courses available for people who wish to gain a little more experience in creative writing and courses are a good way of meeting other writers and sharing your ideas with them.

It  is a term used to distinguish certain imaginative or different types of writing from technical writing. The use of specificity of the term is partly intentional, designed to make the process of writing accessible to everyone (of all ages) and to ensure that non-traditional, or traditionally low-status writing (for example, writing by marginalized social groups, experimental writing, genre fiction) is not excluded from academic consideration or dismissed as trivial or insignificant. This distinction is helpful in separating the writing from more technical writing, professional writing or journalistic writing.. Any novel provides an example of what creative writing is.

Thus, creative writing includes but is not limited to:
• fiction;
• drama for stage or screen;
• poetry;
• screenwriting — writing for films;
• self-exploratory writing (e.g. autobiography);
• creative non-fiction;
• writing that self-consciously mixes these or other genres.

As the name implies, it means using your creativity to write a story, poem, or whatever. Creative writing can be about any topic. The best creative writing is often based on the writer's own personal experience. Pick a topic you know some or a lot about and write about that. Before you start, envisage what your story will be about. Then get writing. As you write, the ideas will flow from your imagination. You may find, as writers often do, that the results are not exactly what you envisaged. In fact, they may not be anything like you envisaged. But as long as the writing came from your imagination and it reads well, you have just become a creative writer. Go to www.thailandstories.com and www.planetwriters.com for some excellent examples of creative writing.

The Creative Writing program at the New School offers a course of study leading to the MFA degree, with concentrations in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and writing for children.