Negotiating Creativity

Anthony, Dan

Abstract

This paper explores an aspect of Creative Writing’s pedagogy which can be overlooked by students and teachers, who primarily want to focus on how to write better scripts, fiction and poetry. It addresses a problem many creative writing teachers face – how can we develop the way students and writers think about and reflect upon their writing? It is suggested that analysis of the context of creative writing in the marketplace (through interrogation of our understanding of what ‘creativity’ means, and how markets for fiction have developed) enables us to re-assess literary output from the specific point of view of students and teachers in the field of Creative Writing.
The interface between writing and markets has been explored before. William Morris, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, Slavoj Žižek, Amitav Ghosh and Tim Morton are part of a literary/philosophical tradition in which the product of creative writing - fiction - may be interpreted as exemplary of developmental cultural processes. I suggest that the idea of the author as autonomous decision maker, ‘feeling’ their way through text creation, workshopping, and discussion - central to the teaching of creative writing - can be complimented with an understanding that ‘creativity’ is socially contingent.
Notwithstanding economic and literary theories that see creativity and creative output as a kind of mood board representing the zeitgeist of a place and time, I suggest that individual writers negotiate the cultural circumstances of their eras through recognisable and consistent approaches to creative production in changing marketplaces. This process, called ‘negotiating creativity’, bridges the gap between writers’ inner imaginings and the demands of the world around them. It can be understood, explored and learned. It has been a means of framing the relationship between writers and their markets since the Early Modern period. In this article, Miguel de Cervantes is considered in conjunction with two twentieth-century, French theoreticians, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, as an illustration of the practice and analysis of negotiating creativity, and its longevity.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 6th European Association of Creative Writing Programmes: Pedagocial Conference, May 2023
• Start Date: Feb 3, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Nov 14, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Jun 1, 2024
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2024
• Deposit Date: Nov 12, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 15, 2024
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 13-16
• Book Title: The Art & the Craft Papers on writing and creativity
• Keywords: Creative writing, creativity, fiction, literature, Cervantes
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/12040969
• Publisher URL: https://eacwp.org/the-art-the-craft-papers-on-writing-creativity/