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| Creative Writing and the Other Kind |
| What is usually called "creative writing" -- poems, stories, novels feels very different to most people from what is usually called "nonfiction" or "expository writing" -- essays, reports, memos, biography, and so on. Without trying to deny all differences between these two broad categories of writing I will nevertheless minimize the distinction in this book. I want to underline the fact that a good essay or biography requires just as much creativity as a good poem; and that a good poem requires just as much truth as a good essay. (See Chapter 28, "Breathing Experience into Expository Writing," for more about this.) But because the distinction between these two kinds of writing is so widely felt, people have drifted into emphasizing a difference in the writing process used for each. People are apt to assume that when you write poems and stories it is appropriate to operate intuitively -- and in particular to organize and revise in terms of an unconscious center of gravity or an intuitive sense of what feels right. Similarly, people are apt to assume that when you produce nonfiction or expository writing you should be completely conscious of what you are doing -- and in particular that you should revise and organize your piece around an idea that is fully conscious, fully verbalized, fully worked out. But it's no good giving creative writing a monopoly on the benefits of intuition or giving nonfiction writing a monopoly on the benefits of conscious awareness. That's why I stress the intuitive processes in the first half of the writing cycle and conscious awareness or critical discrimination in the second half. It's true that some of my language in the book may seem to apply more obviously to expository or nonfiction writing than to creative writing: phrases like "figuring out your main idea" or "deciding what you want to say." I have more experience writing expository or nonfiction prose than anything else, and I assume that all my readers will have to do writing of that sort and only some of you will also write poetry and fiction. Yet because I put so much emphasis on tapping intuitions and standing out of imagination's way in my approach to writing, readers and listeners sometimes think I am only talking about creative writing. In certain chapters in fact, especially those in the last section, the language will seem to apply more obviously to creative writing than to expository writing. The important point is that you should exploit both intuition and conscious control, whichever kind of writing you are doing. Conscious control needn't undermine the intuition you may use in writing poems and stories: you can conclude with critical thinking that the poem you wrote last night hangs together beautifully (perhaps even according to a principle you can't yet articulate) and by all means leave it alone. Similarly intuition needn't blunt your conscious awareness as you revise your essay today, just because last night you wrote seven nonstop pages that came from feelings and perceptions you didn't know you had. You can consciously and critically build your essay today out of insights you could only arrive at by relinquishing critical thinking last night. |
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