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Journal of Creative Writing Studies

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Journal of Creative Writing Studies is a peer reviewed, open access journal. We publish research that examines the teaching, practice, theory, and history of creative writing. This scholarship makes use of theories and methodologies from a variety of disciplines. We believe knowledge is best constructed in an open conversation among diverse voices and multiple perspectives. Therefore, our editors actively seek to include work from marginalized and underrepresented scholars. Journal of Creative Writing Studies is dedicated to the idea that humanities research ought to be accessible and available to all.

Journal of Creative Writing Studies is a publication of Creative Writing Studies Organization (CWSO), which also hosts the annual Creative Writing Studies Conference .

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Current Issue: Volume 9, Issue 1 (2024)

Research: qualitative and quantitative.

Analysis of Narrative Arcs of College Writers’ Creative Writing: Implications for Engaging Creative Writing Across the Curriculum Justin Nicholes

Creative Writing in a University Bridging Program for Underprivileged STEM Students GLEN RETIEF, Yolandi Woest, and Nosipho Mthethwa

"Give 'em Something to Talk About: Love, Generosity, and Wonder in the Portrait of the Artist Workshop" Florence Gonsalves and Matthew Vollmer

“A Book of Many Rooms”: Joshua Bennett as Personal Tour Guide through Decades of Spoken Word Poetry Michael Baumann

The Making of Instinct: A Review of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems Mitchell James

Craft and Conscience: Writing and Social Justice Janelle Adsit

An Essential Guide to an Invisible Art: A Review of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing Jennifer Pullen

Creative Writing and the Mind/Body Connection

Body and Art as Message: an Experience with Chronic Pain, Writing, and the Mind-Body Connection Mitchell R. James

100 Prompts For Healing used in the Treatment of Addiction Eric A. Kreuter Ph.D.

Teaching Poetry to Med Students? A Conversation with Owen Lewis and Abriana Jetté Owen W. Lewis M.D. and Abriana Jette

A Proposal: Healing Impacts of Writing Groups on Cancer Survivors Cassandra M. Normand

Afterword and After the Ward: The Poetry Cure Abriana Jette and Margarita Sverdlova

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• Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century

In this Book

• Edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley
• Published by: Southern Illinois University Press

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright
• 1. Rhetorical Pedagogy
• Tom C. Hunley and Sandra Giles
• 2. Creative Writing and Process Pedagogy
• 3. Mutuality and the Teaching of the Introductory Creative Writing Course
• Patrick Bizzaro
• 4. A Feminist Approach to Creative Writing Pedagogy
• Pamela Annas and Joyce Peseroff
• 5. Writers Inc.: Writing and Collaborative Practice
• Jen Webb and Andrew Melrose
• pp. 102-125
• 6. Writing Center Theory and Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Classroom
• Kate Kostelnik
• pp. 126-152
• 7. Service Learning, Literary Citizenship, and the Creative Writing Classroom
• Carey E. Smitherman and Stephanie Vanderslice
• pp. 153-168
• 8. Creative Literacy Pedagogy
• Steve Healey
• pp. 169-193
• 9. The Pedagogy of Creative Writing across the Curriculum
• Alexandria Peary
• pp. 194-220
• 10. A Basic Writing Teacher Teaches Creative Writing
• Clyde Moneyhun
• pp. 221-242
• 11. Digital Technologies and Creative Writing Pedagogy
• Bronwyn T. Williams
• pp. 243-268
• 12. Ecological Creative Writing
• James Engelhardt and Jeremy Schraffenberger
• pp. 269-288
• pp. 289-292
• Contributors
• pp. 293-298
• pp. 299-310

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1 Theories of Creativity and Creative Writing Pedagogy

From the book the handbook of creative writing.

• Anna Leahy , Mary Cantrell and Mary Swander
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Chapters in this book (63)

Prompting Creativity: Revisiting Aristotle’s Advice on Plot and Character

• First Online: 10 October 2021

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• Mark Rossiter 3  

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Which is more important in creative writing, plot or character? Students almost always say the latter, but Aristotle in his Poetics disagrees. Plot for him is everything and he goes on to define what he calls a complex plot and how it is they move us. This chapter re-examines his work, setting it against more contemporary perspectives and with reference to the author’s own short fiction. Practical exercises developed through years of workshop experience enable writers to explore the question for themselves, producing story fragments that can be a springboard to further creative projects.

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To reiterate: Aristotle is talking about tragedy, but as we’ll see, his advice applies to the nature of narrative itself, its structure and its mechanics.

This pattern can be contrasted with well-known dramatic structural forms such as Freytag’s Technik des Dramas , more commonly known as Freytag’s Pyramid, which describes five acts: “the introduction […] the rising action […] the climax […] the return […] the catastrophe” (Freytag 1900 , p. 115), and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth or hero’s journey, whose 12 steps include “The Call to Adventure […] The Road of Trials [...] Apotheosis […] The Crossing of the Return Threshold […] Freedom to Live” (Campbell 2004 /1949, pp. vii–viii).

I do recommend you write your own scenarios, tuck them away and return to them later. Meantime, here are some my students have used: a person sees a reflection of themselves in a mirror or a window in the street; casually opening the car glove box; in a share house/hostel/prison; two people argue in a cinema/gallery/bistro; I think you’ve had enough; a goldfish bowl; alien incursion; sorry, it’s overcooked; are you positive?

Alison, J. 2019. Meander, Spiral, Explode—Design and Pattern in Narrative . New York: Catapult.

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Aristotle, and S.H. Butcher. n.d. Poetics . MIT Internet Classics Archive. Accessed 6 January 2020. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html .

Austen, J. 2006. The Complete Novels . New York: Penguin Books.

Bedford, J. 2005. Workshop Analysis Lecture. Advanced Narrative . University of Technology, Sydney.

Brooks, P. 1992. Reading for the Plot . Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Campbell, J. 2004.  The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1949).

Freytag, G. 1900. Freytag’s T echnique of the Drama  (J. Elias, and M.A. MacEwan Trans., 3rd ed.). Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company.

Hemingway, E. 1964. A Moveable Feast . New York: Scribner.

James, H. 2007. The Art of Fiction. In The Critical Tradition , ed. D.H. Richter, 464–475. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Kuehl, L. 1978. Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71. The Paris Review . Accessed 5 January 2021. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion

NY Book Editors. n.d. What is Literary Fiction? NY Book Editors. Accessed 6 January 2021. https://nybookeditors.com/2018/07/what-is-literary-fiction/

Rossiter, M. 2005. The Dogs. Island , 118–121.

———. 2011. Introductory Tutorial. Theory and Creative Writing . Sydney: University of Technology, Sydney.

Stein, G. 1914. Tender Buttons . Project Gutenberg. Accessed 6 January 2021. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15396/15396-h/15396-h.htm

Tartt, D. 2013. The Goldfinch . London: Abacus.

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About this chapter

Rossiter, M. (2021). Prompting Creativity: Revisiting Aristotle’s Advice on Plot and Character. In: Adelaide, D., Attfield, S. (eds) Creative Writing Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73674-3_8

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• Feb 26, 2022

Creative Writing 102: Critical Theory-The (Im)possibility of Application

Creative Writing 102 articles are a continuation of the previous Creative Writing 101 series and serve as one of the academic courses in the field of Creative Writing Studies and Literary Theory. The course, which is a fundamental guide within the scope of general knowledge compared to the technical knowledge of Creative Writing Studies and Literary Theory, also addresses students and the general readership alike. With this goal in mind, the article has been written in very plain and basic English to convey just the necessary understanding of Creative Writing and provide an introduction.

Creative Writing 102 is mainly divided into five chapters including:

- The Screenplay - Blending Screenwriting with Literary Theory

- In the Realm of Travel Writing - Immortalizing Stories in Nonfiction

- The Digitalization of Creative Writing Through Video Games

- Critical Theory - The (Im)possibility of Application

- Unraveling Creativity and Humor in Comedians' Personalities

[Book cover of Creative Writing for Critical Thinking: Creating a Discoursal Identity by Hélène Edberg].

“Studying theory is an important way of bringing together Literary Studies and Creative Writing. Theory enriches both creative and critical investigations and while the use of theory is considered de rigueur in Literary Studies, in Creative Writing, the value of theory has been hotly contested.” (Atherton, 2010, p. 5).

Critical theory and literary criticism are used for interpreting and analyzing the content of literary productions while creative writing targets the written outcomes of writers in terms of creativity, imagination, and originality. In the fourth article of the 102 series of Creative Writing, the concern is about questioning whether there is a possibility to incorporate critical theory to the teaching and practice of creative writing in higher education; or rather an impossibility of application due to the difference of the two disciplines. In this sense, to what extent and how can critical theory be applied to the practice of creative writing?

Critical theory and Creative writing – a relationship of interconnectedness or unrelatedness?

The adoption of critical theory to the discipline of creative writing has been controversial to many scholars and teacher-writers in higher education, questioning the efficiency and usage of the thematic content of literary criticism in the teaching of creative writing in classes. Some scholars are in favor of incorporating critical theory to creative writing while others refute such practice to preserving the authenticity of creative writing. Three basic fundamentals, including “freedom”, “receptivity to the new and unfamiliar”, and “experimentation” shape the discipline of creative writing by distancing its content from “the philosophical, social, historical, cultural, and psychological apparatus of critical theory.” (Ramey, p.46). In other words, the dissociation of literature, philosophy and other areas of humanities like psychology, sociology, and history in the Creative writing studies is thought to limit and hinder the writer’s creativity and writing process. Thus, the writer is thought to be deprived of guidance and in this way he or she is unable to produce, what Ramey (2007) refers to as, a “fine new literature”.

[Book cover of Thinking Creative writing Critique from the International New Writing Journal

edited by Graeme Harper].

The impossibility to write or create content is explained by the unpleasant experience of the ‘blank page’, whereby writers or students feel uncreative and powerless to put any ideas in the shape of words on a white paper or a blank Word document, explains Atherton (2010). Hence, they are overwhelmed by a feeling of blockage and feel trapped in the process of writing. At the Australian University of Melbourne, a literary approach to the teaching of poetry is used by Professor Kevin Brophy in his creative writing class. The experience of the ‘blank page’ is studied and examined in W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Balloon of the Mind” as an instance to demonstrate the complexity of the task of writing. In this sense, Pr. Brophy’s reference to Yeats’ poem is made on purpose to raise his students’ awareness of the process of writing in terms of processing ideas into the mind, structuring and organizing what to write and how to proceed with writing.

Coupled with the example of Pr. Brophy’s pedagogy, more insights on the creative process of writing are given by Atherton (2010) when she points out the interconnectedness between theories of the sublime and writing. The sublimity of creation undergoes a state of chaos before reaching a state of delight, whereby the writer experiences a certain kind of fright, frustration, and bewilderment in not being able to create. In this sense, the writer is transported by a series of mixed-up feelings and oscillates between the ability and inability of creation until comes a moment of illumination and inspiration enabling, thus, the writer to express ideas through words. Therefore, the incorporation of critical theory to creative writing studies is described as crucial as it “allows for the enrichment and layering of creative and analytical writing.” (Atherton, 2010).

“Literary Studies elevates creative writing to the highest level by studying and analysing creative texts; creative writing is similarly enhanced when it is underpinned by literary theory.” (Atherton, 2010, p .2).

Not many universities are in favor of adopting critical theory and literary criticism to the teaching of creative writing, for many teacher-writers and scholars think that creative writing is far distinct from English. In other terms, English is given more importance as a field of study and the inclusion of critical theory to its curriculum in higher education is justified by the fact that theory is de facto considered to be part of English studies. However, this claim is refused by other scholars. According to them, critical theory used in the field of English studies is by no means a part of it. It is an independent discipline and a mixture of other field of studies, such as philosophy, psychology, and sociology, combined to provide criticism and analytical explanations of literary works. Any attempt at separating both disciplines would be qualified as “artificial” and “unconstructive”, argues Ramey (2007). For this reason, the debate over adopting creative writing to critical theory or rather separating it from literary criticism is still open to discussion and further examination of teaching programs at higher education.

[Book cover of Creative Writing with Critical Theory: Inhabitation

edited by Dominique Hecq and Julian Novitz].

At some point, there are several universities worldwide whose curriculum programs have been re-designed for the benefit of prioritizing critical theory in the teaching of creative writing. For instance, the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex promotes the interconnectedness between theory and practice through an emphasis on critical writings to empowering students with enough knowledge and mastery for writing and thinking in a creative way. Moreover, the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland provides students with a literary program in the study of creative writing and elaboration of academic projects on poetry and fiction. Not only such programs aim to improve the students’ writing skills, they also cover, most importantly, a great deal of theoretical and historical framework related to the students’ discipline for a better quality of training. In this way, creative writing students and contemporary creative writers in general, explains Ramey (2007), are tempted by experimenting and using “techniques such as self-reflexivity, pastiche, parody, irony and other frame-breaking operations,” in their writings and creative process of literary composition.

“At California State University, Los Angeles, MA students in the Creative Writing Option are required to enrol in classes in Historical Criticism and Contemporary Critical Approaches and take classes in a variety of periods and genres of English, American and world literature.” (Ramey, 2007, p. 46).

How is critical theory taught in creative writing classes?

Postgraduate students of creative writing studies have pre-constructed opinions about critical theory as “didactic, political, polemical, rigid, and impenetrably jargon-laden,” argues Ramey (2007). They think that blending creative writing with critical theory is a useless and threatening method of learning as it would jeopardize their ability to produce any literary writings and put their imagination and creativity at risk. In fact, the common concerns that students express are “If I know too much, I won’t be able to write naturally,” and “It will take away my creativity,” describes Ramey (2007). She lists out three preliminary questions that any creative writing student should ask in class before proceeding with writing. The first question is “What are a writer’s responsibilities?”, supposedly helping the student to find out the motives of becoming a writer and the main tasks any writer has to follow and prioritize. The second question is “Why do you write?”, which incites the student to question himself or herself about the reasons of as well as the need for creating stories, in general. The third and last question is “Whom do you write for?”, which targets not only the writer’s readership in terms of gender, but also implicitly points out the readers’ age and interests.

[Book cover of Creative Writing and the New Humanities by Paul Dawson].

To undo the traditional thoughts about the triviality of combining critical theory with creative writing, Ramey (2007) proposes to teach her students the basics of theory by referring to passages of significant literary and philosophical figures, including Horace, Dante, Lucretius, Quintilian, Tertullian, Plotinus, Longinus, Plato and Aristotle. Ramey’s method of teaching aims to demonstrate the importance and relevance of ancient literature in terms of concepts, themes, and reflections in contemporary literature and how it guides, teaches and impacts new creative writers to produce innovative, complex, and novel literature. Also, acquiring more knowledge about history of literary criticism and theory is required, if not compulsory, for the grasp of the discipline of creative writing, claims Ramey (2007).

“Critical theory for creative writers reflects who we are as individuals in relation to the literary examples of the past. It is a way of entering into tradition in order to express our unique voices and visions in the present.” (Ramey, 2007, p. 50).

In a unit of her MA class Critical Theory for Creative Writers, Ramey (2007) shows the link between critical theory and the practice of creative writing by dividing the course into four main sections – a lecture, a writing assignment, a discussion, and a workshop. A list of selected readings of Longinus’ five notions of ‘Sublimity’, Sappho’s poem “Fragment thirty-one”, the section twenty-two of Aristotle’s Poetics , a section of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , and Karl Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), followed by another literary representation and Marxist examination of William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605) through Edward Bond’s Lear (1971). The selected themes are utilized to prompt students to interact through discussion and debate. Thus, for the sake of producing critical and creative writings, students are encouraged to criticize the various thematic content of the course. Hence, it paves the way to a better understanding of the interconnectedness between critical theory and creative writing.

On the whole, teaching critical theory and literary criticism in creative writing classes is still subjected to debates in many institutions in the world. Many scholars and teacher-writers are against the idea of linking the content of theory to the practice of creative writing, for the literary and non-literary themes of theory are considered to be unimportant to be taught to creative writing students. Others, however, are aware of the utility and relevance of critical theory to the discipline of creative writing. The inclusion of modern and experimental methods to their courses are made to help, guide, and teach new writers to produce better creative and critical writings by reproducing other versions of ancient and canonical literature.

Image Sources

Dawson, P. & Routledge. (2004, December 9). [Book cover of Creative Writing and the New Humanities by Paul Dawson]. Routledge.com. https://www.routledge.com/Creative-Writing-and-the-New-Humanities/Dawson/p/book/9780415332217

Edberg, H. & Palgrave Macmillan. (2018, February 8). [Book cover of Creative Writing for Critical Thinking: Creating a Discoursal Identity by Hélène Edberg]. Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Writing-Critical-Thinking-Discoursal-ebook/dp/B079PPGQ26

Hecq, D., Novitz, J., Hills, L., Matthews, A., Bacon, E., Harper, G., Pittaway, G., Coles, K., Disney, D., West, S., Hetherington, P., Munden, P., Hogan, E., Jackson, A., Kocher, S., & Walker, A. (2018, September 26). [Book cover of Creative Writing with Critical Theory: Inhabitation edited by Dominique Hecq and Julian Novitz]. Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Writing-Critical-Theory-Inhabitation/dp/1780240686

Routledge, & Harper, G. (2020, December 18). [Book cover of Thinking Creative writing Critique from the International New Writing Journal edited by Graeme Harper]. Routledge.com. https://www.routledge.com/Thinking-Creative-Writing-Critique-from-the-international-New-Writing-journal/Harper/p/book/9780367730543

Atherton, C. & University of Melbourne. (2010). Sleeping with the enemy: creative writing and theory in the academy . Aawp.Org.Au. Retrieved February 21, 2022, from https://www.aawp.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Atherton.pdf

cassandra-atherton.com. (n.d.). Cassandra Atherton . Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://cassandra-atherton.com/about-cassandr

mup.com.au. (n.d.). Kevin Brophy . Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://www.mup.com.au/authors/kevin-brophy

Ramey, L. (2007). Creative Writing and Critical Theory. In S. Earnshaw (Ed.), The Handbook of Creative Writing (pp. 42–53). Edinburgh University Press.

Additional Readings

Lamarino, D. L. (2015). Codifying the Creative Self: Conflicts of Theory and Content in Creative Writing. Theory and Practice in Language Studies , 5 (6), 1123–1128. https://www.academypublication.com/issues2/tpls/vol05/06/01.pdf

Yeats, W. B. (n.d.). The Balloon of the Mind by W.B. Yeats . Poets.Org. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://poets.org/poem/balloon-mind

The 102 series is coming together nicely. This particular article is very well-structured and the ideas are discussed pertinently.

That's nice of you Ioana. Thank you a lot 😊

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Creative Writing Theory

Conference-length paper.

Students in English 617 will produce a conference-length paper suitable for the creative introduction to the MFA thesis or for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

Theories and Techniques of Creative Writing

Students in English 617 will study and identify theories and techniques of creative writing, primarily in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

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Kelly Writers House Summer Workshop Alum Deborah Olatunji featured in Penn Today

Check out this fantastic  Penn Today feature on fourth-year student Deborah Olatunji, whose journey at Penn began with the Kelly Writers House Summer Workshop . Though initially intending to major in nursing, Deb discovered that her true passion lay in exploring identity, vulnerability, and mental health advocacy.  

Four years later, Deb has changed her major, started a podcast , studied abroad in South Africa, and launched the Black Storytellers Collective, a transnational project that connects Black writers across the diaspora. Through it all, the Kelly Writers House has remained a source of community and Deb's "third place" at Penn.

Read more about Deb's extraordinary path at the link below.

• Israel-Hamas War

My Writing Students Were Arrested at Columbia. Their Voices Have Never Been More Essential

O n April 30, 56 years after Columbia sent the police in to arrest student protesters who had taken over Hamilton Hall in protest of the Vietnam War—protests the school loves to promote—I was walking my 12-year-old daughter home after her choir performance. We had gone an extra stop on the subway because the stop at 116th, Columbia’s stop, was closed. Instead, we had to walk back to our apartment from the 125th stop. When we got within sight of Columbia, a line of dozens of police blocked our path. I asked them to let us through; I pointed to our apartment building and said we lived there. As a Columbia professor, I live in Columbia housing.

“I have my orders,” the cop in charge said.

“I live right there,” I said. “It’s my daughter’s bedtime.”

“I have my orders,” he said again.

“I’m just trying to get home,” I said.

We were forced to walk back the way we came from and circle around from another block. Luckily, our building has an entrance through the bodega in the basement. This is how I took my daughter up to her room and sent her to bed.

Read More: Columbia's Relationship With Student Protesters Has Long Been Fraught

A week earlier, I had brought some food for the students camping out on Columbia’s West Lawn and had met with similar resistance. Security guards asked whether I was really faculty; I had already swiped my faculty badge that should have confirmed my identity. They asked to take my badge, then they said I hadn’t swiped it, which I had, two seconds earlier, as they watched. They said their professors had never brought food to them before. I didn’t know what to say to this—“I’m sorry that your professors never brought you food?” They called someone and told them the number on my badge. Finally, they were forced to let me through. They said again that their professors had never brought them food. “OK,” I said, and walked into campus. I reported their behavior and never received a reply.

On April 30, after I had got my daughter to bed, my partner and I took the dog down to pee. We watched the protesters call, “Shame!” as the police went in and out of the blockade that stretched 10 blocks around campus. Earlier that day, we had seen police collecting barricades—it seemed like there would be a bit of peace. As soon as it got dark, they must have used those barricades and more to block off the 10 blocks. There were reports on campus that journalists were not allowed out of Pulitzer Hall, including Columbia’s own student journalists and the dean of the School of Journalism, under threat of arrest. Faculty and students who did not live on campus had been forbidden access to campus in the morning. There was no one around to witness. My partner and I had to use social media to see the hundreds of police in full riot gear, guns out, infiltrate Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where protesters had holed up , mirroring the 1968 protests that had occupied the same building.

In the next few days, I was in meeting after meeting. Internally, we were told that the arrests had been peaceful and careful, with no student injuries. The same thing was repeated by Mayor Adams and CNN . Meanwhile, president Minouche Shafik had violated faculty governance and the university bylaws that she consult the executive committee before calling police onto campus. (The committee voted unanimously against police intervention .)

Read More: Columbia Cancels Main Commencement Following Weeks of Pro-Palestinian Protests

Then, Saturday morning, I got an email from a couple of writing students that they had been released from jail. I hadn’t heard that any of our students had been involved. They told me they hadn’t gotten food or water, or even their meds, for 24 hours. They had watched their friends bleed, kicked in the face by police. They said they had been careful not to damage university property. At least one cop busted into a locked office and fired a gun , threatened by what my students called “unarmed students in pajamas.”

In the mainstream media, the story was very different. The vandalism was blamed on students. Police showed off one of Oxford Press’s Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction . (This series of books offers scholarly introductions that help students prepare for classes, not how-to pamphlets teaching them to do terrorism.)

“I feel like I’m being gaslit,” one of my students said.

I teach creative writing, and I am the author of a book about teaching creative writing and the origins of creative-writing programs in the early 20th century. The oldest MFA program in the country, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was funded by special-interest groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and, famously, the CIA, and was explicitly described by director Paul Engle as a tool to spread American values.

Read More: 'Why Are Police in Riot Gear?' Inside Columbia and City College's Darkest Night

The way we teach creative writing is essential because it shapes what kinds of narratives will be seen as valuable, pleasurable, and convincing. Today’s writing students will record how our current events become history. One of the strategies Columbia took with its police invasion was to block access of faculty, students, and press to the truth. It didn’t want any witnesses. It wanted to control the story.

For weeks, Columbia administration and the mainstream media has painted student protesters as violent and disruptive—and though there have been incidents of antisemitism, racism, and anti-Muslim hatred, including a chemical attack on pro-Palestine protesters , I visited the encampment multiple times and saw a place of joy, love, and community that included explicit teach-ins on antisemitism and explicit rules against any hateful language and action. Students of different faiths protected each other’s right to prayer. Meanwhile, wary of surveillance and the potential use of facial recognition to identify them, they covered their faces. Faculty have become afraid to use university email addresses to discuss ways to protect their students. At one point, the administration circulated documents they wanted students to sign, agreeing to self-identify their involvement and leave the encampment by a 2 p.m. deadline or face suspension or worse. In the end, student radio WKCR reported that even students who did leave the encampment were suspended.

In a recent statement in the Guardian and an oral history in New York Magazine , and through the remarkable coverage of WKCR, Columbia students have sought to take back the narrative. They have detailed the widespread support on campus for student protesters; the peaceful nature of the demonstrations; widespread student wishes to divest financially from Israel, cancel the Tel Aviv Global Center, and end Columbia’s dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University; and the administration’s lack of good faith in negotiations. As part of the Guardian statement, the student body says that multiple news outlets refused to print it. They emphasize their desire to tell their own story.

In a time of mass misinformation, writers who tell the truth and who are there to witness the truth firsthand are essential and must be protected. My students in Columbia’s writing program who have been arrested and face expulsion for wanting the university to disclose and divest, and the many other student protesters, represent the remarkable energy and skepticism of the younger generation who are committed not only to witnessing but participating in the making of a better world. Truth has power, but only if there are people around to tell the truth. We must protect their right to do so, whether or not the truth serves our beliefs. It is the next generation of writers who understand this best and are fighting for both their right and ours to be heard.

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The challenge of being a creative person once you’ve created a person

A very tired parent’s tips for writing a book while also doing all the other things.

Eight or nine years ago, an old friend called seeking advice. She was trying to write a novel, but she was also a new mom with a full-time job, and she was exhausted. I, who had breezily published a couple of books by then, offered my best wisdom. You have to push through, I told her sternly. You have to take your own writing seriously, or nobody else will. Set aside two hours every night. Put on the coffee and push through the exhaustion. You can and will do it.

Years passed. Then I, too, had a baby. Then I, too, set out to write a book while also being a mother with a full-time job. And somewhere in the middle of this endeavor, I called my friend and asked whether my advice had been as bad as I was beginning to sense it had been. No, she told me cheerfully, it had actually been much worse. The callousness of it had shocked her, she said, until she decided that I simply hadn’t known any better and that, when I did, I would apologize.

God, I’m so sorry.

My first post-baby book came out today, and I have been thinking, almost nonstop, about the relationship between creativity and motherhood. I used to love reading articles with titles such as “The daily routines of 10 famous artists,” until I realized that Leo Tolstoy may have finished his masterpieces by locking his study doors to ensure uninterrupted productivity, but, like, what were his 13 children doing while he was in there? Did anyone check in on Mrs. Tolstoy? For the women I know, there is no setting aside a few hours at the end of the workday. The end of the workday is the beginning of the parent day. The end of the parent day is never, because 2-year-olds wake cheerfully at 5 a.m., and strep throat comes for us all.

Where, in this schedule, was the life of the mind? TikTok would not stop showing me videos of mothers showing off their “realistic beauty routines,” but what I really wanted were realistic creativity routines: the mothers who didn’t give a crap about heatless curlers, but had somehow composed a cello sonata while working five days a week as a dental hygienist.

In my bleariest days of early parenthood, I met a woman at the playground who had just finished doing something extraordinary (Triathlon? Solo art exhibit?), and when the rest of us asked her how she’d found the time, she shrugged and said, modestly, “Oh, you know.” But the point was that we didn’t know, and we were desperate for her to tell us. (Live-in grandparents? Adderall?)

The bigger point is that we weren’t really trying to figure out how to compete in triathlons. We were trying to figure out how to be people.

When you have a baby or a toddler, reminding yourself that you are a full person with your own dreams and needs can feel both completely vital and completely impossible. But being a full person is a sacred legacy to give to a child. My own mother is a folk artist. When I was growing up, she made Ukrainian eggs in the frigid concrete sunroom, a space heater at her feet, and her works were shown and sold at galleries around the Midwest. I knew then, and I know now, that my mother would die and kill for me. But I also knew that she loved other things, too. She had loved those things before she ever knew me. She had secrets and wisdom to pass on.

Her work had nothing to do with me, yet it was a gift. It paid for my brother and me to go to summer camp. It went on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, and we visited it, as well as the Seurats and the Hoppers, and ate granola bars. When my mother dies, I will carefully unwrap the tissue paper surrounding the astonishing works of art she gave to me over the years, and I will sob.

I want that for my own daughter. I want her to know that motherhood doesn’t have to atrophy personhood; it can expand it.

And in wanting that, desperately, I came up with a routine that allowed me to maintain a grip on the parts of me that were me before I was a mother. A realistic creativity routine, if you will.

I write between the hours of 10 p.m. and midnight, unless it turns out that I write between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4. I write 300 to 400 words every time I am on the Metro; I write 30 to 40 words each time I pick my daughter up from day care, in the three-minute gap between when I ring the outer bell and when a teacher’s aide comes to let me inside. I write badly. I write very, very badly, vaguely remembering a quote I’d once heard attributed to author Jodi Picoult, about how you can always edit a bad page, but you can never edit a blank page.

Does it look like the routines of Tolstoy, or Virginia Woolf, or anyone else I may have once read about in an article about the routines of famous artists? It does not. But the bad pages get edited, and then they get good.

Pursuing creativity as a working mom means, in other words, letting go of any romantic notions of what creativity means or looks like.

It means not waiting for inspiration to strike, but instead striking inspiration, bludgeoning it upside the head and wrestling it to the ground. Inspiration is a luxury, and once you realize that, you can also understand that the ability to create something through sheer force of will — without inspiration, without routine, without time — is a far more creative act than relying on a muse.

If my old friend called me now, I think that is what I would say to her. That, and:

You will not be Mark Twain, summoned by a horn when it’s time to eat the dinner someone else has prepared. You will not be going on Tchaikovsky’s vigorous two-hour walks through the countryside or spending the morning shopping for inspiring objects like Andy Warhol.

But you will create something. Not by pushing through the exhaustion so much as living alongside it, and then peering beyond it, and then stopping, and then starting, and then having superhuman discipline, and then eating a whole package of Oreos, and then finishing something beautiful at 2 a.m. and sneaking into your child’s room to see another beautiful thing, and then thinking about how the things that make us the most tired are the things that give us reason to create at all.

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Book News & Features

Ai is contentious among authors. so why are some feeding it their own writing.

Chloe Veltman

The vast majority of authors don't use artificial intelligence as part of their creative process — or at least won't admit to it.

Yet according to a recent poll from the writers' advocacy nonprofit The Authors Guild, 13% said they do use AI, for activities like brainstorming character ideas and creating outlines.

The technology is a vexed topic in the literary world. Many authors are concerned about the use of their copyrighted material in generative AI models. At the same time, some are actively using these technologies — even attempting to train AI models on their own works.

These experiments, though limited, are teaching their authors new things about creativity.

Best known as the author of technology and business-oriented non-fiction books like The Long Tail, lately Chris Anderson has been trying his hand at fiction. Anderson is working on his second novel, about drone warfare.

He says he wants to put generative AI technology to the test.

"I wanted to see whether in fact AI can do more than just help me organize my thoughts, but actually start injecting new thoughts," Anderson says.

Anderson says he fed parts of his first novel into an AI writing platform to help him write this new one. The system surprised him by moving his opening scene from a corporate meeting room to a karaoke bar.

Authors push back on the growing number of AI 'scam' books on Amazon

"And I was like, you know? That could work!" Anderson says. "I ended up writing the scene myself. But the idea was the AI's."

Anderson says he didn't use a single actual word the AI platform generated. The sentences were grammatically correct, he says, but fell way short in terms of replicating his writing style. Although he admits to being disappointed, Anderson says ultimately he's OK with having to do some of the heavy lifting himself: "Maybe that's just the universe telling me that writing actually involves the act of writing."

Training an AI model to imitate style

It's very hard for off-the-shelf AI models like GPT and Claude to emulate contemporary literary authors' styles.

The authors NPR talked with say that's because these models are predominantly trained on content scraped from the Internet like news articles, Wikipedia entries and how-to manuals — standard, non-literary prose.

But some authors, like Sasha Stiles , say they have been able to make these systems suit their stylistic needs.

"There are moments where I do ask my machine collaborator to write something and then I use what's come out verbatim," Stiles says.

The poet and AI researcher says she wanted to make the off-the-shelf AI models she'd been experimenting with for years more responsive to her own poetic voice.

So she started customizing them by inputting her finished poems, drafts, and research notes.

"All with the intention to sort of mentor a bespoke poetic alter ego," Stiles says.

She has collaborated with this bespoke poetic alter ego on a variety of projects, including Technelegy (2021), a volume of poetry published by Black Spring Press; and " Repetae: Again, Again ," a multimedia poem created last year for luxury fashion brand Gucci.

Stiles says working with her AI persona has led her to ask questions about whether what she's doing is in fact poetic, and where the line falls between the human and the machine.

read it again… pic.twitter.com/sAs2xhdufD — Sasha Stiles | AI alter ego Technelegy ✍️🤖 (@sashastiles) November 28, 2023

"It's been really a provocative thing to be able to use these tools to create poetry," she says.

Potential issues come with these experiments

These types of experiments are also provocative in another way. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger says she's not opposed to authors training AI models on their own writing.

"If you're using AI to create derivative works of your own work, that is completely acceptable," Rasenberger says.

Thousands of authors urge AI companies to stop using work without permission

But building an AI system that responds fluently to user prompts requires vast amounts of training data. So the foundational AI models that underpin most of these investigations in literary style may contain copyrighted works.

Rasenberger pointed to the recent wave of lawsuits brought by authors alleging AI companies trained their models on unauthorized copies of articles and books.

"If the output does in fact contain other people's works, that creates real ethical concerns," she says. "Because that you should be getting permission for."

Circumventing ethical problems while being creative

Award-winning speculative fiction writer Ken Liu says he wanted to circumvent these ethical problems, while at the same time creating new aesthetic possibilities using AI.

So the former software engineer and lawyer attempted to train an AI model solely on his own output. He says he fed all of his short stories and novels into the system — and nothing else.

Liu says he knew this approach was doomed to fail.

That's because the entire life's work of any single writer simply doesn't contain enough words to produce a viable so-called large language model.

"I don't care how prolific you are," Liu says. "It's just not going to work."

Liu's AI system built only on his own writing produced predictable results.

"It barely generated any phrases, even," Liu says. "A lot of it was just gibberish."

Yet for Liu, that was the point. He put this gibberish to work in a short story. 50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know , published in Uncanny Magazine in 2020, is a meditation on what it means to be human from the perspective of a machine.

"Dinoted concentration crusch the dead gods," is an example of one line in Liu's story generated by his custom-built AI model. "A man reached the torch for something darker perified it seemed the billboding," is another.

Liu continues to experiment with AI. He says the technology shows promise, but is still very limited. If anything, he says, his experiments have reaffirmed why human art matters.

"So what is the point of experimenting with AIs?" Liu says. "The point for me really is about pushing the boundaries of what is art."

Audio and digital stories edited by Meghan Collins Sullivan .

• large language model
• mary rasenberger
• chris anderson
• sasha stiles
• authors guild

Bachelor of Science in Creative Writing – Journalism Captivate Your Readers

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Liberty University’s Bachelor of Science (BS) in Creative Writing – Journalism is an exciting and dynamic degree program that can help prepare you for a career in the media industry. With a focus on writing for social media, news and print, and multimedia storytelling, this journalism major can help equip you with the skills and knowledge you need to excel in a variety of fields.

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In the Bachelor of Science in Creative Writing – Journalism program, you can learn competencies that are essential for success in a variety of journalism and creative writing industries. From writing novellas to writing for theater and film, you have the opportunity to develop many abilities that can help boost your marketability. Some of the skills you can develop include:

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