Synergia: What is Creative Writing? Part 2

Part 1 appears here.

I flopped onto the red, paisley hotel bedspread and opened my laptop. “Thank god, free wi-fi!” I muttered. The hotel in Washington, D.C., had not provided free  Internet connection. My friend Erinne, Dr. Smith, I, and assorted other students and professors from the English department had been there for the past four days at the Associated Writing Programs conference (AWP), one of the biggest and most prestigious conferences in the creative writing field. Now I was itching to check Facebook and my email.

We’d been held up in Baltimore because of a snowstorm and couldn’t fly back to Detroit until the following morning. So we’d found a hotel—paid for by Dr. Smith’s English department credit card—and were getting ready for dinner, which Dr. Smith and her partner, another professor, had offered to buy. I was planning to enjoy as much of the free food and accomodations as I could before returning to campus, where I would find myself touching up final papers and studying for exams. At least, I thought, I have my capstone out of the way.

“Hey, our grades for our capstones are up!” my friend, Erinne, said, looking up at me from her spot on the other bed, where she sat with her laptop. I watched her scroll for a moment before her face broke into a grin. “Hey! I got an A!”

“Nice! You were great, though. You deserve it,” I said as I waited for my email to load. At the top of my inbox, starred and marked “important,” was an email from our capstone advisor with the subject line “Final Grades.” I eagarly clicked on it.

Dear Em, I wanted to mention this to you in an email so it didn’t surprise you when you read the attached comments from your graders…

What? What’s that? That didn’t sound good. That didn’t sound like the comments I usually got on papers. I was a straight-A student. I didn’t get comments like that!

…I wanted to let you know that I don’t think Dr. Smith meant her comments in a hurtful or negative way. I think she was only making an observation about your creative work and your presentation….

Hurtful or negative? What did that mean, “hurtful or negative”? What did Dr. Smith say?

…It was a pleasure having you in the class and you did a fine job on your project and presentation…

I skimmed the rest of the email and then downloaded the attachment. I couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, couldn’t breath. What did Dr. Smith say?! I’d always thought Dr. Smith had liked me and my writing. Why would her comments be so ambiguous that they could be construed as hurtful or negative?  I didn’t have to wonder long. The attachment opened and I bit my lip as I read Dr. Smith’s comments.

I believe that, in her heart, Em is not truly a creative writer. I think she is a theorist and an activist who uses her writing to draw attention to issues of social justice.

Not truly a creative writer? Not truly a creative writer?! Since when were creative writers not allowed to write about social issues? I scrolled down the attachment to see what my grade was, but a part of me already knew: seventeen points out of twenty, an eighty-five percent, a solid B.

To many students, this news would be a relief. To me, it was devestating. For three and a half years I’d cultivated my GPA of four-point-oh like a rare rosebush. I’d monitored it constantly, ensuring that it always received just the right amount of care and work. I pruned out imperfections before they festered into problems and prided myself on its beauty and perfection. It was my everything, my best thing. It defined me. And now, like a rot that sank deep into the root, this one missing point had ruined everything. Sure, my GPA was still good, but it was no longer perfect, and for three and half years, perfection had been all that mattered to me.

“That bitch!” I snarled, loudly enough for Erinne to hear. Even though I was still in shock, I wanted some sympathy.

“Huh?” Erinne asked, taking out her earphones.

“That bitch, Smith! She said about my capstone that I’m not a real creative writer!”

Erinne narrowed her eyes. “That’s crazy! Your presentation was so good!”

“Thanks,” I spat. “God, I hate her!”

Erinne nodded.

“And I got a B!”

“Really? But your presentation was better than mine.”

“My GPA is ruined!”

Erinne sighed. “Wow, that sucks. But we’re graduating in a few months, anyway. It’s really not going to matter in the long run.”

“I just…I can’t believe she did that!”

Erinne shrugged and put one of her earphones back in. “Just remember, soon it won’t matter.”

Erinne seemed uninterested in commiserating with me further, so I planned to spend the rest of the evening sulking privately.

However, my self-pity was quickly interrupted by a knock at the door.

“Hey, guys! It’s Alex!” a friend of Erinne’s and mine called. “Dr. Smith and the rest of us are ready to go to dinner. You coming?”

Erinne took out her earphones and hopped off her bed. “You coming?”

I sighed.

“It’s free,” Erinne reminded me.

“I guess…”

* * *

What is creative writing? To a roommate who was a brilliant writer but who claimed she was  uncreative, I used to say that all writing is creative. And in a way, it is. All writing, from the worst fan-fiction story to Shakespeare’s masterpieces is creative in the sense that it is choosing words and putting them in an order that has never before been formed. From there, these sentences are arranged in a way in which they are unlikely to ever be arranged again. In the sense that all writing is forming something new, all writing is creative.

There is also, I would argue, a creativity in critical and analytical writing, particularly in the fields of poststructuralism and deconstruction, fields that I learned to love from my old professor, Dr. Smith. Say what you want about Derrida. He’s esoteric, dense, reflexive, and performative. But he is also creative. No one wrote theory like Derrida, and those that have tried it since usually just end up copying him instead of forging new ground. Derrida was a theorist, yes, but there’s also something poetic about his theory. He was—dare I say it!—a creative writer.

There is also, again I would argue, an element of social justice in many creative works in the so-called “canon.” Toni Morrison is praised for her rich characters and lyrical prose, but her stories also often center around the plight of African-American girls growing up in a culture that snubs their beauty and their minds. Is Toni Morrison a creative writer? You’d be hard-pressed to find a critic who’d say she isn’t. Is she an activist for social justice? Of course! She’s been very open, both in her novels and her public speeches, about her fight against racism. Does categorizing her as one—an author or an activist—negate the other? Of course not!

I often find myself drawn to writers who straddle the line, if there is any line to begin with, between social critics and creative writers. David Sedaris might make his readers laugh out loud, but he also subtly draws our attention to the U.S.’s class pretentions and cultural insensitivity. Judith “Jack” Halberstam, a professor of cultural studies who has written many books about the intersections between homophobia and capitalism, writes in a critical style that has been described as “playful,” but which I find poetic. Ani DiFranco plays guitar and sings lyrics about gender and class inequalities. The creativity, for this diverse array of people, is in how they compose their message through well-placed words and well-formed sentences. The subject matter, at worst, certainly does not detract from the superior writing. At best, it enhances the writing, allowing the writing itself to perform the message of the text. The reader isn’t merely told the message through a direct statement—“homophobia is bad”—or through the actions of a main character—Sedaris goes to France and doesn’t find the stereotypes he expected. The writing itself becomes an element of the message. (Ani DiFranco places her message within the legacy of a folk tradition, which her musical style and lyrics reflect.)

This isn’t an idea that I came up with myself. I actually learned it in my four years as an undergraduate creative writing major at a small, Midwestern university. I idolized my creative writing professors, and in doing so, I not only absorbed their wisdom regarding the craft of writing but also their social and political awareness. They wrote poems and novels and short stories, but they also read Foucault and were just as likely to talk about power and the panopticon in class as they were punctuation. They loved writing and words but they also had a sense of responsibility to the broader culture of which they were a part. One of my professors wrote creative nonfiction pieces about the impoverished American Indian reservation where he’d previously taught. Another professor was very open about her role in exposing a serial date rapist after a number of her female students had come to her for guidance and compassion after being assaulted. These were people who’s teaching I loved, whose creative works I respected, and whose social awareness I wanted to emmulate. I didn’t see any conflict between their creative writing and their activism.

Honestly, I still don’t.

The third and final installment of this piece appears here.