Description
Who is this strange being that is the creative writer? How can we understand the person behind the creative writer or what process a person may take to write creatively? Can we use this knowledge to nurture aspiring creative writers and even enhance the writing of already established creative writers? In The Psychology of CreativeWriting, we offer 20 chapters by top scholars musing on the key components of creativity writing: the writer, the text, the process, the development, and the education. These insights are bookended by our own analyses and thoughts.
We have both been fascinated by creative writing and creative writers for as long as we can remember. As a child, Scott would often peer into other worlds, either through writing stories about time travel or reading science fiction such as the Xanth series by Piers Anthony. Today, he works on stand-up comedy writing whenever he has the time, and he tries to sneak away from his work whenever he can to open up a psychological thriller or science fiction novel and escape into another time and place.
As for James, he always wanted to be a writer – he was writing stories by the fourth grade, always under the watchful eye of his first mentor, his mother. He continued to write, becoming a sports journalist at age 14 for local newspapers and slowly publishing his attempts at poetry, stories, humor, and essays in a wide variety of tiny magazines and journals. In college he studied under the famed novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle and realized he should find a day job. Continuing to write plays and musicals to this day (and with the very good fortune to see them often performed off-off-Broadway and around the world), James initially began studying creativity itself as a way to understand the creative writer.
We are not the only ones to harbor such fascination. A search on creative writers in PsycINFO returns 755 results; searches on creative mathematicians and creative painters return58 and97, respectively. Inaworld inwhich celebrities comeand go like exploding supernovas, thewriter has remained a constant. StephenKing, JohnGrisham, and J.K.Rawling have been stars for decades,with no sign of abatement. Literary giants (Joyce Carol Oates, the late John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth) continue to be published and be discovered.