Cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary

Abstract

A physicist, an historian, a psychologist, and a creative writer walk into a bar. The punchline is: a gathering like this is not that unusual. Creative writing involves a dynamic exchange of knowledge, drawing on and contributing to other areas of human understanding. In the case of the ‘cross-disciplinary’ this means delving into these areas and using what is found to the writing at hand, while in the case of the ‘interdisciplinary’, it means incorporating elements of what is found and altering the writing in some way. So, a story featuring information from biology versus a poem in which the shape of lines is based on the whorl of a seashell. A field identified by its creative application of the written word, creative writing has sometimes been in search of an educational identity, attached as it has been to the study of literature or the study of theatre or the study of film. But the distinctiveness here is the particular combination in writing of the imaginative and the intellectual, a domain competency found in creative writers, but not one that divides the practice and the results of it from other areas of human endeavour. Creative writers observe, collect, consider, imagine, associate, speculate, apply, question, discover much related to fields vastly different from their own as well as in those, such as the study of literature, or theatre, or film or music, cognately congruent with their own. In this there is a complex, fluid activity of exchange, forms knowledge-to-knowledge, writer-to-reader, expressed in works that appeal as much because they touch many aspects of human life, real and imaginary, as they express a single way of responding to this.