Introduction to being a creative writer in the introduction to fiction writing course: employing composition studies and the extracurriculum to teach an open-access approach to creative writing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite the individualised, empowering, and political nature of early developments in the instruction of creative writing, once creative writing instruction gained traction in higher education in the U.S., especially at the University of Iowa, teaching creative writing became more about the written product than the writing process. That shift made it so that today, the acceptance of a written artifact identifies one as a writer more than the act of writing itself; therefore, many students are now subject to curriculums that generally define them as writers through the completion of written artifacts and not the process of writing creatively. This article details an alternative curriculum, one informed by discussions on the writing process – including moments of inception and methods of creation – and not just the successful production of a written artifact, the very last (and not always necessary) stage of writing creatively. This project accomplishes this task using a lesser popularised history of creative writing, largely detailed in the histories of writing composition, writings from the extracurriculum, and best teaching and assessment practices in composition studies. Students in my open-access curriculum come away with over 30,000 words of creative writing and writing in reflective practice in a single semester.