Introduction to the paper raises the questions: what are the causes of today’s crisis faced by the “traditional,” which has lost its creative character, and if there are ways out of this crisis. Materials and methods. When searching for the answers to these questions, the study relies on the comparative analysis of the sources and shows how Russian teaching methodology experts of the 20th century solved the “essay problem,” what tasks were offered for the text written by students to be an original “answer” in their dialogue with the literary text. Bibliography overview. A whole host of the sources used impart the character of an analytical review to this part of the paper. It aims to convince the reader that the focus on “creative reading” (Abakumov) and “creative writing” (Abakumov) was one of the leading trends in the methodology of the 20th century. This section states that the literary creativity of students nowadays can and should be supported with digital tools. Digitalization of modern literary education, including the application of new creative tasks in the educational process, is a condition for its development in the 21st century. Results. This part of the paper presents possible multimedia creative tasks (podcast, book trailer, longread, video poetry, and others) and indicates that the latter performed using IT tools are not a rejection of conventional creative tasks but rather their development and transformation in the digital environment. The proposed thesis is illustrated by referring to fanfiction and showing what traditional creative task forms preceded fanfiction. These tasks (as opposed to writing a traditional essay) are shown to become valuable and meaningful for the students because they are characterized by convergence and participativeness. It is through these properties of the task’s students are involved in the participatory culture within which the texts of fiction live today. This section concludes that the proposed system of creative multimedia tasks should further be discussed, experimentally tested, and adjusted based on the testing results. In conclusion, according to the teaching methodology experts of the 20th century, who talked about student creativity as a necessary condition for understanding a literary text and a productive dialogue with it, the methodological science objectives to be set concerning the issue presented in the title of the paper are identified. These include: creating a glossary of terms that defines possible creative tasks of a multimedia nature and generating methodological recommendations that describe an algorithm for their development and the technology for including them in the educational process. Keywords: traditional and multimedia creative tasks, value and meaning, convergence and participation, fanfiction, classification of multimedia creative tasks