Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
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Common Forms of Creative Writing
Creative writing, an overarching umbrella term, is designed to uphold and justify literary subsets, genres, and sub-genres that combine literary and visual art, as they can contribute to creating a unique narrative form. Even within the most common and well-known genres of creative writing, literary art breaks down the most mundane barriers, bridging written word and visual art into one cohesive narrative for a broader, more enlightened experience.
This blog post will review a few common literary genres, focusing on how creative writing, literary art, and visual art are used in the examples provided. Some examples will coax us to look at the work further, encouraging a thoughtful literary analysis of the art. This post will aid in our understanding of how creative writing cascading umbrella can inform and inspire dozens of writers to create something unique within the mundane forms of art.
Fiction
Adult Literature
- A long, structured, complex narrative that uses an arrangement of writing techniques and styles, voices, and literary devices to create a big picture to invoke reliability, relatability, and an understanding of the characters in their ever-growing reality.
The City & The City by China Meiville
- The detective, the story's narrator, describes a crime scene with a distant but keen-eyed analysis. His stiff, seemingly emotionless persona indicates he has seen cases like this before, providing some background on his character. As the audience, we can trust the detective because of his descriptive account and his seniority or experience of the job.
- Literature Analysis: Reread the scene and notice how the other detectives and bystanders act around the narrator. How is the narrator describing the scene in a way that makes this moment feel ominous but intriguing?
Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart
- The narrator sets the mood by describing his feelings at that moment. We can infer that he knows a lot about pain and how our fight-or-flight responses can impact our need to survive. This should make us curious about what the narrator is going through and how he knows so much about this topic. Setting the scene, time, and place sets the tone for the book and puts us in the narrator's consciousness.
- Literature Analysis: Review the page and determine how the narrator describes the scene in a way that makes us believe he is experiencing a life-threatening event. Ask yourself if the words ‘you’ or ‘you’re’ make a direct and intimate connection with the audience. If so, why?
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Short Stories
- Short stories are precise and deliberate throughout the story, from beginning, middle, and end, tying topics together like puzzle pieces and forming a bigger picture.
- Each short story focuses on topics, characters, and narratives that are unrelated to each other but invoke a deep understanding of something meaningful to the story's development.
- This literary art focuses on specific topics and emotions to create a powerful, deep, and instant connection and understanding of the narrative within a short time.
Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway
- For instance, Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway depicts a couple with a deep, somewhat fickle discussion about an unspoken topic that seems to trouble them. The depiction of the train station signifies the couple's choices regarding the unspoken matter; do they move forward with the operation or not? How much of their lives will change after the operation? Some symbolisms in the story indicate what the couple is discussing. This technique of ‘show, don’t tell’ is strongly implied in the story. For instance, the hills that resemble white elephants symbolize breasts, hinting at the unspoken topic. A river between the hills indicates life. The beer hints at the couple's difficult decision, impacting the woman significantly.
- The couple's dialogue helps the audience infer what the story is about. The characters speak about what they are seeing, describing the scenery and justifying their actions and thoughts — making their decision all that important.
- Literature Analysis: Upon further analysis of the short story, what could the train station represent? Is it simply a train station, or does it symbolize something deeper? If so, what?
There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
- In this short story, the narrator speaks from a distant, all-knowing consciousness, describing the bustling interior of a family home. All day, robotics handle chores, vocally indicating every new task and tick of the hour. The lack of sentient life is soon revealed, though the means are speculative. The chaos beyond the home finds its way into the house, burning memories and dozens of robotics programmed to keep the house livable or alive.
- The mechanical, almost sentient house takes center stage, removing human intervention. The robotic dialogue makes the story even more eerie and mysterious, further indicating the lack of human existence. The narrator’s ghostly, emotionless detail of the unfolding scenes of life and death make the futuristic house more sentient than it was likely intended.
- Literature Analysis: Much of the story depicts an illusion of normality within chaos. Looking further, we can tell that sound is just as critical as silence, as the narrator, tone, and font design indicate. Does sound and silence have a deeper meaning to the story? How does it serve this story?
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Children’s Literature
- An engaging story, vivid illustrations, and character development are meant to capture a child’s imagination and attention. Extensive illustrations and text on large, durable pages improve attention and versatility for children. For young audiences with longer attention spans, the books read like novels, as the book is made up of age-appropriate text.
You Will Always Have Me by Todd Parr
- This simple narrative structure is told through word choices and visual art to attract young audiences. The bold colors paired with the large font improve young adults' understanding of the narrative and keep their attention. Combining the large text and simplistic choice of words with images and colors is a form of creative storytelling. The target audience is between 2 to 8 years of age.
Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Obsorne
- With a simple description, dialogue, and tone, the book is for children and YA readers with relatively short attention spans. The image is a great resting spot for young readers to look at. The visual art serves as a resting point for readers to rest their eyes and shift their awareness to a visual aid, guiding them through the words without having to interpret too much information at once. The targeted age group for this book is 6-8 years old.
Creative Nonfiction
Memoir
- A form of storytelling that describes an individual's experiences through emotional, vivid, and creative storytelling while keeping true to facts and events. This genre of literary art is designed to create intimacy and lore through creative and conceptual narration.
Breathe by Rita C. Robinson
- In my short memoir, Breathe, the narrative is structured around one crucial topic: breathing. The dialogue opens the story with a sense of urgency, urging the audience to ponder its relevance.
- Describing the scene, time, morning activities, and uniform is a method of detail to put the audience in the narrator's consciousness. As truthful as the events are, I remain aware of writing the story creatively, emotionally, and sensibly to invoke an understanding of a topic or health concern that some people may be unaware of.
- Literature Analysis: From further inspection of this scene, how is symbolism used in the story, and does it impact it?
Deaf Utopia by Nyle DiMarco
- In Nyle DiMarco’s memoir, he stays true to his family's experiences and deaf culture by writing an intense, emotional, and memorable narrative. His word choices, tone of voice, and narration also provide accuracy and creativity as he tells the story through American Sign Language (ASL), spelling, and prose writing. Providing additional information, like a definition to sign in ASL, clarifies the authenticity and significance of the story beyond the targeted audience.
Poetry
Free Verse
- A narrative structure that encourages freedom of creative thought and emotions through poetic writing, utilizing rhythm and tone, poetic devices, and stanzas. This form of writing can be deeply personal for the writer and reader.
light by Marquise Jackson
- This poetic free verse is structured like a spoken word, open to free thinking and rhythm. It feels loose, thus allowing the reader to feel the words on the page.
Shoulders by Naomi Shihab Nye
- The free verse reads like a single moment captured in time, initiating the importance of a small life that will live far longer than a moment. This well-crafted poem focuses on emotions and sensations to describe the world's weight on a man's shoulders.
Scriptwriting
Screenplay
- For a screen adaptation, a screenplay conveys imagination and artistic expression to create a story and plot centered on a fictitious world told from the characters and narrators' perspectives, dialogue, and experiences.
Shaun of the Dead by Edgar Wright
- This comedic screenplay introduces the characters with dialogue, multiple tones of voice, and a vague environment at a pub to place the audience at the scene. The narrator (or the camera), who is off-screen, clarifies what the audience sees and the characters are doing.
The Apartment by Billy Wilder
- This scene describes the environment and the character as a way to introduce the screenplay to arouse the audience's interest. It is meant to urge them to continue, to want to understand the importance of the character and what he is doing. The way the scene is written also provides a glimpse into this character's lifestyle and personality.
Playwright
- A compelling story and plot based on the characters and narrators' perspectives, experiences, and dialogue as they navigate their world for an on-stage performance.
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
- In this scene, the narrator describes Walter Lee Younger enough to instantly learn what he looks like now, who he is, and what he may be thinking about. As the dialogue unfolds, the audience understands Walter and Ruth live under the same roof, and it is early in the morning. We get a fairly stiff environment by how the characters speak to one another.
- Walter and Ruth’s names are uppercase because they serve as the characters in the play. This helps the actors or readers tell them apart, who is speaking, and where they should be placed on stage.
Fences by August Wilson
- The period, scene, and environment set the tone for most of the play, introducing the characters and their whereabouts to let the cast know where they are in the environment. The description and dialogue also tell the actors and the audience what to expect from the play, such as the period's mood, demographics, and culture.
- Bono and Troy are uppercase because they serve as the characters in the play. This helps the actors or readers differentiate them and know who is speaking.
In closing, we briefly studied some of the most common subsets and genres within creative writings vast umbrella. Despite how common genres like children's literature and free verse poetry are to most people, they use different writing techniques, designed to capture and reshape text and visual art to enable creativity, reliability, and emotions. The literary analysis prompted us to strengthen and broaden our critical thinking skills to sharpen our understanding of narrative techniques.
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“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience to his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his words” — Virginia Woolf
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Read a new or favorite form of literature that falls under a common subset as mentioned (fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and Scriptwriting), and write a literary analysis about it. Note the intentions of the literature, the narrative, tone of voice, point of view, description, symbols, and metaphors.
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