A Conversation on Creativity

I recently had a conversation via Twitter. (If you don't use this, and you're looking to market yourself to a social-media-conscious generation, then you should look into this.) The conversation centered around the use of the term "creative writing" to describe, well, Creative Writing.

The original poster believed that the term was a little arrogant because it implied that other types of writing were non-creative. I would like to formally disagree.

While the rest of the definition on Wikipedia is very piece-meal, I think the opening phrase is good.

Wikipedia:
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature [emphasis added]. ...

This is a definition from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now, SIL International), a group that focuses on the development, study, and documentation of language.

SIL International:
Creative writing is writing that expresses the writer's thoughts and feelings in an imaginative, often unique, and poetic way [emphasis added]. Creative writing is guided more by the writer's need to express feelings and ideas than by restrictive demands of factual and logical progression of expository writing.

I think the key concept that underlies the difference between Creative Writing and Professional (not, "non-creative") Writing is that there is an artistic or poetic nature to creative writing because it expresses personal feelings without the restrictions of professional writing. Professional writing has a host of guidelines (see, The AP Styleguide for verification); whereas, creative writing is not as limited in what it can and "can't" do. Thus the art that underlies it.

Creative writing, to me, is a means of getting to paper my thoughts, visions, dreams, and fears. It has a lot more to do with expressing myself than getting out an opinion or elaborating upon a professional topic. This blog, for example, is not creative writing, but it is certainly creative.