The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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Creative writing
However, one underlying principle, agreed with departmental heads beforehand, is to help these students begin to think more laterally in language – even more wildly – and to conceive of ideas and paradigms via the unusual route of
Writing Games and thought-experiments based on the creation of poems and fictions. What is striking is that, although some initial scepticism about these experiments in teaching and learning came from the scientists, they quickly realised that students were doing better in their writing, communicating their findings more clearly, and benefiting from human contact and creative play as researchers. Any residual scepticism was much more likely to reside within students and faculty in the humanities.
Our work was informed by an important movement called Writing Across the Curriculum. This movement grew in response to a perceived deficiency in literacy among university students in the s. It is now widespread – its advocates thinking of writing as a learning tool. Writing helps students synthesise,
analyse and apply course content. Students often use logbooks and journals,
and the idea, as in creative writing, is to become an active participant in your subject and that practice can create fluency. All this is coterminous with the discipline of creative writing, although it has to be said that, at some institutions, creative writing occupies a much more privileged position in terms of the status of both students and faculty. Writing in the Disciplines is part of the movement of Writing Across the Curriculum. It is based on the understanding that each discipline has its own conventions of language and style and that these conventions must be taught to students so that they might successfully participate in academic discourse. Reports, article reviews and research papers are the most commonly used assignments. At my own university, we experimented with using many creative writers and creative Writing Games to deliver these parts of the curriculum, and to do so with creative panache, teaching them as though they were performance art. External teaching tests have shown real progress, and a side-benefit of increased recruitment at a time when science is suffering in this respect.
In Britain in the early twenty-first century, the Royal Literary Fund went even further, and organised residencies for hundreds of creative writers to work at many UK universities. This imaginative enterprise was funded from royalties the author of Winnie the Pooh, AA. Milne, had left to the Fund. The bear of little brain bequeathed more than what might have been expected of him,
for in this way creative writing and the teaching of advanced rhetoric rejoined each other through a bold experiment. The purpose was not to teach creative writing, but to work with students on their academic and expository writing.
The thinking was rooted in the notion of not burning up the creative energy

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