Writing is a way to put your knowledge and thoughts on a piece of paper. It also can be copying hollow words from a book or something else. But creative writing is something different from copying and memorizing. It is anything where the purpose is to express thoughts, feelings and emotions rather than to simply convey information.
According to “Stephan Harway”, “Creative writing is anything that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development and the use of literary tropes”.
Due to looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though they fall under journalism, because the content of feature is specifically focused on narrative and character development.
Creative writing can also be defined as “the ability to harness creative thoughts revolving inside one’s head and mind and put it into writing using very good sentence structures.”
According to the above definition creative writing entails more than storing imaginations because not all imaginations are creative thoughts. True creative writing might not be a learned talent, but the ability to tap inner creativity is possible for just about anyone.
In the light of above definitions, creative writing is the writing of those emotions and thoughts which arises directly from your heart. Creative writing is something which mostly depends on your thinking and imagination. Therefore, the words written by the pen of a creative writer are the index of emotional and mental condition of the writer. A perfect creative story or a poem describes the thoughts of the writer about the topic.
“Molana Hussain Azad” says: “Creativity is a gift of God which is very rare”. So, creativity is very precious thing. These are the emotions of a person during joys and sorrows.
A writer says that creativity is the power to extract stories from your environment and conclusions from the nature. This is the reason due to which most of novels and dramas etc are based on everyday life and problems.
The term creative writing is used to discern certain types of incentive or artistic writing from other general types of writing. This field is broad and includes many different formats and genres of writing. The broad and general description of it is purposeful in its effort not to limit the imagination of the potential writer, or that of the reader. Creative writing is totally different from other types of writing such as technical writing, scientific writing, or copy-driven journalism. The discipline of creative writing includes, but should not be limited to works of fiction poetry, personal memoir or autobiography, soy lyrics, plays and screenplays, and any mixture of the above.
By and large, writing is a skill that is innate to a person. Just like with other proficiencies, most types of writing often come easier to some people than to others. Therefore, it is often thought that a person cannot be taught how to write, especially creatively. Despite whatever natural talents for writing a person might have, those talents often need to be developed in order for the writer to realize his or her full potential in the craft. Learning how to write creatively must begin on the inside. A certain amount of individual experience, opinion, and innate sensitivity must be tapped when taking on the task of creative writing. It is an artistic expression, like painting or composing music. It is therefore subject to criticism, both constructive and disrespectful. This should in no way deter a person form writing creatively, or in any other way. Sometimes, artistic expression is done just for the sake of doing it. There does not have to be a reason to create something, and there does not have to be an explanation behind the creation. The personal expression is free.
“An excerpt from “Art of Creative Writing by Aftab Saqib”