Coffee Break Read – The Development of ‘Creative Writing’

Just a thought…

Once upon a time, people told stories – and then they wrote them down. Sometimes they made up new stories and wrote those down too. People enjoyed the stories and would look forward to the next one.

Then some people began to wonder what made stories what they were, so those people took the stories to pieces and looked for patterns. They then declared that the patterns they found were what stories had to have.

Now people started thinking that every story had to have the patterns that had been found and they began to mutilate everything they wrote so it would fit those patterns.

Fortunately, a few people carried on writing stories as they always had – not caring about the patterns just telling a thundering good story whether it fitted any of the patterns or not…

Moral of the story: You can’t learn to write by studying literary criticism – you learn to write by reading fabulous books.