 The term creative writing makes me uneasy. Sure, it’s a simple way of indicating a type of writing we associate with a novel, a short story, a poem, a screenplay, a song or an ad slogan. And it’s useful for distinguishing it from the kind of writing used in, say, a corporate quarterly report, a PowerPoint presentation, a scientific paper, a press release, a current events article, a marketing plan, an essay, a manual, a warning leaflet for a pharmaceutical product, instructions for a cell phone – in short, all the stuff that is customarily grouped under the heading of functional writing.
But are we really convinced by this distinction? Or that it’s even useful, given that it is loaded with commonplaces that are nothing if not debatable? Truisms like: creative writing is a calling. It is the locus of talent, of seduction, of experimentation, imagination, freedom, agony and ecstasy; whereas functional writing is merely a profession, a job – at times a tough job.
This dichotomy doesn’t work, because so-called creative writing is a tough job, too, and must take into account numerous restrictions. And functional writing can also be a calling, and can offer quite a bit of freedom. The differences are, in reality, far less marked than the labels suggest.
How do we classify, for example, Al Gore’s presentation of the risks of climate change, which is essentially a massive quantity of facts and statistics contained in a PowerPoint file. Yet it is done so effectively as to have completely changed the rules and rhetoric of the tool, not to mention focusing the international media spotlight on Gore, thereby allowing him to spread his message of environmental protection to hundreds of millions of people, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Do we really want to call the text of that presentation ‘functional writing’ just because it’s a PowerPoint file rather than a short story or a poem? How much do raw facts and data count in classifying these things? Shouldn’t we also consider the way in which they’re narrated and organized within a rhetorical structure that incorporates words, images of various types (graphs, animations, video) into a presentation comprised of gestures, expressions, tone of voce, knowledge and the presenter’s own personal style and history?
And how do we classify the making of the film that resulted from this presentation, An Inconvenient Truth? That is, the cinematographic narration of Gore’s travels as he delivered his presentation in person around the US and the world, developed in yet another medium of communication that combines words, images and actions, which was released with the brilliant ad slogan “The most terrifying film you will ever see” and which won two Oscars in 2007 for Best Documentary and Best Original Song.
Add to the dizzying mix of media the fact that it started out as a best-selling book, and we have a veritable Matryoshka doll of communication forms. The creativity lies in the entire system, in the structure that holds it all together. The creativity of words, spoken or written, derives from and depends on the interaction between the text and everything that surrounds it.
I am convinced of three things.
The first concerns writing itself. It seems to me that there is not much point in talking about creative writing as a specific, prevalently literary form of language usage, which implicitly suggests that there exists a form of writing that is not creative.
If we accept the definition of creativity given by mathematician Henri Poincaré (Science and Method, 1906) as the union of pre-existing elements in new combinations that are useful, then writing (and speaking, obviously) – that is, manoeuvring among the syntagms and paradigms of Saussure and Jakobson by assembling (how?) words (which?) to form one of innumerable possible discourses – is always and inherently a creative act. We sometimes forget this. We sometimes fail to honor, with all the awareness it deserves, the potential and the responsibility that the act of speaking or writing comports. Even by choosing to utter or not utter a single sentence, or to utter one sentence in favor of another in this context or that, we are making a choice that produces new meaning. And we do so, yes, creatively.
The second thing concerns what one writes about.
Here’s an example. In my son’s 7th-grade literature textbook, a charming section entitled ‘Creative Writing’ features nursery rhymes, short poems and so forth, and invites the student to try his or her own hand at limericks and rhyming verse.
It’s good stuff – there are Ersilia Zamponi’s plays on words and Gianni Rodari’s Grammar of Fantasy. It’s interesting and fun and therefore, I think, useful from the didactic standpoint, because activities that are interesting and fun tend to encourage attentiveness, participation and learning – and this applies to adults as well as children.
The ethologist Frans de Waal tells how even chimpanzees, when faced with a boring task like having to repeatedly distinguish colors and shapes, don’t learn very much. But as soon as there’s a possibility of creative interaction in the form of a screen or a joystick – that is, when the task becomes more fun – performance improves spectacularly.
The only thing about the textbook I disagree with, philosophically as well as didactically, is the title given to the section, ‘Creative Writing’.
On the one hand, it makes it seem as though creativity is a consequence, rather than the premise, of having fun, and on the other it appears to give permission to be creative with words, but only in those pages where the conspicuous point is to have fun, and not, for example, when dealing with the serious business of writing a summary, an essay or a research report. This discourages the use of creativity in the writing of any (and I stress the word any) text, deeming it admissible only at playtime, thereby perpetuating several dangerous misunderstandings: that creativity necessarily must contain an element of the bizarre, or that it must be transgressive and break the rules rather than invent new and better rules, or that it has more to do with fantasy than with constructive invention, or that one can be creative only when writing about ‘light’ topics, or composing fiction.
In my 35 years of professional life, I’ve had to write pretty much everything: advertising, short stories, essays, song lyrics, radio and television scripts, documents, invitations, commemorative texts, newspaper articles, press releases, new product names, instruction manuals, even the texts for telephone and electric bills and the endless quantity of notices that a bank sends to its clients. The greatest creative challenges were posed by the texts that would appear to have the least need, or that leave the least leeway for a creative interpretation.
So again, if we leave aside the preconceptions about weirdness and transgression and adopt the definition of Poincaré, we can easily see how the categories of new and useful can be applied to any text that is written well and serves its purpose.
Trust me when I say that communicating energy, orientation, passion and innovative challenge when writing a strategy plan, and then transmitting these things in an engaging and credible way such that the result is also, obviously, an excellent strategy plan is more difficult than launching a new perfume.
Investing a phone bill with logic, legibility, courtesy, comprehensibility and perhaps even a touch of grace, without betraying the message and purpose of the bill itself, is a much more complex task than making an appealing advertisement for mineral water or coffee or an automobile. With the phone bill, there’s no room for fantasy – there are only the right words to use and the proper meaning to communicate. And for precisely this reason, the way you frame a sentence, the choice you make between two synonyms or the layout of the text all acquire an extraordinary importance. You really have to push your mind.
If we could actually succeed in helping schoolchildren understand the joy and wonder to be discovered in the creative act of writing and speaking, and if we could explain that the written and spoken word, regardless of the topic, allow us to make choices through which we can express ourselves and provide at least a glimpse of our view of the world, then it might become easier to teach them how to write and speak well. By explaining that rules are tools for being creative rather than cages that impede expression. By telling them that knowing how to use words means knowing how to use thought, and that choosing words and manipulating them creatively means knowing how to articulate thoughts that are useful, that aren’t obvious, that enliven the mind and are charged with unexpected implications, that stretch beyond the prosaic, that engage and motivate and generate change.
The third thing is this: today, the verbal and the visual are mixed together with increasing frequency, whether in Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation or the pages of a newspaper, a web page, a graphic novel or the advertising we see everywhere around us.
The reasons for this progressive integration of words and images are various. Among them is the growing diffusion of screens of every sort, greater access to a greater range and number of images, the by now widespread practice of reading and watching simultaneously, the power that images have in showing us things quickly and synthetically, in capturing attention, in transmitting emotions with immediacy. Moreover, young people today probably see more pixels than ink, and so it is understandable that printed pages (including some scholastic textbooks) are starting to resemble web pages.
This is a cross-fertilization that transfers the rules that were originally developed by advertising to other contexts and other media, for it was the ad industry that first established the norms and processes for integrating words and images effectively in the small and costly spaces of the printed page and in the larger but still limited spaces of posters and billboards.
Seeing as this migration is fully underway, modifying and empirically applying the strategies and means of advertising in other areas, perhaps it might be interesting to go have a good look at what we’re dealing with.
The defining characteristic of ad writing is its lack of self-sufficiency. Words are an important ingredient in an advertisement, but they’re not the only one. Images, for example, play a key role in capturing attention (among other things) – by interacting with the text, they explain it, modify it or twist its meaning. But the most important ingredient is invisible, and that is the format, by which I mean the structure, in the logical more than the graphic sense, that configures words and images in the contained space of a page or poster or screen and therein establishes heirarchies, suggests sequential readings, lends recognizability and gives order by structuring the message as a whole in what Gestalt theory would call ‘good form’. There are several consequences of the lack of autonomy of ad writing. First of all, the quality of the writing is necessary but not sufficient for producing an effective final result. Secondly, good writing is defined strictly by its ability to integrate itself with the image within the confines of the format. Even the most brilliant title (or ‘headline’) that fails, however, to mesh with the accompanying image is a terrible headline, for it generates incomprehension. So, the question of whether or not a headline is good is relative, since it depends on the image associated with it, whereas a good novel is still good even if it has a boring cover and is printed with an ugly font on low quality paper. In closing, let’s look at an interesting demonstration of the interdependency of words and images in advertising: the same headline juxtaposed with different images carries significantly different messages (figures 1, 2); likewise when the same image paired with different headlines (figures 3, 4).
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|  | |  | | Capita così alla medesima immagine, accostata ad headline diverse (figure 3, 4).
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|  | |  | | The permeability of writing with respect to its context, and the consequent possibility of creating meaning by working not only with words but with that which surrounds them, constitutes in my view one of the most interesting creative challenges of the present time. To grasp it in all its richness, it would perhaps be useful to leave behind the traditional distinction between creative and functional writing, for at this point in time creativity belongs not only to the act of writing in itself, but rather to the entirety of its context, and to every field of application.
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