Genres of Creative Writing

In some ways, it makes no sense to speak of creative writing in terms of categories. In the first place, all writing is creative. And you might create your own forms, or mix them together in exciting new ways-writers do it all the time.

But knowing the traditions is a good way of learning how to break them.

So here are some basic descriptions of categories, with some of their special features and challenges. Try working in a form that you've never used before!

    Fiction: This form includes novels and short stories. Fiction is a prose form, meaning that lines aren't broken up.

    Poetry: Poems can be any length, from one word up to book length and beyond. Breaking the lines at significant points is one way that poets distinguish their work from prose. Poems may or may not adhere to traditional structures of rhyme and rhythm.

    Song lyrics: Could you set some of your poems to music? How might that change the way you write poems?

    Playwriting: In writing a play, you have to consider how the characters will interact with the artificial setting that the stage creates. Think about how you'd convey information non-verbally-through body language, clothing, set design, etc.-as well as verbally. Would there be music, offstage sounds?

    Screenwriting: As in playwriting, think about non-verbal language. Also, how would the camera move? Would the scene be filmed close-up or at a distance? How would you "cut" from one scene to the next? What kind of background music, if any, would you choose?

    Autobiography: The story of your life? Well, yes and no. Autobiography, because it depends on memory, can never be strictly true. Sometimes it's exciting to play around with the failings or confusions of memory, rather than just trying to force out the facts. Autobiography also doesn't have to cover your whole life. You could write about a special year, week, or hour in your life.

    Multimedia Writing: Anything goes in this exciting new field. For instance, if you're writing a story for CD-ROM or the Web, you can create hypertext links between different sections. This means that your reader doesn't have to go through the text in any set order: each reader chooses a different path, and so creates his or her own version of the story. You can include images, video, sounds, fields for readers to write in their own text...and that's just the beginning!