What is “Creative Writing”? Different Questions and Answers

There may be different answers to the question of what creative writing really is. Creative writing, in the comprehensive sense, encompasses all three levels of “writing”, “academic discipline”, and “scholarship”. As an activity of writing practice, it has gone beyond the core of “literary writing”; different writing styles have been derived or permeated. As an academic discipline, its main objective is to nurture creativity and creative writers. It forms a disciplinary system consisting of a curriculum system, pedagogy, academic degrees, etc. In terms of scholarship, it mainly refers to creative writing studies, which includes an independent realm of research and a system of knowledge that adopts new research models and other approaches, which serves to achieve the practical activities and academic objectives of creative writing. Compared to other mature academic disciplines, creative writing is in a stage of growth; therefore, its presence remains unstable on all three levels, thus leading to the repeated question of “What is creative writing?” and the difficulty for the answer to be consistent.