ABSTRACT
The expansion of creative writing courses has been one of the most dramatic developments in the recent history of ‘English’ as a discipline. In the following pages, we move on to questions about how to think about ‘creative writing’ – about what exactly it is, how it relates to studying literature and why it might matter. In the chapter after this, we talk about how you might go about actually producing some creative writing (specifically a work of short fiction). Even if you are not interested in pursuing creative writing yourself, we hope that these pages might help to clarify the ways in which it has, for better or worse, changed the nature of literary studies. If climate change is the term for what is happening to the world’s weather, creative writing is producing ‘discipline change’ in literary studies.
