ABSTRACT
Historically, Creative Writing is a field that doesn’t dialogue closely with technology: students and programs tend to focus on the more established forms of writing and publishing. In a 1992 article for The New York Times titled The End of Books, Robert Coover stated that “writing students are notoriously conservative creatures. They write stubbornly and hopefully within the tradition of what they have read. Getting them to try out alternative or innovative forms is harder than talking them into chastity as a lifestyle,” a claim that I find true even today, more than 30 years later. However, as any software engineer or experienced digital humanist will tell you, any system needs updates. It is impossible to keep everything working without dealing with changes. In a field such as Creative Writing, the idea of something new is intrinsic to everything we do. What we actually see, in students and lecturers alike, is that this “newness” is mostly related to the content, not the tools. The problem with this stance is that there might be content that is impossible to create—and/or understand—if you don’t explore new tools. There will always be experimentation, but the digital development forces us to rethink how literature is understood (by those writing, teaching, researching, and reading it). The digital side of Creative Writing hasn’t been a novelty ever since computers were invented: there has always been someone playing with computers and what they mean for writers and readers. The difference is that it is inescapable now. In this chapter, I offer a personal view on recent technological developments and how they impact academic Creative Writing, using my experience as a lecturer in Brazil and proposing a link between Creative Writing and Digital Humanities as a promising way to understand recent (and future) creative changes. I also offer a commented sample Digital Creative Writing class schedule. Hopefully, by the end of this chapter, we will understand the relationship between literature and digital technology a little better, and this will inspire us to change the outlook for the future of Creative Writing programs and their interdisciplinary collaborations.
