Can Creative Writing Enhance Other Types of Writing?
Posted on | April 24, 2010 | 4 Comments
Can learning the techniques of fiction and creative writing enhance other types of writing? When we study creative writing, we learn how to structure stories, how to communicate their ideas. We learn how to evoke emotions, how to build characters and relationships between characters.
Let’s look to see how any of these skills might go well with other types of writing:
Sales Copy: The easiest way to build enough rapport with your customers is to tell them who you are, why you’ve created the product and tell stories about people who have needed and/or used the product. Knowing any of the fundamentals of creative writing listed above will make this task much easier.
Academic Writing: Much academic writing presents research and its conclusions to a limited audience, most of whom have at least some understanding of the arcane aspects of the subject at hand. Using visceral descriptions and observations can bring obscure facts alive, therefore give conclusions more power.
Business Writing: Unlike academic writing, business writing often has a broader audience, an audience that may not have knowledge of the matter at hand. It is often considered necessarily dry, more so in order to give details to an audience that doesn’t understand the subject. How much more powerful would it be to the end reader to read a report that told the story of the matter rather than one that coldly listed facts?
Technical Writing: Here we may run into a road block. Technical writing requires the writer to describe technology and processes in a clear cut way so that others who wish to use the technology or run the processes will know what they are doing. There is an assumption by the writer of knowledge in the reader in the area of what is being explained and therefore a list of procedures and/or explanations of detail seem sufficient. Again, though, how much easier on the reader, no matter how much prior knowledge they have of the subject, if the detail is presented as a story that can be followed about how the relationships between the technicalities grow?
So, can creative techniques enhance other types of writing? Yes.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.
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April 24th, 2010 @ 2:23 pm
Geoff, Love how you specify the ways that tools of the creative writing (both fiction and creative nonfiction) can be incorporated into other more professional types of writing to make it more engaging to the specific audience. Enough with the deadly boring in any kind of writing! Bravo! And Thanks.
Bobbye Middendorf
The Write Synergies Guru
April 24th, 2010 @ 8:14 pm
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April 25th, 2010 @ 12:43 am
Don’t know how to “build enough report” Geoff, but working on building enough RAPPORT LOL!
Anyway, I agree creativity can enhance any activity…:-)
I see you’re also using Kontera. How’s that going for you? (I just started it on my blog.)
Mtn Jim
Mtn Jim Fisher´s last blog ..Day Dreaming
April 25th, 2010 @ 10:38 am
Jim – Caught me. I am the type of speller who can spell cat three times in the same sentence and it will never look the same twice. Thanks for the correction!
As for Kontera, so far, I hate it, but I’m giving it a chance. (They tout this amazing contextual search technology and so far not one of the ads they put on my posts have had anything at all to do with the post at hand. They are mostly generically pulled words with a link to “learn more about blog” type adds.)