Creative Writing Works

Excerpts from “The Rise of Creative Writing & The New Value of Creativity”

By Steve Healey (The Writer's Chronicle 41.4, February, 2009)

The kind of creative skills practiced in Creative Writing are valued because they're increasingly used as a productive force in the post-industrial knowledge economy. Books of poetry and fiction may not sell well, but creativity and “thinking outside the box” have become primary tools for production in the American theater of the global economy.

The familiar opposition between cultivated humanism and vulgar marketplace, between impractical creativity and practical profitability, is rapidly disappearing, and this disappearance has contributed to a Creative Writing boom. Undergraduate and graduate degree programs in creative writing have grown from 79 in 1975 to 790 in 2008, with no signs of slowing down.

The skills that have the most value in the new economy are often those practiced in Creative Writing – including the ability to manipulate language, to affect audiences in powerful ways, and to craft evocative stories, characters, images, and voices.

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Daniel Pink's article “The MFA Is the New MBA,” published in Harvard Business Review notes that “corporate recruiters have begun visiting the top arts grad schools.”

Pink is also the author of A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age , which argues that “the future belongs” not to the rational, left-brain number-crunchers but to the right brain thinkers, the “creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.”

In Thomas L. Friedman's perennial bestseller, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Friedman dubs our historical moment the “New Age of Creativity.” Explaining how American workers can succeed in the flat world, Friedman urges us to develop our creative talents, because these will make us “untouchables” in an economy geared more toward adding value to basic goods and services.

Richard Florida, whose much-referenced book, The Rise of the Creative Class , also makes bold claims for the value of creativity, calling it “the most highly prized commodity in our economy.” The World Is Flat and The Rise of the Creative Class are among a new wave of business-friendly tomes that examine how an increasing number of American workers are valued not for their ability to produce things but to produce concepts, emotions, lifestyles, and experiences.

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For information about the Creative Writing Concentration

contact Eric Nelson ( enelson@georgiasouthern.edu )

Department of Writing and Linguistics, 1118 Newton Hall, 478-0739