Modern Creative Writing – Resist or Evolve?

Did you know that in the 18^th century, stories could only be printed and published in England if they were true? Powerful religious influences at the time otherwise deemed stories as ‘lies’ and thus ‘evil’. You can see the effect of this in the book titles published at the time, and how they suggest the story belongs to a real person, whose experiences actually happened, such as:

• ‘Robinson Crusoe’ by Daniel Defoe (1719)
• ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift (1726)
• ‘Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded’ by Samuel Richardson (1740)
• ‘Joseph Andrews/Shamela’ by Henry Fielding (1742)
• ‘The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling’ by Henry Fielding (1749)
• ‘Cecilia’ by Fanny Burney (1782)
• ‘Camilla’ by Fanny Burney (1796)
• ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ by Laurence Sterne (1759)

The value of fictional stories told as ‘novels’ was in flux, and wouldn’t be defined until the 19^th century. Thus the irony was that writers had to claim their story was true in order to avoid being called a liar!

We’ve come a long way since then. We’ve experienced developmental eras such as Romanticism and Modernism, we’ve experimented with style such as Stream of Consciousness and Gothic, we’ve even created new genre such as Young Adult and Climate Fiction.

Since the rise of television and movies, and now social media, we’ve also become a very visual culture. We want to be shown, not told about characters, so we can imagine and deduce our own conclusions about them. Gone are long passages at the start of stories, telling of a particular character or place. We want to infer a character through their actions and decide for ourselves whether what they are doing is interesting enough to read on.

There are many techniques writers can use to make their creative writing ‘modern’ in this way, such as focusing more on action, dialogue, and internal thought to tell a story, rather than detailed descriptions and summarising. There’s some free advice for writers on my Writing Rockface post ‘The Over Blight’, such as how to identify when certain writing devices don’t belong in a narrative at a given point, which can risk over-telling, over-showing, over-writing, over-explaining or over-poeticising.

Still, all evolution commonly encounters resistance because it’s natural to value the status quo, and I often see this when mentoring or editing clients who reference ‘the classics’ in order to justify their creative writing decisions.

Classics are classics for their resonance of ideas and themes, for their cultural importance or groundbreaking contributions, for the way they offer deep explorations into what it means to be human. At the same time, since storytelling tastes constantly change as our lives also change, creative writing decisions must also change. Thus many older classics can be both highly valued and written with too much detail and wordiness by today’s standards.

I love how language evolves over time (see my posts ‘I Fear Me The Worm, How The Meanings Of Words Change‘, ‘Words Reveal Who We Really Are‘ and ‘The Throwaway Culture of Forbidden Words‘). Much to my teenagers’ distress, my favourite trendy words right now are ‘mid‘ and ‘OG‘.

Laying out a book in InDesign recently for a publisher, I had to create multiple template boxes to resemble text messages – they are such an important element of modern life, the book layout demanded a replication of reality.

But who knows if any trend will stay or go, and who knows how creative writing will continue to evolve. All we can be certain of is that it will, and writers can either resist that or evolve with it.