Creative-critical hybrids

Critical writing and creative writing are often considered to be separate and contrasting activities. The distinction between the two, which this chapter will unpick, rests on the assumption that creative writing is an imaginative and subjective activity, while critical writing is an interpretive, discursive and more objective activity. Historically, authors tended to identify primarily either as critics or creative writers. Even when they were both, they usually produced tests that were designed, in each case, to be either critical or creative in direction. Creative-critical hybrids collapse this polarisation of the critical and creative, and meld the two together in the same text. Such hybrid works contest the idea that creative work is only imaginative, and critical work only interpretive and discursive, and point to their symbiosis. They highlight the intellectual work that creative writing undertakes, and the way it engages with philosophical, cultural and political systems of thought. At the same time they suggest ways in which critical writing can break out of its conventions, and be enlivened through the adoption of creative writing techniques.