"Creativity and Collaboration: The Relationship of Fact and Fiction in Personal Writing"

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About the Author

Rachel Casey is an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. Her academic interests include the analyses of rhetorics involved in critical thinking, civic engagement, and feminist theory.

Contents

Introduction

Review of Literature on Creativity

Method and Approach

The Story

The Magazine

The Allegory

Conclusion

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

References

Introduction

I am eight years old. Outside scenery rushes past me through a car window—my first trip without my parents—but all I see on the drive from Florida to Missouri is my heart-printed journal. Inside, a story about a girl’s dedication to her family amid the Great Depression. Next, I am ten years old, and from where I sit at the school picnic tables, I listen to my fourth grade classmates engage in a high-stakes game of recess soccer, but my eyes remain trained on my faded blue notebook as I scribble a story about one boy’s quest to save the world. Then, I am eighteen, and after a long day at school, I climb into bed and pull out my laptop and continue to write a story about a made-up city, a girl’s journey, and a mysterious forest.

From an outsider’s perspective, it may appear that writing acts as a means of seclusion, and following along this same idea, the practices of creativity and the creative process have long been regarded as individual endeavors held to the extreme of being solely isolated in nature. Bearing this mindset, creativity then poses itself as an extremely unattainable end, the means to which can neither be planned nor practiced; further, in viewing the creative process as individual, one comes to the conclusion that creativity itself is of a divine nature (Howard, 55). In other words, anything marked “creative” also holds the stamps of “inspired” and, consequently, “unattainable.”