"Creativity and Collaboration: The Relationship of Fact and Fiction in Personal Writing"
Download PDF About the AuthorRachel 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 |
ConclusionThrough my data collection and analysis, I observed collaborative creativity in action, supporting the concept originally proposed by researchers Vygotsky and Dyson. Creativity is neither individual nor exclusive; rather, it is a process which involves many, an amalgamation of one’s past, present, and future states. At seven, I combined my physical life and locale with J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world. At eleven, I combined the structure of Discovery Girls magazine with my own “fashion sense” and perceived trends. At seventeen, I combined my innermost feelings and questions with an imagined world and my favorite writers’ stylistic techniques. These findings dually support Rebecca Moore Howard’s previous research on collaborative pedagogy and her assertion that collaboration does not mean copying but rather working with someone or something to achieve amplification of voice and expansion of ideas. An extension of this conception of collaboration to the realm of creativity and personal writing can be seen in all three of my included writing samples, as my experiences in life combined with the publications of other authors worked together to produce something new. Through AIIM’s components of conceptual collaboration, I was able to identify specific elements of the collaborative process as used in professional and corporate environments, thus relating the established practice of collaboration to a new discipline: fiction writing. I found my pieces to exhibit actions, such as mediation, participation, and asynchronous collaborative behaviors. Whether it be another’s created world, structural format, or stylistic technique, my personal writing took hold in experimentation with existing work. I neither plagiarized nor copied but in basing my stories in something I knew, I found a greater ability to explore and grow. Further, my analysis builds upon the standpoint that creativity is not of divine nature but rather a product of synthesis and, as coined by Jason Ranker, “everyday creativity.” Ranker proposed the amalgam of elements from one’s “material and social environment” when one engages themselves in any form of creative enterprise. In my personal writing, I can see this proposition as holding merit. As stated previously, one draws from what one knows, and due to the observation that humans are future-oriented beings, we are constantly taking our world—ourselves—and crafting new scenarios based upon the “what if”’; it is an employment of both mediation and reflection. In my Harry Potter-themed short story, I combined my real-life friend and J.K. Rowling’s make-believe world to satisfy my seven-year-old “what if” scenario: what if I lived in a world where wizards existed and I could wield magic? The answer to my question took a ten-paged story: “I Am Magic.” These interactions observed between the material and social, fact and fiction, support the proposition for the inclusion of creative practices and personal writing into the broader theory of collaborative pedagogy. Writing is a social process; writing employs the constant interaction of outside sources (situations, publications, people) to create a new and original product. Promoting the association of creativity and collaboration is important to society as it will help grow a new generation of readers and writers unhindered by the thought of being unoriginal for recognizing the derivation of certain ideas. Further, collaborative processes, as shown in face-to-face collaborative ventures, enhance thought and production. Acknowledging fiction writing as an asynchronous collaborative endeavor encourages the writer to recognize and utilize both the present life experiences, tapping deeper into one’s psyche, and existing authored works in order to foster motivation and encourage exploration. This acknowledgement, bringing the recognition of collaboration to the forefront, also gives “non-writers” a chance to witness the multidisciplinary relevance of creativity. With the traditionally labeled “creative writing” shown to be collectively collaborative rather than a means of individual giftedness, it can be shown that engineering solutions or business strategy sessions are as creative as fiction writing. Creativity, through its association with collaboration, presents itself as a universal endeavor. Through simply living and experiencing, one gathers creative potential to use in any environment. In drawing attention to the accessibility of creativity, children have the opportunity to grow up with the knowledge that they are creative no matter what genre they choose to produce, offering benefit to society through the development of future-oriented innovators and the contributors of new ideas. |