There are two distinct ways to account for a literary text: first, as determined by the large impersonal forces of history, economics, language, the unconscious, ideology, gender, race, class, etc.; second, as created by an individual human mind. The first is the way of the literary scholar; the second, the way of the writer. And the difference between these two is that the writer relies upon flexibility of judgment—the capacity for remaining detached, for shifting the attention, for imagining the possibilities—while the scholar commands a systematic method. For a writer, any text is a transcript of choices that records the movements of a creative mind; for a scholar it is a selection of evidence that justifies a determinate interpretation.

What is now called creative writing is a historical effort to treat literature as a creative activity rather than an object for interpretation. Its roots go back to the late nineteenth century when literary scholarship—then called philology and also relatively young—sought to apply scientific method to the study of literature, setting out to extract and systematize the knowledge contained in the literary canon by means of accurate observation, the verification of research, the certainty of findings, and the exclusion of error. Philologists preferred not to say anything at all about literature if they could not say something definitive. As one of their students observed, looking back upon a graduate seminar in Chaucer, "I do not recall that Chaucer’s poetry loomed large in the course save as regards his pronunciation."

Creative writing was founded upon the conviction that there might be something more to say about poetry. And so it owes its existence to an anti-scholarly animus that was originally directed against philology. The important point to make, though, is less historical than dialectical: as a field of study, creative writing is forever defined by its opposition to literary scholarship. Even when their specialty is the contemporary age, scholars tend to approach literature (in Allen Tate’s phrase) as if no one ever intended to write any more of it. Occasionally they are motivated by suspicion toward the ideology of the aesthetic: "there is something at once misleading and sentimental," says the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt, "about this saving invocation of art." More often, as W. B. Stanford notes in Enemies of Poetry, scholars seem interested in literature primarily as a branch of some other subject that interests them more. The tendency in literary scholarship is to divorce textual study from artistic creation, interpretation from technique. One without the other may yield a method, but not an exercise of full judgment. For judgment is the habit of mind by which a thing is perceived as a whole. Methods exist for reducing it to a selection of relevant and manageable details.

Creative writing was established to heal this divorce. It emerged during a sixty-year period from about 1880 to 1940 as a fight against the current in the academic study of literature. The character of this fight varied from school to school, but it was not merely various. At every school where it was waged the principle was fundamentally the same: creative writi ng conceived literature not as a branch of some other subject but as a thing in itself; not a corpus of knowledge, but a living experience. And wherever it appeared, the study of writing arose as a challenge to any other conception of literature. Historically speaking, creative writing is the name that might be given to any effort to shape the literary judgment by combining the content of literature and the act of it.

Originally creative writing had more in common with literary criticism and English composition than it has today. All three were allies in the campaign against literary scholarship. Creative writing in fact evolved out of the genre of English composition that was taught at Harvard starting in the 1880s, and it reached its maturity at Iowa in the 1930s when it was installed in the curriculum of a graduate school of criticism. At both universities, the goal was to restore literature as a complete process; the idea was to reattach an understanding of literature to the use of it. "If all went well here below," said Barrett Wendell, doyen of Harvard composition, "the ideal end of the study of literature would be . . . the making of it." If we ever hope to understand literature fully, agreed Norman Foerster, founder of creative writing at Iowa, "we are to study it from the inside, we are to see it, so far as possible, with the eyes of the creative artist."

The ideal end of philological scholarship by contrast was the making of scholarly expertise. Anyone who hoped to be a scholar was expected to study the subject from the outside, with the eyes of the scientific investigator. An examination of literature from the creative point of view was laughed off as unsystematic, dilettantish popularization. Thus creative writing was formed at least in part by being excluded from the professionalization of literary scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although creative writing itself was professionalized in the 1960s, by then it had already been secured as a retreat from scholarly professionalism. Today writers are hired and promoted in academe on the basis of their writing—it is their equivalent of serious research—and yet even so they have been less successful than academics in other fields at devising institutional peer-review mechanisms for legitimizing their own work and excluding that of others. Although anyone who wants to teach writing must be professionally recognized as a writer, no one must teach creative writing in order to publish creative writing.

Complaints about the professionalization of the writers’ workshop, accordingly, miss an important point. There is little question that academic professionalization has influenced contemporary literature (and not always for the best), as such critics as Joseph Epstein, Dana Gioia, Bruce Bawer, Greg Kuzma, and R. S. Gwynn have argued. But this is only one side of the story, which can never be more than half true without the other side. Unless professionalism is conceived merely as writing for publication rather than for oneself—finding a form for what one has to say, instead of being content to scribble in a journal—the lesson of creative writing’s history is that there is a genuine alternative to professionalism, the continuing existence of which is one reason why creative writing has made an incomplete success of professionalizing itself. Creative writing contains the promise both of righting itself and reintegrating the study of literature. This is usually overlooked by those who complain about (even by those who apologize for) creative writing.

Such a promise is to be found nowhere else in the literary and academic culture. The original partners of creative writing have become specialized: English composition is focused closely upon writing appropriate to the world of practical affairs, while criticism has been elevated to critical theory. Not so creative writing, which remains an enterprise for bringing study and practice, the understanding of literature and the use of it, into one play of judgment. The program for doing so is not always adequate to the task. And too sometimes the nature of the enterprise has not been fully grasped, and its backers have nodded long enough to neglect the study of texts—especially texts that are more than a few years old—in favor of sheer practice. Even then, however, the coherent view of literature that sits at the bottom of creative writing has not been abandoned; it has only been neglected. In creative writing, the study of the content of texts is joined to the act of creating them, and there will a place for it in the culture as long as literary scholarship puts these things asunder.

In most English departments today, the study of texts goes on in one set of classrooms while the writing of them is under discussion in another set. The picture of literature that students get as a consequence is incomplete and defective. Content without act leads to passive reception, the magical assumption that meaning and value are ready at hand, to be obtained without struggle. In literature classrooms this usually takes the form of talk about "themes." Since little attention is paid to how themes are constructed, however, students have a difficult time discovering themes for themselves. The result is one with which most teachers of literature are familiar: no matter how warmly they are urged to arrive at an independent view, students end up (to use their word for it) regurgitating the teacher’s view. The fault belongs not to them but to a way of dealing with literature in which meanings are labeled and classified in isolation from the struggle to give meaning to anything.

Contemporary literary scholarship is no more likely than nineteenth-century philology to end this isolation. The real name of this scholarship is interpretivism: not the interpretation of texts as such, but a creed that rewards a partial reading of a text by praising it as sophisticated. Truth to the whole text is not the aim of interpretivism—it is sophistical rather than philosophical—and the worst a contemporary scholar can be accused of is a lack of theoretical sophistication, unself-consciousness, being out of date, oversimplifying, serving the dominant powers, or not breaking with tradition, although truth sometimes demands all of these.

The aim of interpretivism is to practice a method; the first problem for a literary scholar is what "approach" he or she is going to adopt. This is far more important to a scholar than questions such as: What effect is this text trying to achieve? By what means? Can I do it? Is it worth doing? There is no method for answering such questions, which require different answers for different texts and hence call for flexibility of judgment. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that contemporary scholars are less interested in making sense of literary texts than in demonstrating the scope and ingenuity of their "approach"—deconstructive, historicist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist—or perhaps themselves. They are more absorbed in working a new interpretive machine than in interpreting the mind that is embodied within any literary text.

The requirement that every student of literature must have an "approach" to interpretation is really the insistence that texts must be approached from a preconception. And politically this is reactionary. Like most forms of reaction, though, interpretivism neutralizes itself by losing touch with the human reality. Despite its boast of theoretical sophistication, in actuality it is theoretically naive. It is infinitely regressive without even knowing that it is. If the first question to be asked in confronting an intellectual dilemma is what "approach" to it is going to be adopted then the choice of an approach becomes itself an intellectual dilemma which—by the logic of this argument—can only be undertaken once an approach to it is found, which in turn becomes a dilemma requiring a prior approach; and on and on.

Nor does this seem an especially flexible and effective method for solving real problems. What ought to be done in Bosnia? If I had the power to do so, would I enact into law my views on abortion against the will of the majority? Why not, if I think they are right? Should I marry so-and-so? First let me put on the thinking-cap of my ism (though I’m going to need another cap to decide which ism to put on. . .). Unable to solve human problems, interpretivism delivers them to an ether of pure abstraction, where bodiless interpreters waffle eternally between "approaches."

The effect upon literary study is not hard to guess. To counteract its tendency to abstraction, interpretivism opts for a rigidly mechanistic view of literary creation. The text is understood as the result of unseen forces—in society, the times, the structure of the language—that produce it. Since this claim cannot be pushed too far without becoming self-refuting (is the claim itself a product of unseen forces?) it is taken as axiomatic. In practical interpretation, the "approach" is not tested; since it is assumed to be true, it is merely corroborated. The whole point in contemporary scholarly interpretation is to provide a selection of evidence to corroborate a preconceived view.

At its best scholarship encourages a deeply skeptical turn of mind. Scholars are trained to take nothing on appearance or another’s say so. The very idea of acquiring knowledge implies the rigorous testing of assumptions, the correction of mistaken views, the revision of previously held theories, the junking of worn-out knowledge—what is known in the philosophy of science as methodological falsification. Contemporary literary scholarship by comparison is founded upon what might be called the principle of methodological verification, although literary scholars prefer the name "hermeneutics of suspicion." And this is fitting. Instead of skepticism, the current scholarship encourages a pervasive suspiciousness of mind. The scholarly interpreter ransacks a literary text in search of evidence to confirm his suspicions, and anomalous data are simply ignored. As a cognitive style, the current scholarship is unyieldingly rigid. And it is at odds with the suppleness of mind demanded by a genuinely creative engagement with literature.

The only real alternative to interpretivistic rigidity on the academic scene today is creative writing. It is not without defects of its own—many teachers of the subject tend toward an instrumentalist view of it, thinking of literary notions and principles merely as instruments for turning out a new piece of writing—but these defects are not in the bloodstream of creative writing. Nor is what David Dooley has called the "workshop aesthetic" a lasting problem. Aesthetic fashions (like fashions of every other sort) come and go. What is most likely to betray the promise of creative writing is the neglect of literary study altogether.

In Writing Fiction, R. V. Cassill coined the term "reading as a writer" for the kind of study that distinguishes creative writing from on-the-job literary training on the one hand and literary scholarship on the other. Good writers are interested in something more than the application of successful literary formulas, and so they must study textsin addition to principles. But unlike scholars they aren’t particularly interested in determining the sources of literary texts. Above all they are interested in how texts are made—how the parts fit together to form a whole—which means they are committed to the view that a text might have been made otherwise than it is. "A writer reading must be aware," Cassill says, underlining every word, "that the story exists as it does because the author chose his form from among other possibilities." A writer’s literary study is founded upon a belief in the freedom of the creative mind to determine for itself the form it will take.

In a recent issue of Common Knowledge, Gary Saul Morson brilliantly sets forth the true meaning of creative freedom, contrasting it to the determinism of much literary scholarship. Discussing the ideas of Bakhtin, Morson argues that human action "cannot be exhaustively described in terms of the conditions under which it arose, people are not just the product of their biology and biography, and the world allows for real surprise." In the hands of a great writer, that which is merely given in human experience is created anew and by this means transformed. Literature is thus the record of creative triumph over material conditions.

To be suspicious of creativity is to doubt the human capacity to transform the given. This is the way of much literary scholarship. By the same token, however, to neglect the study of literature is to collude in the suspicion of creativity. And this is the way in which creative writing abandons its historical mission of standing athwart the deterministic current in literary scholarship. There is in human beings a longing to transcend the conditions of their existence, to create the meaning of their own lives; and creative writing appeals directly to this longing. This probably explains why it is, as William Harrison once observed, "the only real growth area in American literary education." Scholars of literature appear to believe no longer in the transcendent power of human creativity, but young people do; and that is why they are increasingly drawn to classes in creative writing.

"The teaching of writing," Wallace Stegner could not say often enough, "is Socratic." By this he seems to have meant that, like Socrates, the writing teacher is a midwife, assisting at the birth of a student’s creation and checking it for signs of life. The method behind such teaching—what is now called the workshop method, if it is right to call it a method—was described by Plato 2,300 years ago as "benevolent disputation by the use of question and answer without jealousy." The teaching of writing, in other words, is Socratic in being an invitation to participate in a conversation. For young writers a teacher serves as a prompting to write not merely to express themselves but to address another mind. Creative writing is dialectical rather than interpretivistic; its aim is not the narrow sophistication that results from cultivating a single point of view, but the full participation of mind that is demanded when a conversation is taken in earnest.

And in this way creative writing is not merely the practice of writing. It is also a mode of literary study where literature is defined as an activity of judgment, of deciding for oneself among possibilities, and study is defined as attending to something more than the evidence of one’s "approach." At its best creative writing is an initiation into what the late Michael Oakeshott referred to as the conversation of mankind. Young writers, that is, are urged to add their voices to an uninterrupted continuity of literary speech. Unless literature is open to new voices it is a museum where everything is hushed. But unless older voices are also permitted to be heard, literature becomes a riot in which everyone shouts at once and no one is sufficiently attached to anyone else to pause and listen. The lesson of creative writing’s history is that if the writers do not attend to literature no one will; certainly not the literary scholars.