Experimental Writing

In college, I took a class called Experiments in Creative Writing. The class was frustrating to me because I had one question which was never answered: Is our creative writing experimental for ourselves or for the world?

Every writer has a personal style and usually has an all-encompassing central idea that guides the majority of their writing. I, for example, prefer third person stories that deal with people or societies with conflicting ideals. As such, if I were to write an first-person autobiographical narrative, that would be a large experiment for me. However, that was what 90% of my classmates wrote for any creative writing assignment, so it would hardly look experimental to the teacher.

Doing "experimental creative writing" is different. If you want to do something that has never been done before, you have to know everything that's ever been done before. Every time I thought I came up with something new (i.e. something I've never seen before), it has already existed, and was at least talked about by some Greek guy who's been dead for a few thousand years.

This latter form of writing is usually a waste of time. Writing is an art form older than most things in human history. It has been explored and honed into the forms we have over millenia. They exist for a reason. It is hard enough trying to find something that has never been tried and can still be called writing. If you can find one of those things, I am highly doubtful the experiment will be successful. There's probably a good reason it's never been tried before.

Despite all of this, I definitely support experimenting with your own writing. For one thing, you can never know what you'll like or excel at until you try it. For another thing, it is very easy to get stuck in a rut and keep rewriting the same stories. It will be a welcome break for you (and perhaps your readers) to do something completely different.

Try something new. At the very worst, you'll hate it and throw it away. At the very best, you could find a new love that you are passionate about.