"Going to See the Elephants: Our Duty as Storytellers" by George Garrett.

Garrett, George. "Our Duty as Storytellers." Creating Fiction. Julie Checkoway, ed. Cincinnati: Story Press, 1999.

In this chapter, Garrett says storytelling has "magic and mystery at the heart of it" (2). The creative process is something that people still don't understand and breaks any rules we might think up about it. The process of writing is creative, and no one knows what will make them feel creative until they give it a shot, or to follow the "original impulse." Garrett says our onlly responsibility as a creative writer is to tell the story as "honestly and accurately as possible" (3).

This might be one glaring difference between those who study writing as composition, and those people who see it as a creative process. While I'm generalizing here, it seems compositionists feel compelled to break down the process and explain it through theory and process. Creative writers seem to want to shrug and say, "I have no idea how I'm doing it. But I'm doing it." However, there is still correlation between the groups, as creative writers still break down the process as craft techniques -- character, theme, point of view, conflict, etc. -- while compositionists might see it more as "focus" (similar to theme), development, organization, style (same here for creative writers), etc.

Another similarity between compositionists and creative writers is the need to feel the audience is swayed somehow by reading the work. In composition I have heard this described as "appeals," or appealing to a reader's ethos, pathos, and logos in order to be effective. Garrett puts the emphasis in this chater on ethos, or emotion, saying the writer should "call up and to appeal to the emotions of our audience (one reader at a time) ... That is our currency as hunter-players, the universal coinage of laughter and tears" (3).