The Creative Writing Compass

The Creative Writing Compass presents a dynamic navigational instrument for creative writers and those learning to be creative writers, providing a method for developing and advancing knowledge of creative writing. Award-winning novelist Graeme Harper explores the many fluid interactions of the imagination and the physical acts of writing. He includes observations and approaches that can be personalized to assist with writing decisions.

This distinctive guide to the practice of creative writing and to its critical understanding is based in the actions of creation and in each individual writer’s responses to those actions. The ’compass’ refers to the range of outcomes produced in creative writing - from finished works to the experiences creative writers have while writing - as well as to the range of forces, influences, and meanings that any writer is likely to encounter along the way.

The Creative Writing Compass is a guide to the consideration, progression, and completion of creative writing projects, providing ways of thinking about work-in-progress as well as ways of determining and reflecting on end results.

Graeme Harper is Professor of Creative Writing and Dean of The Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan, USA. He is Chief Editor of New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. An award-winning fiction writer, publishing as Brooke Biaz, his recent books are Stimulus, Intention and Process in Creative Writing (2024) and the novel Releasing the Animals (2023).