It's Called Creative Criticism

And no, it has nothing to do with giving constructive feedback

The Light in William Styron’s Darkness Visible

Happy Sunday, Writers at Work!

I encourage everyone to submit to M. E. Rothwell’s Substack, The Books That Made Us. It goes beyond the usual tell-us-your-favorite- or career-shaping book prompt and asks us to consider the books that stay with us, maybe even haunt us. It’s a great guest-post opportunity!

Before you do (!), I want to share a bit about the subgenre that this essay and all similar essays fall into: creative criticism.

The best part about writing on Substack—unlike other platforms—is that the quality of writing is so high. It’s like an M.F.A. program in that it can show you the best examples of various genres of both journalism and creative writing.

You can’t game the system on Substack. It’s great to know tricks and get tips, but ultimately, to succeed here, your writing has to be exceptional.

Writing exceptional prose is a lot easier when you know the genres, structures, and modes of creative writing and journalism. You don’t have to be a scholar, just have a foundational understanding of it. Creative criticism is one place to start.

Although few have ever heard the term creative criticism, it’s a widely practiced form. It’s all over the internet. Every time you read someone bringing their personal story and/or identity into their discussions of the latest Beyonce album or reading of James Baldwin, that’s creative criticism.

Creative criticism is essentially defined as an essay that uses a text or film (or music, etc.) through which to view the self. It’s an analysis of a text (not an evaluation or review—to analyze means to break apart) within the writing of a personal essay. When done successfully, it sheds greater light on the text and the writer. The book, movie, or song discussed serves as a bridge between the writer and the reader. 

You can find “examples” in these two excellent anthologies: 

Both are edited by J.C. Hallman and can be purchased at your local bookstore and on Amazon and are probably at your local library

(Examples is in scare quotes because J.C. Hallman coined the term and created the category creative criticism in the early 2000s and then backtracked through history to find examples of it.)

There are so many delicious essays in these anthologies: Charlie D’Ambrosio on J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Vladimir Nabokov’s lecture notes on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Salman Rushdie on “The Wizard of Oz.”

Check it out. You can also read my essay on William Styron’s Darkness Visible on The Books That Made Us—and, yes, there’s an audio version of me reading it.

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