When you think of creative writing you can think of it as any writing, fiction or non-fiction that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include most novels and epics, as well as many short stories and poems. It is important to note that screenwriting and play writing typically have their own programs of study, but fit under the creative writing category as well.

Here are a few forms of creative writing.

• The short story is a literary genre of fictional prose narrative that tends to be more to the point than longer works of fiction such as novellas and novels. Short stories have their origins in oral story-telling traditions and the prose story- a swiftly-sketched situation that quickly comes to its point.

• An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, usually concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events important to a culture or nation. Some oral poetry may meet the criteria of an epic. The first epics are known as primary, or original, epics. Epics that attempt to imitate these are known as literary, or secondary, epics.

• A novel (from, Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for “new”, “news”, or “short story of something new”) is today a long written, fictional, prose narrative. As a point of reference, though this definition is not the last word, a novel generally has a word count of 40,000 or higher.

• Poetry (from the Greek “ποίησις”, Poisson, a “making” or “creating”) is a form of literary art in which language is used for its artistic and suggestive qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns or lyrics.

• Creative nonfiction, which is also known as literary or narrative nonfiction, is a genre of writing which uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. As a genre, creative nonfiction is still relatively young, and is only beginning to be scrutinized with the same critical analysis given to fiction and poetry.

There are more forms of creative writing and you may find that your writing style fits into one or more categories.