Future directions: creative writing as a life tool

Is creative writing a means for publication or a life tool? The book is dead (Wente, 2010) and so is the author (Holcombe, 2007). Christopher Evans argued, in his book The Micro Millennium, the electronic age would make books “begin a steady slide into oblivion” (cited in Mash, 2003). More than ten years before Evans’ book, Roland Barthes, literary critic and theorist, published his important essay “The Death of The Author” and critically elucidated how the author, shaped by history and society, does not exist independently of textual constructions. “It is language which speaks, not the author” (Barthes, 1968, p. 2). The connection between author, text and creative writing as not only a means of publication but also as a life tool will be the focus of this paper.