Is There a Relationship between Literature Reading and Creative Writing?

This study attempts to reliably measure literature reading and creative writing ability, and subsequently to determine whether a relationship exists between the two abilities. Participants were 19 eleventh-grade students: 11 were known to be good readers of literature, whereas 8 were known to be poor readers of literature. Each participant read 4 literary texts and wrote 5 creative texts. Texts concerned two genres: poems and short stories. The transcriptions of reading responses and writing products were rated by different panels of 7 and 8 independent expert judges, respectively. Multilevel analyses indicated that agreement among judges was high and that individual student performance relative to other students was fairly consistent among tasks, both for reading and writing tasks. Moreover, average reading and average writing performance appeared to be related even when the a priori selection was taken into account. The results support our hypothesis that a positive relationship exists between literature reading and creative writing ability. Moreover, it shows that both constructs can be measured in reliable ways. Implications for further research and for the position of creative writing within the literature curriculum are discussed. (Contains 4 tables and 3 footnotes.)