Narrative Identity and Creative Writing: Crafting and Imagining Possible Lives

Abstract While the psychological benefits of narrative practices are widely acknowledged, how—and which—modalities of self narration bring psychological gains, as well as for whom and in which contexts, are open questions. Taking its starting point in this lacuna, this article investigates potentialities of the practice of creative writing, with focus on the element of the creative and on the writing act. The article establishes as a problem in many existing accounts of creative writing interventions and narrative identity the lack of clear conceptualization of writing and of the adjective creative . The article shows that reconsideration of creative writing practices within a framework of 4E cognition can lead to more precision in this regard, arguing that such a framework invites distinguishing between two dimensions of the creative element: one of them cognitive-imaginative and the other to do with aesthetic form and craft. The framework, in addition, allows explaining how the dimensions of form/craft and of imagination are linked. The article improves our understanding of how the elements of the creative and of writing, as brough together in acts of creative writing, can enable writers to step out of harmful self-narratives, develop alternatives, and increase a sense of their lives as holding possibilities. The article also addresses practical, methodological, and theoretical implications of its insights about possibilities of creative-writing forms of self-narration for therapeutic contexts and beyond.