Creative writing usually gets defended in emotional terms. It builds empathy, it processes feeling, it lets you live inside someone else’s experience for a while. All true. What gets talked about far less is a claim I ran across recently in some research on writing pedagogy: that creative writing, done a certain way, can actually train critical thinking, not just emotional range.
That’s a bigger claim than it sounds. Critical thinking usually gets treated as the opposite skill from storytelling: logic and argument on one side, imagination and feeling on the other. The research I’m thinking of pushes back on that split, using an idea borrowed from philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that self-awareness gained through narrative imagination is itself a form of critical reflection, not a separate thing that happens to sit next to it.
The Setup
The core of the argument comes from a study built around a single writing prompt: a single parent takes a job that requires two years away from their eleven-month-old child. Writers were asked to inhabit that dilemma in narrative form, rather than argue about it from the outside. Then, crucially, they were asked to reflect on what they’d written, on the choices their own narrative had made about who was right, who was sympathetic, what counted as a reasonable trade-off.
That second step is the actual mechanism. Writing the dilemma as a story forces you to make hundreds of small interpretive choices you’d never have to make in an essay: whose perspective the story centers, what details get emphasized, which character’s guilt or relief gets more page time. Reflecting afterward on why you made those choices, and what those choices reveal about your own assumptions, is where the critical thinking actually happens. Not in the writing itself. In the writer catching themselves in the act of having written a particular way.
Why This Is Harder Than an Essay
An essay lets you state your position and defend it. That’s a real cognitive skill, but it’s also one where your assumptions can hide comfortably behind the argument’s logic. A narrative doesn’t give you that cover. If you write the single parent as clearly justified and the disapproving relative as clearly small-minded, that’s not an argument you’ve made explicitly. It’s a bias you’ve enacted, in scene, without necessarily noticing you did it.
That’s the useful trap. Fiction makes you commit to interpretive choices before you’re consciously aware you’re making an argument at all. Going back afterward and asking why you wrote it that way surfaces something an essay would have let you keep hidden, on purpose or not.
Where This Lines Up With the Heresies Book
This is close to the actual structural bet the Heresies book is making, whether I’d have described it in these terms while writing it or not. Every chapter opens with Chieqe stating a claim in its most extreme, least defensible form. The essay that follows isn’t just arguing against her. It’s the same move as the reflection step in that research: taking a position that got stated instinctively and interrogating what it actually assumes, what it gets right, what it overreaches on.
Chieqe’s draw at the end of Heresy No. 16 isn’t a plot twist. It’s what happens when the reflective step is taken seriously all the way through: neither position collapses, because both were actually interrogated rather than one being set up to lose from the start. That’s the difference between using a character to stage an argument you’d already decided the outcome of, and using one to genuinely find out what the outcome should be.
The Practical Version
You don’t need a formal study or a moral dilemma prompt to use this. Next time you’re stuck on what you actually think about something, don’t write the essay. Write the scene. Give it to a character and let them make the choices the situation demands, then go back and ask what those choices assumed about who deserved sympathy and why. You’ll usually find the honest version of your position was hiding in the scene you wrote, not in the argument you would have made if you’d started with the essay instead.
Keep writing.