Sometimes referred to as transformational writing, textual intervention, or active reading, re-creative writing offers a stimulating way of engaging with a literary text. It is an approach through which readers can construct meanings creatively.
In a sense, all reading reshapes or transforms meaning; traditional literary criticism itself involves a kind of rewriting, whereby meanings that might not have been immediately apparent are brought to our attention. Re-creative writing often explores gaps or absences, or gives a voice to a character or characters who have been largely marginalised or silenced within the text on which the re-creative writing is based. This text is often known as the ‘base text’. Many well-known narratives are, in this sense, examples of re-creative writing in that they offer a different version of a base text. Examples include Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe; and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.
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