1 How children experience creative writing in the classroom Healey, B. (in press). How children experience creative writing in the classroom. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. Brett Healey Curtin University Abstract The structure of a child’s writing experience stems from the affect, embodiment and materiality of their immediate engagement with activities in the classroom. When a child’s movements and emotions are restricted, so too is their writing. This engagement shapes the experiential landscape of classroom writing, and the way that children perceive, value and feel about writing affects their motivation which predicts their writing attainment. This paper reveals the structure of children’s consciousness while expressing ideas through creative writing. It does so by presenting an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the writing experience in the classroom. In the study, eight Year 6 (11-12 years old) children from a school in Perth, Australia were interviewed and qualitative data were analysed to interpret the essential components of the writing experience. The results produced three main themes (sub-themes noted in brackets): The Writing World (Watching, Ideas from Elsewhere, Flowing); The Self (Concealing & Revealing, Agency, Adequacy); and Schooled Writing (Standards, Satisfying Task Requirements, Rules of Good Writing). The themes indicate a binary experience of writing where the child’s consciousness shifts between their imagination (The Writing World) and the task before them (Schooled Writing), and each affects the way the experience of the self appears to the writer. When comparing the experience with that of authors, one notices that the experience of words as authorial tools is missing. The results imply that the writing environment, and the individual’s response to it, may restrict the engagement and the phenomenality of writing. Introduction In Australia, the way children experience writing is shaped by their response to the classroom writing culture. The following true anecdote of a Year 6 child’s typical writing experience illustrates this: When he began to write, images flowed in front of him, one after the other. Then he heard his teacher’s voice reminding him to use similes. The images were replaced by the classroom walls, his desk and his paper. He looked at his four lines of simile-free writing and knew he had to try something else so that he could write like a Year 6 should. This type of experience is unobservable to teachers externally (Healey & Merga, 2017) and extant theorising suggests there is cause for concern about how children experience writing. For example, many children experience negative emotions while writing (Zumbrunn, Ekholm, Stringer, Mcknight, & DeBusk-Lane, 2017), have deeply entrenched identities as poor writers (Gardner, 2013), and possess unsophisticated knowledge about the writing process (Gillespie, Olinghouse, & Graham, 2013). Indeed, theorists have been concerned about children’s attitudes towards writing, with studies suggesting that children comply with writing as a school activity without developing their own writer identities (Grainger, Goouch, & Lambirth, 2005). These attitudes may stem from the fact that classrooms are often places where children “may be engaged in