Creative Writing as Taught by Aristotle

As an inspiring writer, I found it amazing that Aristotle's opinions on poetry are still relevant to creative writing today. Essentially, plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song, are not so different that the elements of writing most modern fiction writers take into consideration in their writing: plot, character, dialogue, theme, conflict, and setting. Although Aristotle was writing specifically about tragic poetry because that was the main if not only form of serious fiction writing at the time, his ideas relate to fiction and (narrative) poetry in general. Spectacle and Song are obviously specific to tragic poetry as it was performed in those days. Writing dialogue that sounds right is part of having good diction, and writers today even in their exposition or narration must still have good diction. Thought, that is making sure your story makes sense, events are caused by other events, not randomly thrown in, things that couldn't happen within the setting or circumstances don't happen, is still very important in stories today. Aristotle did not include theme, but themes in stories are essentially the meaning that Aristotle believed should be conveyed through the wonder at the end. The themes he believed tragedies should deal with involved the nature of humans.