I guess it would depend on what kind of article it is, and how you're using the word "creative". If you're talking about a news article, you do have to be creative in the sense of how to make a boring story interesting, or coming up with a title that hooks the reader in, or figuring out how to stay within a strict word limit without the quality of the story being sacrificed. If it's a story a lot of other news organizations are going to be covering, you need to be creative with your angle; meaning, how to set your story apart, whether it's getting a new perspective from a different source or offering a different opinion if it's an editorial. But it isn't creative in the sense of making fiction, which in my experience is most often what people refer to when they say "creative writing".
It depends who’s speaking, the type of article, and its publishing venue. My college courses defined them differently, and they were in different departments. The creative writing courses were part of the English department, but the news writing and magazine article writing courses were not (probably because the journalism style guides tend to throw a lot of what’s taught in Comp out the window). Both use the toolbox of words and sentences (hammers and nails), but the resulting architecture of the thing you’re building (the house) is different, with different structural rules (the blueprint) that demand their own type of creativity to execute. Even within the realm of articles, they’re different. Writing a news article is different from a magazine article in terms of structure and the specific types of word tools used in writing, and sometimes, though not always, in point of view and word count as well. I started writing fiction, switched to news writing and magazine articles, and am writing more fiction again. I’ve seen people claim writing fiction is more difficult, but I disagree, because fiction was equally as “easy” for me when I started writing as news writing is for me now. It’s more about the writer’s natural comfort zone and adaptability. Some writers get their asses kicked by the challenge of writing a compelling news article in reverse pyramid using a lot of adverbs and few adjectives with a strictly limited word count. Other writers get their asses kicked by plot, arc, dialogue, pyramid structure/not revealing too much in the beginning, or, in my case, the vastness of the available tools of fiction that are off-limits in news writing. When I started writing news articles I had a hell of a time re-learning to write within those tight limitations, and as an editor I saw others struggle with it as well. Now that I’ve gone back to writing fiction, that re-learning process is equally difficult. I liken it to learning a new workout routine: you know how to run and jump, but using them in a different way is what’s hard. Came back to add, because I couldn't figure out how to phrase this: Although writing articles and writing a piece of fiction each require creativity, for me, the kind of creativity feels different as does the state of "flow" when the writing is going well. Also, for me, when writing an article more of the creativity takes place when I'm brainstorming the prep, whereas with fiction it's mostly discovery writing. So creativity exists in both...but during different parts of the process, and that varies from writer to writer.
No. Articles are nonfiction and creative writing is generally fiction, although there can be some crossover between the two.
