You might expect a program called Creative Writer to focus primarily on writing skills. However, Creative Writer’s emphasis is clearly on creative. Suggested for ages 8 and up, Creative Writer doesn’t teach kids to be better writers, but it does encourage them to develop ideas and provides a fun vehicle to express those ideas creatively. It’s a graphics/page-layout/word processor hybrid that offers some terrific type effects, zany sounds, bright graphics, and wacky characters.
When kids load Creative Writer, they enter the city of Imaginopolis and meet MeZee, a dorky but likable character that eight-year-olds will find inviting. While McZee may be a little too offbeat for some preteens and early adolescents, his sidekick. Max, is a much cooler character who balances out some of McZee’s Barney-like qualities.
The creativity takes place in a fourstory building that contains the lobby/library the project studio, the writing studio, and the idea workshop. All four floors eventually lead to the same tool-based editor, which is bursting with special effects, borders, backgrounds, stickers, and sounds.
The lobby/library is where kids find the portfolio that contains their saved work, although there are other easy ways to open saved files. (New documents can be started on any of the other three floors.) Creative Writer frequently asks kids if they want to open something they’ve already created, and they can also personalize the lobby/library by hanging their own drawings on the walls. Kids ride an elevator or click on the firefighter’s pole to move up to the higher floors. It’s easy to skip the lobby/library level and get right to work.
The project studio offers templates for creating newspapers, cards, and banners. Eschewing political correctness, Microsoft offers access to the various projects through animal heads mounted on the wall: click on the moose head to make a Moosepaper, the aardvark head to create a Cardvark, and the rhinoceros head to build a Banneroceros.
The writing studio lets kids access dozens of tools. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself creating cards and signs with the program’s special tools for adding shadows, textures, odd-shaped words, and a variety of eye-grabbing effects.
The idea workshop offers some simple tools to help kids develop a story. The Splot Machine scrambles a variety of sentence fragments to come up with weird sentences that young writers can use to generate story ideas. For example, they might get a sentence like this one: The silly rabbit / rode a bike / through your bedroom closet. The Picture Window provides interesting line drawings that children can color and/or use as the inspiration for a story.
Creative Writer’s interface is colorful and fun. For younger children who might have a shorter attention span, there’s never a dull moment. McZee changes randomly from one wacky outfit to another; after short periods of inactivity, an animal scurries across the screen, or McZee pokes his head through the wall. Creative Writer takes over your Macintosh, however, so you lose access to the familiar Mac interface and the Finder until you quit the program. For kids who have already mastered Macintosh fundamentals. Creative Writer can be counterintuitive.
Creative Writer has no manual, but it does come with a brief Getting Started pamphlet and a colorful poster that does a surprisingly good job of describing the basics of the software.
While Creative Writer’s features are appropriate for kids of all ages, some more-mature young users may find it kid stuff. Keep the program’s cartoonish design in mind when you’re buying software for kids in their early teens. That small caveat aside. Creative Writer is an engaging program that packs a lot of fun and features into the small city of Imaginopolis.
Muse, Dan. (September 1994). Creative Writer 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 85).
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Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
