Rooted at the core of successful literary analysis is the ability to identify literary elements and use inference skills to gain deeper insights about an author's message in a work. Accepted English instruction often helps students to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of a literary work through refining analytical writing. This research uncovers insights about how imaginative writing practices help reinforce students' close-reading abilities and benefit student literary analysis. This work is a descriptive, grade-level analysis that examines the uses and benefits of implementing creative writing instruction to aid literary study, specifically in assessing close-reading skills, at the secondary 10th grade English level. Two sophomore classes produced scored data from three consecutive writing sessions; these sessions prompted both imaginative writing responses and analytical writing responses to reveal how both imaginative writing practices and analytical writing practices were used in a successfully analogous way to assess the close-reading and inference skills used to enhance literary analysis.