Creative Writing as a form of Research

In a recent pre-progression supervisory meeting, Paul Evans reminded me that the largest part of my research is, in fact, the writing of fiction, and that fiction, then, is not just a form of research, but a vital part of it. Novelists, he said, study things by writing fiction and questions are answered in the creative piece itself. This led me to read what Graeme Harper (2008) has to say about creative writing as practice-led research. Here's a quote: 'Creative writing can be defined as actions or a set of acts, often referred to as 'process' and leading to the completion, partial completion or sometimes the temporary or permanent abandonment of a piece of creative writing. Whatever the end result - anywhere from completion and dissemination to complete abandonment - actions occur... the definition of "creative" used here is "showing inventiveness or imagination".' (p-. 161-2). Now, keeping in mind the academic drive in universities and HE institutions is, it must be said, essentially biased towards the 'critical' or 'theory-based' approach, it strikes me that anything that is considered 'creative' (or even 'merely creative') is battling against the tide, or taking a different path. Let me say here, while I think about it, I notice I'm speaking here in psychogeographic metaphors - or with, if you like, a psychogeographic register - and that makes me think that the substance of this PhD, by which I mean its very construction demonstrates a sense of what I'm calling psychogeographic flow.

But this isn't a new idea, this sense of what Paul Dawson calls 'two metaphors which encapsulate popular understandings of the location of both writers and academics: the garret and the ivory tower.' (2005, p. 14) where 'the garrett' represents the creative writer and 'the ivory tower' represents what he regards as the romanticised ideal of the 'public intellectual. He goes on to say that 'Not only are writing programmes seen as anomalous, but the work they produce, literature, has traditionally been perceived as placeless.' (original italics) (2005, p. 14). What is new, to me at least, is that Dawson is also using a psychogeographic register to describe the (shall we say) 'plight' of anyone embarking on a creative writing PhD, and that specifically here, his use of placelessness as a description of creative writing in academia links absolutely to my ideas about the Black Country. Mike Harris, in his 2009 essay 'Escaping the Tractor Beam of Literary Theory: Notes towards appropriate theories of creative writing - and some arguments against the inappropriate ones? disagrees with Dawson's assertion that creative writing students should embrace literary theory in order to fully understand (and convey an understanding of) their craft. He says that what is most important is 'literary aesthetics - poetics - because it is arguably the one indispensable part of our writing process.' Re-reading his essay reminded me that, yes, the most important part of being a writer is not actually reading, but writing, and that although critical reading is, naturally, part of the writing process, that a creative writer's reading is not the same kind of critical reading that a literature student or literary critic does. 'The text writers read most of all is their own text' he says.

I like and understand what Harris is saying here, the upshot of which is that to push creative writers down the path of knowing about literary theory (notice the psychogeographic reference there, too) is to teach them precisely the wrong thing. He refers to Czikszentmihayli when he says that there are both 'conscious and semi conscious processes at work when we write creatively' which he likens to riding a bike and he says the difference between the way in which creative writers read texts, and literary academics do is that creative writers read the fiction of others like an instruction manual 'for technique, style, structure and thematic possibility' - essentially, for ideas, for inspiration, for a springboard into their own creativity, whereas literary academics read the same works from a different vantage point: 'to describe, analyse and interpret.' I might also add, to ascribe certain meaning and to attach certain literary theory to it. That kind of reading is considered an academic exercise, rather than a personal development exploration. The theory operates there as a filter through which new meaning is left behind, like gold dust, perhaps. What Harris is getting at is that, for him, the application of literary theory to a task for which it was not designed (ie improving creative writing practice) is inefficient and frankly, useless. He says, 'One may, for example, use a bathtub as a boat, but generally speaking, boats float better.' His use of 'escape' from the 'dazzling tractor beam of inappropriate literary theory' he says, would give creative writers the capacity to focus 'clearly on the writine process'.

Lucy Neave's 2020 paper 'What constitutes discovery? An analysis of published interviews with fiction writers and biomedical scientists' goes further by tackling the idea that creative writing is, effectively, a kind of hidden academic essential, unquantifiable except perhaps by anecdote, in every academic field. What she analyses is not so much the interruption of 'theory' in the act of writing, but the unconscious (or perhaps semi-conscious) mechanics of writing itself and its place in formulating or arriving at 'discovery' or 'findings'. She pinpoints a major issue: 'In contrast to scientific discovery that may be construed as having a bearing on the world at large, a realisation that occurs while writing fiction, while rewarding, may feel difficult to articulate or substantiate.' (2020, p. 150). I think it's important here to hesitate for a moment and keep our feet on the ground, and I'm reminded of Harris' criticism of Dawson who said that reading is actually the basis of the writing workshop 'because ... a student may, in principle, produce work in an unanalysable flash of inspiration, without conscious knowledge of the tools of composition and submit unchanged by suggestions provided in the workshop' (Dawson 2005, p. 88). Harris picks up the flaws in this argument by saying that 'composing a whole, completed work in a 'flash of inspiration' simply doesn't happen.' He cites Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan', and its alleged conception through an inspired dream, but Coleridge's own account talks about research and there is some debate about the preparatory work that Coleridge did before writing the entire piece. However, Neave's focus is coloured by Felski's idea that 'literature is a source for less tangible and measurable forms of knowledge which, nonetheless, through readerly immersion and writerly technique, foster difficult-to-quantify understanding, including a sense of "interwovenness" along with a host of other forms of knowledge and feeling.' (p. 150) And that, 'Writers make discoveries and are involved in practices of knowing, even if these forms of knowledge are diffuse, complex and changing.' (p. 151). She examines interviews by several writers who speak about their writing process. Jeffrey Eugenides, for instance, equates discovery of 'voice' with 'knowledge' when he talks about the drafting of his novel 'The Virgin Suicides'. 'The discovery of a voice [the first person plural in this case] that opens up a channel to impersonal but specific knowledge.' Peter Carey, in an interview, suggests that writing, discovery and invention are connected by saying that in the first draft he has a broad idea about character and place and what's going to happen, but the writing process allows him to 'discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.' (p. 154). In her examination of interviews with scientists, by contrast, their understanding of what writing did for them and their discoveries was implicit. In fact, scientists' views of writing, though functionally about 'writing up', were found to be ultimately more than simply that. Neave found that some scientists commented that they started writing before the experiment is actually finished because doing that has beneficial effects for obtaining meaningful results. Here, then, writing, so Neave says, cannot simply be construed as 'writing up' if the results aren't yet available. She says, 'Understanding the role of writing in the thinking process around scientific discovery is significant in heightening comprehension about writing and thought processes, and about the nature of scientific discovery itself.' (p. 158).

In Grenville & Woolfe's 'Making Stories. How Ten Australian Novels were written' (1993) Helen Garner mentions a quotation from Jung that she keeps on her wall: 'Long experience has taught me never to know anything in advance and not to know better, but to let the unconscious take precedence.' (p. 70) She talks about the importance of 'not knowing' and 'waiting' and only then 'discovering' which is critical to her ability to write... which brings me to my next task: editing my own novel, 'God's Country'. I've been (in Garner's words) waiting. This, of course links to Graham Wallas' 1926 four stage model of the creative process (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification) and I'd say that 'waiting' equates to 'incubation' here. There are other, newer, versions of this idea, but from a personal point of view, I call this part of the creative process, the gestation period, in which, for me, my first draft is complete, and I've left if for several months, but know it's there, and know it is somehow evolving in my unconscious. Tomorrow, I start the editing process. It's a road to the unknown (psychogeography, again) but I'll take it with Loffler's alert reverie, and will immerse myself into Guy's Black Country and see what I find.