As a writer, of course I think about the mechanics of my writing - my writing process and habits, and issues of structure, plot, character, dialogue and theme. But I’ve long been fascinated by the more mysterious process of creativity and how my stories - and the characters within them - come into being.
Being honest: I’m not entirely in control of that, or at least, not the I who is writing this. Writers are often asked, ‘where do your ideas come from’, and my answer to that has to be that sometimes, I don’t know. They come into being through me, the Iain who is thinking about these words for my website as I write them, but with fiction sometimes there is no conscious understanding, no I’m putting this together from the news, with that person who I once met, with this idea I saw in a film.
A woman, her daughter missing, a return home, but who has returned? A diners club for people grazing supermarket food. A man who becomes convinced a new ice age is happening right now. All stories of mine, and all just…happened when I started free-writing or spinning off a place, a vague image of a person.
Yes, once the stories are up and running then a conscious process takes over, deliberative decision-making, a shuffling of the pieces, a redrawing of a character. But sometimes, that initial burst of creation and how we can talk about meaning or my intentions in the work - well, I can completely understand the concept of the muse which appears as old as human creativity itself.
This fascination deepened in conversations with my good friend and former colleague Dr Susan Mandala. Susan is a linguist and specialist in stylistic analysis and the study of choice in language (and an excellent writing consultant - check out her workshops). She and I have discussed this in the past, especially when she delivered an excellent session in the writers’ group I ran, which used a piece of my work as the starting point for a stylistic investigation into choices that writers make - consciously or unconsciously - and how those manifest in the text. We started talking about expanding that into a wider project, and that’s turned into an academic research project in the form of a duoethnography.
This is the point where the writers reading this say, “a what now?” I’ll quote Susan’s explanation: ‘A duoethnography is a form of qualitative research that involves two professionals who serve as each other’s research participants. In a series of research conversations that we have and then analyse, we put our two different understandings of how fiction works in contact and contrast in order to generate new understandings and new ways of working.’
Susan will bring her deep understanding of linguistics, I’ll bring my fuzzy understanding of what is always an untidy, fuzzy creative process, and the collisions of the two and our reflections upon them will develop new understanding and insight. Our working title is The Writer, His Style, and the Analyst: A Duoethnography on the Understanding of Meaning in Fiction.
If you’re a duoethnographer in any discipline, an interested creative writer or stylistic analyst, drop me a line and we can all chat.