The multimodal writer: one practitioner’s experience of moving between different types of writing for different modes of dissemination

The body of work presented for this PhD by Public Works consists of novels, travel books and other creative non-fiction. The accompanying exegesis identifies how a multimodal practice has informed creative process, research, content and range of outputs. It is often thought that writers are split uncomfortably between a desire to write and a need to earn a living. This exegesis explores how a range of activities and genres of writing can in fact feed each other, with novels benefitting creatively from work taken on primarily ‘for the money’, for example, and vice versa. It considers how such synergies can be facilitated by a multimodal approach, when a writer works to harness expert intuition and distributed subjectivity and identify and deploy multiple writerly personalities. The exegesis considers formative experiences including a job as a publisher’s blurb writer, and it presents evidence-based examples through the author’s writing life of the interdependency of fiction and creative non-fiction, Virago books and print and broadcast journalism including for the Guardian and the BBC. As well as the author’s public work, the exegesis draws on bodies of work in the fields of literary fiction, creative non-fiction and the pedagogy of creative writing. In a wider context of developments in digital technology and the advent of social media, consideration of how to move between different types of writing is prescient. Conclusions reached in this exegesis are that breaks from, and movements between, different types of writing for different modes of dissemination can aid creativity and productivity.