Sensing the Logic of Writing: Creative Writing Reimagined

This project draws attention to the ‘graphic elements’ – both written and visual – of a creative writing practice by exploring those graphic elements in both the critical component of this mixed-mode dissertation and in a series of creative artefacts. Its principle aim is to record how as a practising creative writer-researcher I have made a series of artefacts as a way of providing an opportunity for readers and researchers to explore this specific instance of theoretically-informed aesthetic experimentation. The psychophysiological researcher, Tony Bastick, having investigated expert ‘experimenters’ in Intuition: How We Think and Act (1982), identified an “intuitive method” that provides “insights” into a “creative process” that is, importantly, “preverbal”, yet not in fact visual (298–299). In this project I raise a different set of questions from those raised by ‘alphabetically’-guided ways of creating writing, as a means of continuing to learn and reinvent my own creative writing practice as mixed-mode (combining written and visual invention). My proposal is to demonstrate how a creative writer-researcher with a keen interest in the visual arts might make an original contribution to the fields of creative writing and visual arts by providing readers with an opportunity to view and examine that set of artefacts alongside a critical document that explores how the choices were made during the double creative process. My central hypothesis is that a practising creative writer-researcher is uniquely situated to identify how her or his own expanded and complexified creative writing process might work and to share that specific crossdisciplinary knowledge as the epistemic aspects of a creative writing practice draws on resonances and exchanges with other disciplines, including the visual arts. On these bases this mixed-mode submission includes a portfolio of writing within a visual arts framework together with a written critical commentary focused on issues raised by those complex practices themselves.