creative writing research methodology

Creative Writing Research: What, How and Why

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Creative writing research is actively moving us further toward knowing what creative writing actually is—in terms of our human actions and our responses when doing it. It is approaching such things as completed literary works and author recognition within the activities of creative writing, not mostly as representatives of that practice, and it is paying close attention to the modes, methods and functions of the writerly imagination, the contemporary influence of individual writer environments on writers, to writerly senses of structure and form and our formation and re-formation of writing themes and subjects. We certainly understand creative writing and creative writing research best when we remain true to why creative writing happens, when and where it happens, and how it happens—and creative writing research is doing that, focusing on the actions and the material results as evidence of our actions. Creative writing research has also opened up better communication between our knowledge of creative writing and our teaching of creative writing, with the result that we are improving that teaching, not only in our universities and colleges but also in our schools.

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Harper, G. (2023). Creative Writing Research: What, How and Why. In: Rebecca Leung, ML. (eds) Chinese Creative Writing Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0931-5_12

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Creative writing as a research methodology

Author: Jonathon Crewe (University of West London)

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Keywords: creative writing, practice-led, narrative, fiction, focalisation

Crewe, J., (2021) “Creative writing as a research methodology”, New Vistas 7(2), 26-30. doi: https://doi.org/10.36828/newvistas.150

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Within Arts and Humanities departments across academia, it is not unusual to find researchers who split their time between more 'traditional' research methodologies and their own professional and creative practice. Indeed, I am one of them. As well as being a Senior Lecturer and researcher producing papers such as this, I am also a creative writer working across film and theatre. Having insights into the production of both forms of outputs, it is clear that there are many similarities in their aims and methods. Combining these into a practice-led research approach, allowing synergies and dialogue to develop, offers the opportunity for deriving unique insights that may otherwise have been overlooked. This article argues that creative writing, in all its various forms, is a valuable research methodology—an argument that could be extended to all practice-led research disciplines.

One strength of practice-led research is the potential to bridge the gap between academia and the general public. The UK Research Excellence Framework's definition of impact beyond academia is 'an effect on, change or benefit to...an audience, community, constituency, organisation or individuals' (REF, 2018, p.83). Whereas social scientists may work with and theorise about group or community identities, individuals do not experience these groups per se, rather they experience interactions with other individuals who may be members of a group. Creative writing, as a practice-based research approach, provides a route to resolving this dilemma by accessing group and community identities from the perspectives of individuals within a particular group or those who have interactions with individuals from this group. Fiction facilitates the portrayal of, and access to, complex and nuanced interiorities (inner character) through the lived experiences of relatable characters, presenting

‘people and situations in their contexts with multidimensionality...as a method of disrupting dominant ideologies or stereotypes by...[describing] social reality and then [presenting] alternatives to that reality. One of the main advantages of fiction as a research practice is the...[ability] to promote empathy, build bridges of understanding across differences, and stimulate self-­reflection’ (Leavy, 2014, p.298).

Practice-led research can produce externalisations of interior knowledge and understanding, as well as exposing socio-cultural frameworks for contextual critical analysis and reflection. Creative writing works to explore the 'human process of making meaning through experiences that are felt, lived, reconstructed and reinterpreted,' and this includes both the writing and the reading process, where 'meanings are "made" from the transactions and narratives that emerge and these have the power and agency to change on an individual or community level' (Sullivan, 2009, 50).

Creative writing allows the researcher access to the individual, but also to go beyond the personal, whereby the 'methods and theoretical ideas as paradigms may be viewed as the apparatuses, or procedures of production from which the research design emerges' (Barrett, 2010, p.138, original italics). Although creative writing provides the researcher and reader with unique insights, it cannot fully realise its research potential without a framework for theoretical and contextual analysis and reflection. A practice-based researcher must maintain a discourse between the artefact and the exegesis, in order to exploit findings and outcomes so that a wider impact can be realised. As such, the creative writing process works in dialogue with continued critical and contextual analysis. In The Political Unconscious , Frederic Jameson argues that ‘the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right’ (Jameson, 2010, p.64). Therefore, the process of creative writing can be analysed in terms of it being a socially symbolic act, whereby the inclusion and usage of ideologemes can be exposed and interrogated. In this context, an ideologeme is understood, according to Jameson, as both a conceptual construction and narrative sign, incorporating concepts such as beliefs and opinions as well as minimal units of socially symbolic narrative acts. As such, they can be seen as the inherited units of representation upon which the process of writing and rewriting through interpretation bases its narrative construction. As Jameson puts it,

‘by their respective positions in the whole complex sequence of the modes of production, both the individual text and its ideologemes…must be read in terms of…the ideology of form, that is, the symbolic messages transmitted…by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production’ (Jameson, 2010, p.61).

As such, narrative texts are not individual entities, but exist within the wider body of the literary canon, reflecting the social order in which they were written. In addition, practice-based researchers, similar to more traditional researchers, inevitably develop their methods and techniques in relation to the existent and recognised practices of their predecessors and contemporaries (Barrett, 2010). An understanding of this suggests a duality for the creative writing researcher, whereby a 'double movement occurs, of decontextualisation in which the found elements are rendered strange, and of recontextualisation, in which new families of association and structures of meaning are established' (Carter, 2010, pp.15).

This process not only informs the creative writing researcher, but also the reader of the text. For an example of how this works, this article will consider a creative writing research project in the form of a novel that aims to investigate a particular marginalised social group, whilst challenging typified representations of that group in mainstream media and politics (for a practice-led research project that does this, see Crewe, 2017). In line with the UK Research Excellence Framework's definition above, a novel can create a change in the behaviour and attitudes of its readers, as well as bringing potential benefits to a community—with respect to this example, a particular marginalised group.

Monica Ali and Caryl Phillips are both contemporary authors who have written from the perspective of individual characters from groups often vilified by mainstream media—for example, the Bangladeshi immigrant Nazneem in Ali's Brick Lane (2007), or the African asylum seeker Gabriel / Solomon in Phillip's A Distant Shore (2004). By providing extended, vivid and nuanced insights into the minds of individuals from groups often portrayed with homogenised negative stereotypes in mainstream media, Ali and Phillips work to challenge these tropes, individuate their characters and elicit sympathy from the reader (see Booth, 1983). In other words, the individualisation of a marginalised voice moves the character beyond the sociological and into the psychological, the point where representational meaning can occur in narrative form, in the sense that ‘the psychological impulse tends toward the presentation of highly individualised figures who resist abstraction and generalisation, and whose motivation is not susceptible to rigid ethical interpretation’ (Scholes, Phelan & Kellogg, 2006, 101; see also Currie, 2010 and Jameson, 2010). In the above example, the creative writing researcher's conscious attempt to shift perceptions from a typified reading of characters from a marginalised group to a de-homogenised, individuated reading, serves to exploit Jameson’s concept of rewriting texts through the interpretation process, whereby any given literary text cannot be viewed as independent and autonomous in itself, but rather as being ‘rewritten’ as part of a set of traditional interpretative functions during the process of reading. The reader’s ‘real-life’ assumptions about the lifestyles and behaviour of these groups are exposed and challenged through their own interpretation of the characters’ lifestyles, behaviour and choices within the ‘fictional world’ of the text.

Howard Sklar (2013) claims that emotions, in particular sympathy and compassion, felt by a reader in response to a fictional character can have ‘ethical implications beyond the experience of reading itself…[Although] directed towards imaginary individuals, they may lay a foundation for emotional and ethical sensitivity in real life’ (p.9; see also Kuiken, Miall & Sikora, 2004). This process allows the reader to recognise the emotional and psychological experience of a character, providing a route to the identification and re-evaluation of pre-existing assumptions about a person or character from a particular excluded or ’other’ group. Although readers will possess existing ‘interpretive frames and experiences to the reading of a given text, the narrative itself provides its own counterweight to personal presumptions by “persuading” readers to feel and to evaluate characters in particular ways’ (Sklar, 2013, p.59). This re-framing of the reader’s interpretive perspective will not only involve a re-evaluation of a character’s behaviour and lifestyle choices, but also of the reader’s systems of belief in relation to the character’s social group. As with Booth and Sklar, Currie (2010) argues that ‘sustained imaginative engagement with a vividly expressed and highly individuated mental economy through a long and detailed narrative can…be expected to have…finely-tuned imitative consequences, with correspondingly powerful results in terms of framing’ (p.104). Narratologists have regularly pointed to focalisation, that is, ‘seeing’ from a character’s perspective, as a technique for achieving this re-framing effect, inducing readers to view the narrative from a perspective that is not their own. For example, Sklar (2013) suggests that this re-framing effect is similar to the process of defamiliarisation, where readers are forced to reassess their ‘familiar’ assumptions about the fictional/real world as a result of shifts in perspective of the narrative’s subject of focalisation, which ‘may challenge readers to re-construct their representations of that character’s feelings or attitudes’ (p.69). Kuiken, Miall and Sikora (2004) discuss a set of phenomenological studies they undertook to investigate how defamiliarisation can lead to what they call ‘self-modifying feelings’ in the readers of literary texts:

‘At times, readers of literary texts find themselves participating in an unconventional flow of feelings through which they realize something that they have not previously experienced—or at least...not...in the form provided by the text...The imagined world of the text can become unsettling. What is realized (recognized) also may become realized (made real) and carried forward as a changed understanding of the reader’s own life-world’ (Kuiken, Miall & Sikora, 2004, pp.268).

Identification with an individuated character can elicit emotions of sympathy and compassion from the reader, forcing them to re-evaluate their judgements of the character within the fictionalised world—one of the key strengths of practice-based research (Leavy, 2014). Creative writing takes us 'to where we've never been, to see what we've never seen...[then brings] us back... [to] look again at what we thought we knew' (Sullivan, 2010, p.62). These self-modifying feelings can instigate changes in the reader’s attitudes to parallel/comparable real-life situations.

Creative writing can exploit the nature of realist fiction by portraying aspects of a world familiar to the reader that are ‘perceived as part of a conceptual frame and ultimately integrated into the world the readers know’ (Fludernik & Häusler-Greenfield, 2009, p.55). Its narrative meaning is established though the relationship between a reader’s response, the author’s conscious and unconscious intentions, and the stylistic construction 1 of the literary text itself. In this way, creative writing works to create a connection between its fictional world and the real world of the reader. As Miall and Kuiken (1999) conclude from a number of empirical studies: ‘during literary reading, the perspectives that we have, perhaps unthinkingly, acquired from our culture are especially likely to be questioned…This points to the adaptive value of literature in reshaping our perspectives…, especially by impelling us to reconsider our system of convictions and values’ (p.127). This observation supports the notion of practice-based research as being consistent with more traditional scientific methodologies, as they 'bear intrinsic similarities in their attempts to illuminate aspects of the human condition...and work toward advancing human understanding' (Leavy, 2014, p.3).

Creative writing, and by extension all the unique specialisms and approaches of practice-led research, as a process of decontextualisation and recontextualisation, working in tandem with critical reflection and analysis, can produce original insights that may remain overlooked or undiscovered by more conventional research methodologies. In its impact beyond academia, potentially changing behaviours and attitudes in its readers and audiences as a result of defamiliarisation and re-writing through interpretation, creative writing can be seen as a valuable research methodology that, alongside more traditional research outputs, can bring new insights and original contributions to knowledge.

Ali, M. (2007) Brick Lane. London: Black Swan.

Barrett, E. (2010) Foucault's 'What is an Author': Towards a critical discourse of practice as research. In Practice as research: approaches to creative arts enquiry , edited by E. Barrett, E. & B. Bolt. London, I.B. Tauris.

Booth, W.C. (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction. London: University of Chicago Press.

Carter, P. (2010) Interest: The Ethics of Invention. In Practice as research: approaches to creative arts enquiry , edited by E. Barrett, E. & B. Bolt. London, I.B. Tauris.

Crewe, J. (2017) Another London: A novel and critical commentary investigating representations of the white working class in media, politics and literature in an age of multiculturalism , PhD dissertation. The University of Surrey.

Currie, G. (2010) Narratives and narrators a philosophy of stories . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fludernik, M. & Häusler-Greenfield, P. (2009) An Introduction to narratology. Abingdon; New York: Routledge.

Jameson, F. (2010) The political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act. London: Routledge.

Kuiken, D., Miall, D.S., & Sikora, S. (2004) Forms of Self-Implication in Literary Reading. Poetics Today, 25 (2): 171-203

Leavy, P. (2014) Method Meets Art, Second Edition: Arts-Based Research Practice . New York: Guilford Publications.

Miall, D.S. & Kuiken, D. (1999) What Is Literariness? Three Components of Literary Reading. Discourse processes, 28 (2): 121

Phillips, C. (2004) A Distant Shore. London: Vintage.

REF – Research Excellence Framework (2018) Draft guidance on submissions. Retrieved from https://www.ref.ac.uk/media/1016/draft-guidance-on-submissions-ref-2018_1.pdf

Scholes, R., Phelan, J. & Kellogg, R.L. (2006) The nature of narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sklar, H. (2013) The art of sympathy in fiction forms of ethical and emotional persuasion . Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Sullivan, G. (2009) Making Space: The purpose and place of practice-led research. In Practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts , edited by H. Smith & R.T. Dean. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

About the author

Dr Jonathon Crewe is a Senior Lecturer in Film Production in the London School of Film, Media and Design at the University of West London.

It is worth noting a key limitation of creative writing, amongst others, that style and aesthetics can potentially distance the reader from the subject, rather than eliciting empathy. ↩

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34 Creative Approaches to Writing Qualitative Research

Sandra L. Faulkner Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH, USA

Sheila Squillante Chatham University Pittsburgh, PA, USA

• Published: 02 September 2020
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This chapter addresses the use of creative writing forms and techniques in qualitative research writing. Paying attention to the aesthetics of writing qualitative work may help researchers achieve their goals. The chapter discusses research method, writing forms, voice, and style as they relate to the craft of creative writing in qualitative research. Researchers use creative writing to highlight the aesthetic in their work, as a form of data analysis, and/or as a qualitative research method. Qualitative researchers are asked to consider their research goals, their audience, and how form and structure will suit their research purpose(s) when considering the kind of creative writing to use in their qualitative writing.

Creative Approaches to Writing Qualitative Research

In 2005, Richardson and St. Pierre wrote,

I confessed that for years I had yawned my way through numerous supposedly exemplary studies. Countless number of texts had I abandoned half read, half scanned.… Qualitative research has to be read, not scanned; its meaning is in the reading.… Was there some way in which to create texts that were vital and made a difference? (pp. 959–960)

How can researchers make their qualitative writing and work interesting? If qualitative researchers use the principles of creative writing, will their work be vital? What does it mean to use creative writing in qualitative research? In this chapter, we answer these questions by focusing on the how and the why of doing and using creative writing in qualitative research through the use of writing examples. We will discuss research method, writing forms, voice, and style as they relate to the craft of creative writing in qualitative research. Researchers use creative writing as a way to highlight the aesthetic in their work (Faulkner, 2020 ), as a form of data analysis (Faulkner, 2017b ), and/or as a qualitative research method (e.g., Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005 ). Table 34.1 asks you to consider the kind of creative writing to use in your qualitative research depending on the goals you wish to accomplish, who your audience is, and what form best suits your research purpose(s). Use the table as a guide for planning your next research project.

Notes : We adapted Table 34.1 from Chapter 1 and material from Chapters 2 , 4 , and 6 in Faulkner and Squillante ( 2016 ).

Writing Goals and Considerations

Using creative approaches to writing qualitative work can add interest to your work, be evocative for your audience, and be used to mirror research aims. Answering the questions we ask in Table 34.1 is a good starting point for a process that most likely will not be linear; you may try many forms of writing in any given project to meet your research goals.

You may use poetry to make your work sing, tell an evocative story of research participants, or demonstrate attention to craft and the research process (Faulkner, 2020 ). Faulkner ( 2006 ) used poetry to present 31 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Jews’ narratives about being gay and Jewish; the poems showed subjective emotional processes, the difficulties of negotiating identities in fieldwork, and the challenges of conducting interviews while being reflexive and conscious in ways that a prose report could not. Faulkner

wrote poems from interviews, observations, and field notes to embody the experience of being LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) and Jewish in ways that pay attention to the senses and offer some narrative and poetic truths about the experience of multiple stigmatized identities. (Faulkner, 2018a , p. 85)

There were poems about research method, poems about individual participants, and poems about the experiences of being gay and Jewish.

You may write memoir or a personal or lyrical essay to show a reflexive and embodied research process. In the feminist ethnography Real Women Run (Faulkner, 2018c ), Faulkner wrote one chapter as an autoethnographic memoir of running and her emerging feminist consciousness from grade school to the present, which includes participant observation at the 2014 Gay Games. Scenes of running in everyday contexts, in road races, and with friends, as well as not running because of physical and psychic injuries, are interspersed with the use of haiku as running logs to show her embodied experiences of running while female and to make an aesthetic argument for running as feminist and relational practice.

You may use a visual and text collage to show interesting and nuanced details about your topic that are not readily known or talked about in other sources in ways that you desire. For instance, Faulkner ( n.d. ) created Web-based material for her feminist ethnography on women and running that presents aspects of the embodied fieldwork through sound and image. A video essay, photo and haiku collage, and soundscapes of running as fieldwork are used to help the audience think differently about women and running. The sounds and sights of running—the noise, the grunts, the breathing, the encouragement, the disappointment—jog the audience through training runs, races, and the in situ embodiment of running. In another example of embodied ethnography, Faulkner ( 2016b ) used photos from fieldwork in Germany along with poems to create a series of virtual postcards that include sound, text, and images of fieldwork. The presentation of atypical postcards shows the false dichotomy between the domestic and public spheres, between the private and the public; they show the interplay between power and difference. In a collage on queering sexuality education in family and school, Faulkner, ( 2018c ) uses poetic collage as queer methodology, manipulating headlines of current events around women’s reproductive health and justice, curriculum from liberal sexuality education, and conversations with her daughter about sex and sexuality to critique sexuality education and policies about women’s health in the United States. Autoethnography in the form of dialogue poems between mother and daughter demonstrates reflexivity. Social science “research questions” frame and push the poetic analysis to show critical engagement with sexuality literature, and the collaging of news headlines about sexuality connects personal experience about sexuality education to larger cultural issues.

You may use fiction or an amalgam/composite of participants’ interviews or stories to protect the privacy and confidentiality of research participants, to make your work useful to those outside the academy, and to “present complex, situated accounts from individuals, rather than breaking data down into categories” (Willis, 2019 ). Krizek ( 1998 ) suggested that

ethnographers employ the literary devices of creative writing—yes, even fiction—to develop a sense of dialogue and copresence with the reader. In other words, bring the reader along into the specific setting as a participant and codiscoverer instead of a passive recipient of a descriptive monologue (p. 93).

In Low-Fat Love Stories , Leavy and Scotti ( 2017 ) used short stories and visual portraits to portray interviews with women about dissatisfying relationships. The stories and “textual visual snapshots” are composite characters created from interviews with women. Faulkner and her colleagues used fictional poetry to unmask sexual harassment in the academy using the pop-culture character Hello Kitty as a way to examine taken-for-granted patterns of behavior (Faulkner, Calafell, & Grimes, 2009 ). The poems, presented in the chapbook Hello Kitty Goes to College (Faulkner, 2012a ), portray administrative and faculty reactions to the standpoints of women of color, untenured women faculty, and students’ experiences and narratives of harassment and hostile learning environments through the fictionalized experiences of Hello Kitty. The absurdity of a fictional character as student and professor is used to make the audience examine their implicit assumptions about the academy, to shake them out of usual ways of thought.

The point of using creative writing practices in your qualitative research writing and method is that writing about your research does not have to be tedious. Reading research writing need not put the reader to sleep; using creative writing can make your research more compelling, authentic, and impactful. You can explain your lexicon to those who do not speak it in compelling and artful ways. The use of creative forms can be a form of public scholarship, a way to make your work more accessible and useful (Faulkner & Squillante, 2019 ). Some scholars have remarked on the irony of using academic language to write about personal relationships and use creative forms, such as the personal narrative, the novel, and poetry, as a means of public scholarship and for accessibility (Bochner, 2014 ; Ellis, 2009 ; Faulkner & Squillante, 2016 ). The goals with this work are to use the personal and aesthetic to help others learn, critique, and envision new ways of relating in personal relationships. For example, in Knit Four, Frog One , a collection of poetry about women’s work and family stories, Faulkner ( 2014 ) wrote narratives in different poetic forms (e.g., collage, free verse, dialogue poems, sonnets) to show grandmother–mother–daughter relationships, women’s work, mothering, family secrets, and patterns of communication in close relationships. The poems represent different versions of family stories that reveal patterns of interaction to tell better stories and offer more possibilities for close relationships.

Creative Forms and Qualitative Writing

Writers have a reputation for collecting material from everywhere and with anyone—especially in their personal relationships—and using it in their writing. This is analogous to fieldwork: immersing yourself in the culture you want to study and engaging in participant observation. We embrace the analogy of the writer as ethnographer because it makes the focus on the writing as method and writing as a way of life (Rose, 1990 ). We encourage you to get your feet wet in the field as a writer and ethnographer. An ethnographer writes ethnography, which is both a process and a product—a process of systematically studying a culture and a product, the writing of a culture. Since we are discussing creative writing as method, we encourage you to be an autoethnographer, an ethnographer who uses personal experience “to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences” (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015 , p. 1). An (auto)ethnographer engages in fieldwork. A writer engages in fieldwork through the use of personal experience, participant observation, interviews, archival, library, and online research (Buch & Staller, 2014 ).

You may remember conversations and events that become relevant to your writing. You may write down these conversations and observations. Take photos, selfies, and draw sketches. Sketch poems and collect artifacts. You may post Facebook updates, Instagram and tweet these details, regularly journal, and use that writing in your work. You may keep a theoretical journal during fieldwork and interviews and sketch your understandings in the margins. You may write poetry in your field notes. You may feel unsure how to incorporate the research you do (and live) into your writing; poet Mark Doty ( 2010 ) offered helpful advice:

Not everything can be described, nor need be. The choice of what to evoke, to make any scene seem REAL to the reader, is a crucial one. It might be just those few elements that create both familiarity (what would make, say, a beach feel like a beach?) and surprise (what would rescue that scene from the generic, providing the particular evidence of specificity?). (p. 116)

How to Use Creative Writing to Frame Research (and Vice Versa)

How you incorporate research and personal experience in your work depends on how you want structure and form to work in your writing. The way that scholars who use creative writing in their work cite research and use their personal experience varies: you may include footnotes and endnotes; use a layered text with explicit context, theory, and methodological notes surrounding your poems, prose, and visuals; and sometimes, you may just use the writing.

Some qualitative researchers use dates and epigraphs from historical and research texts in the titles of poems and prose (e.g., Faulkner, 2016a , Panel I: Painting the Church-House Doors Harlot Red on Easter Weekend, 2014) and include chronologies of facts and appendices with endnotes and source material (e.g., Adams, 2011 ; Faulkner, 2012b ), while others use prefaces, appendices, or footnotes with theoretical, methodological, and citational points and prose exposition about the creative writing. Faulkner ( 2016c ) used footnotes of theoretical framings and research literature to critique staid understandings of marriage, interpersonal communication research, and the status quo in an editorial for a special issue on The Promise of Arts-Based, Ethnographic, and Narrative Research in Critical Family Communication Research and Praxis ; all of the academic work was contained in footnotes, so that the story of 10 years of marriage and 10 years of research was highlighted in the main text in 10 sections (an experimental text like we will talk about in the narrative section). In Faulkner’s feminist ethnography, “Postkarten aus Deutschland” (2016b), we see dates included in poem titles, details about cities in poetry lines, and images and places crafted into postcards beside the text. Calafell ( 2007 ) used a letter format to write about mentoring in “Mentoring and Love: An Open Letter” to show faculty of color mentoring students of color as a form of love; the letter form challenges “our understandings of power and hierarchies in these relationships and academia in general” (p. 425).

Writing Form and Structure

Whether you desire to write about an interview as a poem, use personal essay to demonstrate reflexivity in the research process, or create a photoessay about your fieldwork, you must ask yourself some questions before you begin: How will you shape this experience in language so that a reader can connect with it? What scaffolding will you build to support it? How can you arrange your information to leave the correct impression, make the biggest impact? These are questions of form and structure. They are related terms, to be sure, but it is important to understand their distinctions.

When we say form , we can also mean type or genre . For example, essay, poem, and short story are all classic forms in creative writing. Structure refers to the play of language within a form. So, things like chronology, stanza breaks, white space, or even dialogue are structural elements of a text. Think of it like cooking: you have spinach, some eggs, a few tablespoons of sharp cheese. Choose this pan and you have made an omelet; choose that pot and you have soup. Pan or pot is a big decision. Fortunately, you have a big cookbook to flip through for ideas before you light the stove.

To narrate something is to attach a singular voice to a series of actions or thoughts. But it is more than simply voice, isn’t it? Imagine the great narrators of literature and film (e.g., Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird ; Ishmael in Moby Dick ; Ralphie in A Christmas Story ; the Stranger in The Big Lebowski ). They bring their personality, their point of view, their irritations and expectations with them onto the page or screen. Details are not merely flung forth from the narrator’s mind or pen as a string of chronological or sequential happenings. This is no information dump. Rather, a narrative is a shapely thing: organized, polished, curated, its events arranged so that they will reach us, move us. Change us. Simply put, narrative is story .

The evocative narrative as an alternative form of research reporting encourages researchers to transform collected materials into vivid, detailed accounts of lived experience that aims to show how lives are lived, understood, and experienced. The goals of evocative narratives are expressive rather than representational; the communicative significance of this form of research reporting lies in its potential to move readers into the worlds of others, allowing readers to experience these worlds in emotional, even bodily ways. (Kiesigner, 1998 , p. 129)

In the following excerpt from Faulkner’s ( 2016a ) personal narrative written in the form of a triptych about her partner’s cancer, she included scholarly research about a polar vortex, scientific information about the color characteristics of red paint, and historical facts about the church née house she lives in with her family to add nuance and detail to her experience (see Figure 34.1 ). She used library search engines, a goggle search, an interview with a city clerk, her academic background knowledge, and journal articles to find research relevant to social support, weather, and paint. Because Faulkner was writing about cancer, living in a former church, and home as supportive place, the triptych form added another layer and emphasized the role of fate and endurance and resilience in relational difficulties. A triptych is something composed in three sections, such as a work of art like an altarpiece. Constructing the personal narrative as a trilogy with sections—Panel I, Painting the Church-House Doors Harlot Red on Easter Weekend, 2014; Panel II, Talking Cancer, Cookies, and Poetry, Summer Solstice, 2014; Panel III, Knitting a Polar Vortex, January 6–9, 2014—played on the idea of a church-house and story as an altarpiece.

Excerpt from “Cancer Triptych” (Faulkner, 2016a ).

The use of research layered the cancer story; it becomes more than a story of a cancer diagnosis. The story paints the picture of community, social support, and coping.

Memoir and Personal Essay

Memoir is a form that filters and organizes personal events, sifting through to shape and present them in an intentional, mediated, engaging way.

Note, too, what memoir is not : a chronological account of everysinglething that ever happened to you from cradle to grave. That form is called autobiography , and it is normally reserved for people who rule countries or scandalize Hollywood. Mostly, that is not us. Memoir is reflective writing, which tells the true story of one important event or relationship in a person’s life. Autoethnography is a form, which also connects the self with the wider culture. Those who do autoethnography use it to highlight “the ways in which our identities as raced, gendered, aged, sexualized, and classed researchers impact what we see, do, and say” (Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013, p. 35).

Besides autobiography, memoir is probably the form most of us think of when we hear personal story . But what is it about this form, in particular, that makes it a good choice for such stories?

From the perspective of the reader, a good memoir does many things. It renders a world using the same tools a novel might: with lush physical details, vivid scenes, a gripping plot, dramatic tension, and dialogue that moves the story forward. It also makes use of exposition —the kind of writing that provides important background information the reader will need to orient themselves within the story. All these elements combine to make for an immersive reading experience, the kind where the scaffolding disappears and the reader slips wholly into the world the writer has created.

But memoir does something else that makes its form distinct from that of a novel or short story. Where for fiction writers we say they should “show, don’t tell,” for memoirists, that maxim becomes “show AND tell.” The memoirist is not only tasked with rendering an experience concretely through sensory writing for the reader, but also required to explain , in a direct way, the importance of that experience at every turn. We call this kind of language reflection . Think of it as the voice of the now-wise author speaking directly to the reader about their insights and revelations, having come through the experience a changed person.

Personal essay is a form that, like memoir, begins with the writer’s self and draws on experiences from their lives. Also like memoir, personal essay uses the tools of fiction—scene, summary, setting, and dialogue—to create a rich sensory world. The difference between these forms is that memoir uses personal experience to look inward , toward the self, and personal essay uses the same experience to look outward at the world.

For instance, let’s say you grew up as a middle child, with a successful older sister and a mischievous younger brother. Your memories of your childhood are filled with moments when you felt invisible in their midst, the classic middle child. There was that one summer when your parents were focused on your sister’s achievements as she applied to Ivy League colleges. Meanwhile, your brother had discovered the local skateboard community and spent his days on the halfpipe behind the grocery store. Most days he came home bleeding, but happy. This was also the summer you started writing poetry and you wanted to read your drafts to anyone who would listen. But your parents were—in your memory—preoccupied with worry about your siblings. They could not sit still long enough to listen to you. You felt neglected and ignored and the feeling has stayed with you throughout your life.

A memoir about this summer would explore your role in the family dynamic and your particular relationships with each player. It would investigate your own complicity in the situation—were they really ignoring you? Are you exaggerating the memory? Did you sometimes enjoy having that solitude, away from their support, possibly, but also away from their scrutiny? Did the experience of learning to rely on yourself lay an important foundation for your nascent adult self? Your memoir about this summer will delve deeply into these questions so that you can learn something important about yourself, and your reader can learn something important about the human condition by reading it.

Take the same material and cast it as a personal essay, however, and you could be investigating the cultural phenomenon of “middle child syndrome.” Perhaps you will interweave moments from that summer with research about birth order psychology to help you, and your reader, understand something important about middle children in general and, by extension, about the world in which humans interact.

Poems, too, can narrate events and had the explicit job of doing so in many cultures for thousands of years. The oral tradition of poetry kept important stories vital for generations and passed historical, political, and sociological information from generation to generation.

Received forms like the epic (which covered many events) and the ballad (which generally celebrated one event) have been used by poets to spin complex tales, which celebrate and memorialize the stuff of human interaction: love, grief, politics, and war. Think of Odysseus’s journeys as recounted in Homer’s great works The Iliad and The Odyssey or of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as examples of each form, respectively. These forms have survived antiquity and continue, at the hands of the skillful poet, to grip and enthrall readers. Dudley Randall’s 1968 poem, “Ballad of Birmingham,” is a stunning and, sadly, still-relevant lament to racial violence in the American South. Derek Walcott’s 1990 masterpiece, Omeros , is a modern epic that weaves narratives of colonialism, Native American tribal loss, and African displacement over 8,000 lines. Even more recently, the poet Marly Youmans’s 2012 book, Thaliad , offers the survival story of seven children, one of whom is named Thalia, in a postapocalyptic landscape.

Beyond these traditional forms, though, contemporary poets use line and image and stanza to evoke story in less prescribed ways as well. Narrative poems in the 21st century employ many of the same tools that fiction or memoir writers do. They must use setting details to create a specific, sensual world for the poem. They must create engaging characters who interact with one another inside a dynamic scene. There can be dialogue, and certainly there will be dramatic tension—something to drive the story forward and keep the reader enthralled. Faulkner’s ( 2016b ) feminist ethnography, “Postkarten aus Deutschland,” is an example of how a qualitative researcher can use narrative poetry (see Figure 34.2 ). Faulkner wrote a chapbook of poems from participant observation in Mannheim, Germany, like postcards that tell the story of participant observation and the time spent observing and writing down details of living, working, and playing in Germany. Faulkner used scenes of participating as a student in a German class, traveling with her family, and everyday experiences like running, spending time with friends, and shopping to add interest and veracity to the project.

Excerpt from “Postkarten aus Deutschland: A Chapbook of Ethnographic Poetry” (Faulkner, 2016b ).

Poets can create dramatic tension both through the sequencing of details and through word choice, or what poets call diction . It is a mistake to suggest that the only type of poem that can work in service of the personal is the explicitly narrative one. Not all stories require chronology or sequence. Some are best expressed in glimpses of place or time, in vivid flashes of insight. Where a memoir or a long narrative poem will move us through story across place and time, a lyric poem can slow us down to find the story inside a single moment.

The term lyric probably makes you think about music, and this is exactly right. In antiquity, lyric poems were those that expressed personal emotions and feelings and were usually accompanied by music, often played on a stringed instrument called a lyre. They were typically written or originally spoken or sung in the first person.

As poetry has evolved away from song, however, that term lyric has come to refer not to music played alongside the poem, but instead to the music inside it, in the way the poet employs sound devices like alliteration, assonance , and repetition of various types to create the appropriate mood (see Figure 34.3 ).

Lyric poem.

This relationship poem begins with a direct address to a “new husband, old lover” and a recollection of a shared sensual experience, which puts the reader into an intensely intimate space. A first read may evoke feelings of companionship, trust, love, even bliss. The poem’s imagery seems beautiful and comforting—“breeze of butterscotch,” “sun-burnished afternoon,” “breakers of mahogany”—but a second, careful read will reveal something more. The “rolling four-poster” at once suggests sexual connection, but could also suggest instability or chaos. “Arms and ankles all slip-knot and braid” shows bodily closeness, certainly, but note the use of the word “knot” to point to something more complicated—a sense of being bound or trapped.

Further into the poem, we find language like “swaying,” “late,” “tempting,” “laggard,” and “augural,” which come together to form a mood of distinct unease. It is pretty clear this marriage is not going to last much beyond this “honeymoon kiss.”

The music of the poem can be found mainly in the repetition of long “a” sounds. They begin in the title with the word Bay and continue through bay/taste/lay/ankles/braid/breakers/swaying/cane/bracing/waving and return to bay in the final line. This effectively bookends the poem with sound. The strong repetition creates the effect of constraint within the lines and stanzas and also, by extension, within the context of the doomed relationship narrative suggested in the poem.

Faulkner and Squillante ( 2018 ) used an intersectional feminist approach to examine their responses to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and rape culture by creating a video collage composed of video, images, and poetry. Their womanifesta, “Nasty Women Join the Hive,” decentered White feminism through the use of reflexive poetry, repetitive images, and critical questions to invite other women to embrace intersectional feminism and reject White feminism and White fragility.

Experimental Forms

If memoir is the dance between showing and telling, the lyric essay is a flirtation, a suggestion whispered in a reader’s ear, a beckoning for them to come closer. That word, lyric, conveys the idea of music, and indeed lyric essays will place as much importance on sound as they do on sense. They have much in common with poems in this way. Lyric essays are less interested in explicit meaning making than they are in a kind of deep interiority. As with poems, their meaning arrives through the accrual of imagery and the layering of sound. They may offer an image or a scene (a pebble or a rusty nail), vivid and resonant, only to leap from it and land in something new (a strangely shaped root). They expect us to leap with them and invite us to by making use of structural elements like sections, asterisks, subheadings, juxtapositions, and ample white space that draws us closer, asks us to fill in the gaps in a way that enriches and enlarges the meaning.

But be careful: A lyric essay is more than a chaotic selection of items on a table or memories on a page. Just like a narrative is polished and arranged, so are experimental forms. The writer must tune in to the particular frequency emitted by the memory or scene and consider how it will or will not play with the bit next to it. If you are working with the fragmentary and imagistic quality of the memories, a lyric approach may be a form that works best (see Figure 34.4 ).

“Pin the Solje on the Baby” (Squillante, 2009 ).

Squillante ( 2009 ) wrote a section for each image, trying to capture resonant details. After these scenes were written, Squillante analyzed them to see what thread of connection might exist between them and then arranged them in such a way as to heighten the tension between them and suggest a kind of associative narrative that might convey the strangeness and poignancy of that trip for the reader. The piece begins with the eagle’s eye view, almost literally: an enormous mountain top viewed from a plane’s window creates in the speaker a sense of awe mixed with disorientation. This is someplace wholly new, wholly unfamiliar. The piece moves from the telescopic first section to a microscopic second section as the images become intimate and interior and much more explicitly about the uncertainty of identity. Who am I in this new space ? Space refers both to geography and to family structure. The final section stays on the ground but uses a wide-angle lens to show a return to the awe and disorientation of the first and second sections now set in a larger context: Don’t we all feel this way sometimes?

Lyric essays, with their sidelong glances, are useful vehicles for personal writing because they tap into our subconscious mind. They force us to think in terms of image and metaphor—those powerful knowledge-making tools wielded by poets. And, whereas a memoir will stare the subject down, scrutinize it until it gives forth meaning, a lyric essay will come at its subject laterally, from around the corner, in the periphery. It sneaks up on meaning in a way that is surprising and satisfying for both writer and reader.

One way to structure a lyric piece is to use numbers or some other kind of mark, such as an asterisk, to separate sections. We sometimes refer to essays that do this as numbered or segmented (e.g., Faulkner, 2016c ; Squillante, 2015 ).

Another way to structure lyric essays is less about friction and more about a kind of layered fluidity that happens when sections build off each other, echo, break off, and return. We call these braided essays , and they mimic the way our stories often emerge—in separate strands we must weave together to make sense of them. For instance, in JoAnn Beard’s ( 1996 ) excellent personal essay, “The Fourth State of Matter,” four separate plot lines merge to give the reader a portrait of a woman in stasis: a dying dog, a crumbling marriage, an infestation of squirrels, and a campus shooting that took the lives of four faculty—friends and colleagues of the author—and one student at the University of Iowa in 1991.

Brenda Miller’s ( 2001 ) essay, “The Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay,” is an instruction manual for the braided essay, while at the same time a wonderful example of the form itself. Miller weaves sections about sharing a loaf of challah—a Jewish braided bread—with her students as a way of teaching them the braided essay form, with sections that use the challah as a way to talk about her own family and cultural identity and sections that instruct the reader, using the voice of a recipe, on how to bake the challah themselves. Each strand itself could be said to have its own trajectory, but woven together, experienced as a whole, it takes on a deeper and broader resonance. A more sustaining, delicious meal. In the section below, Miller meditates on the baking process, but it is also obviously about the writing process:

All good bread makers develop a finely honed sense of intuition that comes into play at every step of the process: knowing exactly the temperature of the water in which to proof your yeast, testing it not with a thermometer but against the most sensitive skin at the underside of your wrist, with the same thoughtful stance as a mother testing a baby’s formula. You add the warm milk, the butter, the salt, a bit of sugar. After a while you stop measuring the flour as you stir, knowing the correct texture through the way it resists your arm. You take the sticky dough in your hands and knead, folding the dough toward you, then pushing away with the heel of your hand, turning and repeating, working and working with your entire body—your legs, your abdomen, your strong heart. Your work the dough until it takes on the texture of satin. You poke it with your index finger and it sighs against your touch. (Miller, 2001 , pp. 19–20)

Doesn’t that recipe-esque structure work beautifully here? It is at once familiar and comforting as well as delightfully surprising. Miller’s choice to use the metaphor of baking—a strenuous, bodily activity—as a way to talk about writing, which is often thought of as only abstract and intellectual, is fresh and persuasive. Miller herself named these kinds of pieces “hermit crab essays,” after the creature who borrows the shell of another alien form to make its home. Here, Miller’s essay borrows the form of a recipe so that she can talk about all the ingredients that go into teaching, and it ends up being a perfect metaphor as well as an effective form for the content.

Remember the middle school pleasure in cutting out words and phrases from glossy magazines and arranging them in interesting, surprising, resonant-to-you ways on the page? It is entirely possible to do this through language as well, and the process, one we might term bricolage or collage , is yet another tool for approaching difficult or complicated narratives and interviews. In this mode writers generate work by excerpting and juxtaposing material from other sources. For example, Faulkner ( 2017a ) used baby artifacts, photos, and text and made digital and paper collages, as in Figure 34.5 .

Feeding from “MotherWork: A Queer Scrapbook” (Faulkner, 2017a ).

Faulkner ( 2017a ) used a series of collage poems composed from family artifacts, feminist research, and systematic recollections as a type of baby scrapbook form to queer staid understandings of White middle-class mothering, to

critique and interrogate expectations and attitudes about what mothers should do, think, and feel. Good mothers in a pro-natalist culture should channel their creativity into things like making scrapbooks of their progeny. Spending time developing identities other than mother—such as poet, academic, and partner—makes fulfilling the normative role of the “good mother” impossible. (Faulkner, 2017a , p. 166)

The feminist texts, poetry, images, and poetic analysis were a queer methodology, or what Halberstam (1998) calls scavenger methodology.

A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior. The queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence. (p. 13)

Audience, Voice, and Point of View

We are always in dialogue with someone when we write: a text message to a friend, a letter to your great aunt, a term paper for your communication professor, a poem to your lover, an article to your editor. Even diary writing—that most personal of gestures—seeks to engage with an audience of the self. Talking to ourselves can be as persuasive and productive as talking with each other. Think of this like a research journal where you try out different voices and forms and creative writing. In fact, we urge you to keep a research journal wherein you experiment with form and voice while you write your qualitative research.

We believe that writing is a social act. We believe that writing can connect us and our research with the large world and our own small desires. When we write, it helps us to imagine someday readers of our words. Will they embrace them? Will they argue with them? Will they consider their own lives differently as a result of reading them? Will they remember them?

You will make different choices about form and possibly even content depending on who you imagine your audience to be. Sometimes it will be an abstract audience made up of “mothers” or “New Yorker readers,” or “social scientists,” and sometimes you will have a very specific face in mind as you write your research. Keeping your audience firmly in mind as you draft will make it easier for you to choose what information to include and what to (most definitely) leave out.

Beyond form and content, you may also find the need to adjust voice and point of view in your creative writing.

Say your son got a bearded dragon for his 10th birthday and that this dragon eats something like 80 live crickets a day.

Say your son is in charge of feeding the crickets to his dragon in the morning before he leaves for school and say, on one particular morning, in your rush to get him out the door, you do not see that the lid to the cricket cage has been left slightly askew.

Say you throw yourself into the shower so you will be on time for meetings with your students, and when you come out, you find 200 chirping creatures hopping about the living room, gleeful for their freedom (until the cats find them, anyway.).

When your son comes home, you must speak to him about this. You must make him understand that the dragon is his responsibility. That he must be more careful with its care. In this conversation, you will not be screaming (that happened immediately on exiting the shower). You will have calmed down considerably by this point. But you will be using your “Serious Voice.”

Later, when you recount the day’s calamity to your husband, outlining the qualities of a proper living environment for crickets, dragons, and humans, he will, using his “Gentle Voice,” ask you to reconsider using your “Teacher Voice.” After all, he has read the reptile manual, too.

The term voice , as we use it in writing, refers to an aggregate of qualities that create, on the page, an idiosyncratic sense of the writer’s self. We sometimes use this interchangeably with the idea of style.

Voice is the thing that helps us identify one author from another. If I were to ask you to close your eyes and listen to me read examples of language excerpted from different works of literature, you would be able to tell quite easily which one was written by J. K. Rowling and which by Ernest Hemingway. Why?

It is more than simply “they sound different.” They do, but it is worth noting the various elements that must work in concert to create that “sound” on the page. They include things like diction and word choice, sentence or line structure, punctuation, tone, use of dialogue, figurative language (or lack of), and even subject matter.

You have probably heard writers talk about “finding their voice” through the process of writing. The idea is that the more time you dedicate to your craft, the clearer the voice that sings from the page and the truer to the writer’s self it will be. On the one hand, this makes perfect sense: the more we practice something, the better we become at it.

But on the other hand, here’s the thing: we do not think you need to find your voice. We think you already have one. In fact, we think you have many voices. The trick is figuring out which one to use for your qualitative writing today.

To tell that tale, I soon discovered, I had to find the right tone of voice; the one I habitually lived with wouldn’t do at all: it whined, it grated, it accused; above all it accused. Then there was the matter of syntax: my own ordinary, everyday sentence—fragments, interjecting, overriding—also wouldn’t do; it had to be altered, modified, brought under control. And then I could see … that I needed to pull back—way back—from these people and these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath and take its own measure. In short, a useful point of view, one that would permit greater freedom of association … had to be brought along. What I didn’t see … was that this point of view could only emerge from a narrator who was me and that same time was not me. (Gornick, 2001 , pp. 21–22)

Related to the idea of voice is the term persona , or as Vivian Gornick refers to it, narrator . When we sit down to approach raw material from our research with the intention of shaping it into a story, we must first consider our relationship to that material, our positioning with respect to it. We need to call on the correct persona (or, as Vivian Gornick calls it, the narrator) within us who can best tell the story of the research.

Beyond choosing a persona for your work, you will also need to choose a point of view through which to tell it. It probably seems fairly obvious that writing personal essays would require a certain closeness to the subject. It may feel most natural to you to adopt the first-person perspective, in which a confident “I” can proclaim itself and take ownership of the story on the page. First-person narrators can present as direct and sure or as vulnerable and raw. Consider the power of the first-person narration in Sharon Olds’s poem, “The Race,” a poem that describes the speaker sprinting through an airport to make the flight that will take her to her dying father’s bedside. There is a breathless immediacy in the poem. We can feel the speaker’s desperation and resolve, the ache in her legs and lungs as she runs toward the gate. This has to do with the careful selection of sensory details and with that first-person narration that allows the poet to re-enter the experience fully to render it clearly for a reader.

Similarly, when Squillante ( 2010 ) was writing the personal essay “Cry, Baby,” she was trying to work out complicated feelings about the experience of mothering her daughter through a difficult infancy and her own postpartum depression. It was painful material, but she needed to feel as close to it as possible to make sense of it (see Figure 34.6 ).

Excerpt from “Cry, Baby” (Squillante, 2010 ).

The first-person point of view can put your reader at ease and connect experiences. It is like a hand held out in acknowledgment and support: this is my story; perhaps it will speak to you, too. This is the goal of much of our qualitative research writing: to be evocative, to get the audience to act, to connect a personal story to larger cultural patterns, to represent your research participants in nuanced and sensitive ways.

It is not the only choice for writing, though. Consider the effect of the second-person narration in the excerpt from Squillante’s ( 2012a ) “Two Suicides” (see Figure 34.7 ).

Excerpt from “Two Suicides” (Squillante, 2012a ).

This essay wrestles with the complexities of friendship, love, divorce, and death—painful, personal stuff that questions more than it answers. Squillante ( 2012a ) chose to use the second-person point of view throughout this piece because of the blurry sense of self that it creates, not I did this, but You did. This personal essay recounts transformative life times when a person does not feel like the person they had always known themselves to be; they experience themselves as an “Other.” Third-person voice allows a distance for reflection; the effect is that of a wiser sibling-self whispering in the narrator’s ear, offering commentary and reflection, direction and support.

Finally, though not as common, the third-person point of view offers the most distant stance in relation to your subject. The effect is observational, detached, almost ethnographic (see Figure 34.8 ). This may be a good point of view to use with your interview work and/or work that is sensitive.

Excerpt from “Self-Portrait with Rollercoaster” (Squillante, 2013 ).

Third-person perspective lets Squillante ( 2013 ) observe this moment from great remove, the way we hear of people who believe their spirits have temporarily left their bodies during medical trauma and claim to have hovered, watching, over their own corporeal fate. Using “the girl,” instead of “I” as the organizing eye allows the suggestion of a kind of universality of experience: the moment we have all had when we recognize that our parents are capable of cruelty.

A final note on point of view: It can be used as a process tool as well as a tool for artifice. If, for instance, one is writing about trauma, a first draft in second or third person can act as a catalyst for necessary but difficult reflection and knowledge making. It can help to get us closer to the material and to feel safe(r) and more able to revise a later draft using that proclaiming, confident first-person voice.

Concluding Thoughts

We encourage qualitative researchers to consider writing, and creative writing in particular, a part of the research process. As you consider different forms and structure for your research, remember that revision is part of the process.

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. (Zinsser, 2006 , p. 8)

But we do not end with this quote to frighten you away from adopting, adapting, and studying creative writing as method, as presentation, and as analysis. We ask you to consider writing part of your method and to study the forms you wish to use as you would study research method and methodology to reach your goals with your qualitative writing (e.g., Faulkner, 2017b ).

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11. Creative Writing as a Research Method

From the book research methods for english studies.

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Supplementary Materials

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Chapters in this book (17)

Research Methodologies for the Creative Arts & Humanities: Practice-based & practice-led research

Practice-based & practice-led research.

Known by a variety of terms, practice-led research is a conceptual framework that allows a researcher to incorporate their creative practice, creative methods and creative output into the research design and as a part of the research output.

Smith and Dean note that practice-led research arises out of two related ideas. Firstly, "that creative work in itself is a form of research and generates detectable research outputs" ( 2009, p5 ). The product of creative work itself contributes to the outcomes of a research process and contributes to the answer of a research question. Secondly, "creative practice -- the training and specialised knowledge that creative practitioners have and the processes they engage in when they are making art -- can lead to specialised research insights which can then be generalised and written up as research" ( 2009, p5 ). Smith and Dean's point here is that the content and processes of a creative practice generate knowledge and innovations that are different to, but complementary with, other research styles and methods. Practice-led research projects are undertaken across all creative disciplines and, as a result, the approach is very flexible in its implementation able to incorporate a variety of methodologies and methods within its bounds.

Most commonly, a practice-led research project consists of two components: a creative output and a text component, commonly referred to as an exegesis . The two components are not independent, but interact and work together to address the research question. The ECU guidelines for examiners states that the practice-led approach to research is

... based upon the perspective that creative art practices are alternative forms of knowledge embedded in investigation processes and methodologies of the various disciplines of performance … the visual and audio arts, design and creative writing ( "Guidelines and Examination Report for Examination of Doctor of Philosophy theses in creative research disciplines," para. 1 ).

A helpful way to understand this is to think of practice-led research as an approach that allows you to incorporate your creative practices into the research, legitimises the knowledge they reveal and endorses the methodologies, methods and research tools that are characteristic of your discipline.

Additional advice and guidance on the nature and implementation of a practice-led research project may be sought from your supervisors and from the research consultants .

• Boyes, E. Masquerade of the feminine (2006)
• Clarke, R. What feels true? (2012)
• Ellis, S. Indelible (2005)
• Grocott, L. Design research & reflective practice (2010)
• Hicks, T. Path to abstraction (2011)
• Mafe, D. Rephrasing voice (2009)
• Noon, D. The pink divide (2012)
• Wilkinson, T. Uncertain surrenders (2012)

ECU Library Resources - Practice-Based/ Practice-Led Research

• Art practice as research : inquiry in visual arts
• Art practice in a digital culture
• Artistic practice as research in music : theory, criticism, practice
• Creative research
• Design research through practice : from the lab, field, and showroom
• Live research : methods of practice-led inquiry in performance
• Method meets art : arts-based research practice
• Mapping landscapes for performance as research
• Thinking through practice: art as research in the academy
• Digital research in the arts and humanities

Further Reading

• Practice Based Research: A Guide
• The practical implications of applying a theory of practice based research: a case study
• Evaluating quality practice - led research: still a moving target?
• Creative and practice-led research: current status, future plans
• Developing a Research Procedures Programme for Artists & Designers
• Inquiry through Practice: developing appropriate research strategies
• Illuminating the Exegesis
• A Manifesto for Performative Research.
• The art object does not embody a form of knowledge
• From Practice to the Page: Multi-Disciplinary Understandings of the Written Component of Practice-Led Studies
• Scholarly design as a paradigm for practice-based research
• << Previous: Positivism
• Next: Qualitative research >>
• Action Research
• Case studies
• Constructivism
• Constructivist grounded theory
• Content analysis
• Critical discourse analysis
• Ethnographic research
• Focus groups research
• Grounded theory research
• Historical research
• Longitudinal analysis
• Life histories/ autobiographies
• Media Analysis
• Mixed methodology
• Narrative inquiry research method
• Other related creative arts research methodologies
• Participant observation research
• Practice-based & practice-led research
• Qualitative research
• Quasi-experimental design
• Social constructivism
• Survey research
• Usability studies
• Theses, Books & eBooks
• Subject Headings
• Academic Skills & Research Writing
• Last Updated: Mar 11, 2024 3:12 PM
• URL: https://ecu.au.libguides.com/research-methodologies-creative-arts-humanities

Edith Cowan University acknowledges and respects the Noongar people, who are the traditional custodians of the land upon which its campuses stand and its programs operate. In particular ECU pays its respects to the Elders, past and present, of the Noongar people, and embrace their culture, wisdom and knowledge.

What is Creative Research?

What is "creative" or "artistic" research how is it defined and evaluated how is it different from other kinds of research who participates and in what ways - and how are its impacts understood across various fields of inquiry.

After more than two decades of investigation, there is no singular definition of “creative research,” no prescribed or prevailing methodology for yielding practice-based research outcomes, and no universally applied or accepted methodology for assessing such outcomes. Nor do we think there should be.

We can all agree that any type of serious, thoughtful creative production is vital. But institutions need rubrics against which to assess outcomes. So, with the help of the Faculty Research Working Group, we have developed a working definition of creative research which centers inquiry while remaining as broad as possible:

Creative research is creative production that produces new knowledge through an interrogation/disruption of form vs. creative production that refines existing knowledge through an adaptation of convention. It is often characterized by innovation, sustained collaboration and inter/trans-disciplinary or hybrid praxis, challenging conventional rubrics of evaluation and assessment within traditional academic environments.

This is where Tisch can lead.

Artists are natural adapters and translators in the work of interpretation and meaning-making, so we are uniquely qualified to create NEW research paradigms along with appropriate and rigorous methods of assessment. At the same time, because of Tisch's unique position as a professional arts-training school within an R1 university, any consideration of "artistic" or "creative research" always references the rigorous standards of the traditional scholarship also produced here.

The long-term challenge is two-fold. Over the long-term, Tisch will continue to refine its evaluative processes that reward innovation, collaboration, inter/trans-disciplinary and hybrid praxis. At the same time, we must continue to incentivize faculty and student work that is visionary and transcends the obstacles of convention.

As the research nexus for Tisch, our responsibility is to support the Tisch community as it embraces these challenges and continues to educate the next generation of global arts citizens.

Creative Writing

Research for writers.

• Finding Books
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Why research?

Whether you're browsing for information to spark your creativity or to check your facts, this guide provides links to resources that can help.

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Getting Started with Reference Books

Reference books are designed to help users find factual information or gain a broad overview of a topic. Typically, they also provide citations of sources for further investigation. The list below offers some suggested research topics for writers, but it is only a starting point. Any information that helps you see the world in new ways may contribute to your writing. NOTE: Although reference books are listed in DELCAT Discovery as non-circulating, they are eligible for Library Pickup Service during the fall 2020 semester.

• Flora and fauna
• Events and movements in history
• Biography and genealogy
• Scientific thought and discoveries
• Technological advances and inventions
• Daily life and customs in particular places or historical periods
• Geographical exploration and maps
• Religious beliefs and practices
• Food culture
• Historical or regional slang
• Metaphor and symbolism

Selected Digital Reference Sources

NOTE:   Oxford University Press upgraded the OED in July 2023, causing unplanned access issues. Off-campus users may experience login problems until Oxford resolves the problem.

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Creative Writing

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The Libraries offer a number of general books on creative writing and writing craft. You can find these through the Libraries' catalog . Below is a small selection of books in our collection; see the rest of this page for guidance on finding more books, both within the NYU Libraries and beyond them.

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Chapter Four: Theory, Methodologies, Methods, and Evidence

Research Methods

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This page discusses the following topics:

Research Goals

Research method types.

Before discussing research   methods , we need to distinguish them from  methodologies  and  research skills . Methodologies, linked to literary theories, are tools and lines of investigation: sets of practices and propositions about texts and the world. Researchers using Marxist literary criticism will adopt methodologies that look to material forces like labor, ownership, and technology to understand literature and its relationship to the world. They will also seek to understand authors not as inspired geniuses but as people whose lives and work are shaped by social forces.

Example: Critical Race Theory Methodologies

Critical Race Theory may use a variety of methodologies, including

• Interest convergence: investigating whether marginalized groups only achieve progress when dominant groups benefit as well
• Intersectional theory: investigating how multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage around race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. operate together in complex ways
• Radical critique of the law: investigating how the law has historically been used to marginalize particular groups, such as black people, while recognizing that legal efforts are important to achieve emancipation and civil rights
• Social constructivism: investigating how race is socially constructed (rather than biologically grounded)
• Standpoint epistemology: investigating how knowledge relates to social position
• Structural determinism: investigating how structures of thought and of organizations determine social outcomes

To identify appropriate methodologies, you will need to research your chosen theory and gather what methodologies are associated with it. For the most part, we can’t assume that there are “one size fits all” methodologies.

Research skills are about how you handle materials such as library search engines, citation management programs, special collections materials, and so on.

Research methods  are about where and how you get answers to your research questions. Are you conducting interviews? Visiting archives? Doing close readings? Reviewing scholarship? You will need to choose which methods are most appropriate to use in your research and you need to gain some knowledge about how to use these methods. In other words, you need to do some research into research methods!

Your choice of research method depends on the kind of questions you are asking. For example, if you want to understand how an author progressed through several drafts to arrive at a final manuscript, you may need to do archival research. If you want to understand why a particular literary work became a bestseller, you may need to do audience research. If you want to know why a contemporary author wrote a particular work, you may need to do interviews. Usually literary research involves a combination of methods such as  archival research ,  discourse analysis , and  qualitative research  methods.

Literary research methods tend to differ from research methods in the hard sciences (such as physics and chemistry). Science research must present results that are reproducible, while literary research rarely does (though it must still present evidence for its claims). Literary research often deals with questions of meaning, social conventions, representations of lived experience, and aesthetic effects; these are questions that reward dialogue and different perspectives rather than one great experiment that settles the issue. In literary research, we might get many valuable answers even though they are quite different from one another. Also in literary research, we usually have some room to speculate about answers, but our claims have to be plausible (believable) and our argument comprehensive (meaning we don’t overlook evidence that would alter our argument significantly if it were known).

A literary researcher might select the following:

Theory: Critical Race Theory

Methodology: Social Constructivism

Method: Scholarly

Skills: Search engines, citation management

Wendy Belcher, in  Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks , identifies two main approaches to understanding literary works: looking at a text by itself (associated with New Criticism ) and looking at texts as they connect to society (associated with Cultural Studies ). The goal of New Criticism is to bring the reader further into the text. The goal of Cultural Studies is to bring the reader into the network of discourses that surround and pass through the text. Other approaches, such as Ecocriticism, relate literary texts to the Sciences (as well as to the Humanities).

The New Critics, starting in the 1940s,  focused on meaning within the text itself, using a method they called “ close reading .” The text itself becomes e vidence for a particular reading. Using this approach, you should summarize the literary work briefly and q uote particularly meaningful passages, being sure to introduce quotes and then interpret them (never let them stand alone). Make connections within the work; a sk  “why” and “how” the various parts of the text relate to each other.

Cultural Studies critics see all texts  as connected to society; the critic  therefore has to connect a text to at least one political or social issue. How and why does  the text reproduce particular knowledge systems (known as discourses) and how do these knowledge systems relate to issues of power within the society? Who speaks and when? Answering these questions helps your reader understand the text in context. Cultural contexts can include the treatment of gender (Feminist, Queer), class (Marxist), nationality, race, religion, or any other area of human society.

Other approaches, such as psychoanalytic literary criticism , look at literary texts to better understand human psychology. A psychoanalytic reading can focus on a character, the author, the reader, or on society in general. Ecocriticism  look at human understandings of nature in literary texts.

We select our research methods based on the kinds of things we want to know. For example, we may be studying the relationship between literature and society, between author and text, or the status of a work in the literary canon. We may want to know about a work’s form, genre, or thematics. We may want to know about the audience’s reading and reception, or about methods for teaching literature in schools.

Below are a few research methods and their descriptions. You may need to consult with your instructor about which ones are most appropriate for your project. The first list covers methods most students use in their work. The second list covers methods more commonly used by advanced researchers. Even if you will not be using methods from this second list in your research project, you may read about these research methods in the scholarship you find.

Most commonly used undergraduate research methods:

• Scholarship Methods:  Studies the body of scholarship written about a particular author, literary work, historical period, literary movement, genre, theme, theory, or method.
• Textual Analysis Methods:  Used for close readings of literary texts, these methods also rely on literary theory and background information to support the reading.
• Biographical Methods:  Used to study the life of the author to better understand their work and times, these methods involve reading biographies and autobiographies about the author, and may also include research into private papers, correspondence, and interviews.
• Discourse Analysis Methods:  Studies language patterns to reveal ideology and social relations of power. This research involves the study of institutions, social groups, and social movements to understand how people in various settings use language to represent the world to themselves and others. Literary works may present complex mixtures of discourses which the characters (and readers) have to navigate.
• Creative Writing Methods:  A literary re-working of another literary text, creative writing research is used to better understand a literary work by investigating its language, formal structures, composition methods, themes, and so on. For instance, a creative research project may retell a story from a minor character’s perspective to reveal an alternative reading of events. To qualify as research, a creative research project is usually combined with a piece of theoretical writing that explains and justifies the work.

Methods used more often by advanced researchers:

• Archival Methods: Usually involves trips to special collections where original papers are kept. In these archives are many unpublished materials such as diaries, letters, photographs, ledgers, and so on. These materials can offer us invaluable insight into the life of an author, the development of a literary work, or the society in which the author lived. There are at least three major archives of James Baldwin’s papers: The Smithsonian , Yale , and The New York Public Library . Descriptions of such materials are often available online, but the materials themselves are typically stored in boxes at the archive.
• Computational Methods:  Used for statistical analysis of texts such as studies of the popularity and meaning of particular words in literature over time.
• Ethnographic Methods:  Studies groups of people and their interactions with literary works, for instance in educational institutions, in reading groups (such as book clubs), and in fan networks. This approach may involve interviews and visits to places (including online communities) where people interact with literary works. Note: before you begin such work, you must have  Institutional Review Board (IRB)  approval “to protect the rights and welfare of human participants involved in research.”
• Visual Methods:  Studies the visual qualities of literary works. Some literary works, such as illuminated manuscripts, children’s literature, and graphic novels, present a complex interplay of text and image. Even works without illustrations can be studied for their use of typography, layout, and other visual features.

Regardless of the method(s) you choose, you will need to learn how to apply them to your work and how to carry them out successfully. For example, you should know that many archives do not allow you to bring pens (you can use pencils) and you may not be allowed to bring bags into the archives. You will need to keep a record of which documents you consult and their location (box number, etc.) in the archives. If you are unsure how to use a particular method, please consult a book about it. [1] Also, ask for the advice of trained researchers such as your instructor or a research librarian.

• What research method(s) will you be using for your paper? Why did you make this method selection over other methods? If you haven’t made a selection yet, which methods are you considering?
• What specific methodological approaches are you most interested in exploring in relation to the chosen literary work?
• What is your plan for researching your method(s) and its major approaches?
• What was the most important lesson you learned from this page? What point was confusing or difficult to understand?

Write your answers in a webcourse discussion page.

• Introduction to Research Methods: A Practical Guide for Anyone Undertaking a Research Project  by Catherine, Dr. Dawson
• Practical Research Methods: A User-Friendly Guide to Mastering Research Techniques and Projects  by Catherine Dawson
• Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches  by John W. Creswell  Cheryl N. Poth
• Qualitative Research Evaluation Methods: Integrating Theory and Practice  by Michael Quinn Patton
• Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches  by John W. Creswell  J. David Creswell
• Research Methodology: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners  by Ranjit Kumar
• Research Methodology: Methods and Techniques  by C.R. Kothari

Strategies for Conducting Literary Research Copyright © 2021 by Barry Mauer & John Venecek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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