research and creative writing

Creative Writing Research: What, How and Why

• First Online: 23 July 2023

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• Graeme Harper 2  

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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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Articles on Creative writing

Displaying 1 - 20 of 46 articles.

UK’s creative industries bring in more revenue than cars, oil and gas – so why is arts education facing cuts?

Adam Behr , Newcastle University

An ode to the social realism of ‘boring’ lyrics – from The Kinks to The Streets

Glenn Fosbraey , University of Winchester

How to write a love song – three tips for beginners from a songwriting expert

‘ Cli-fi ’ might not save the world, but writing it could help with your  eco-anxiety

Rachel Hennessy , The University of Melbourne ; Alex Cothren , Flinders University , and Amy T Matthews , Flinders University

I research the therapeutic qualities of writing about art – here are three steps for trying it yourself

Patrick Wright , The Open University

Creative writing can help improve one’s health: a South African study shows how

Dawn Garisch , University of Cape Town and Steve Reid , University of Cape Town

Boxing empowered me to express my trauma – now, I help other abuse survivors do the same, combining it with creative writing

Donna Lyon , The University of Melbourne

How a poet and professor promotes racial understanding with lessons from history

Quraysh Ali Lansana , Oklahoma State University

How to understand your grief through writing

Catherine Cole , Liverpool John Moores University

Write what you know: the COVID experience is a rich resource for year 12 English exams

Janet Dutton , Macquarie University

5 ways to teach the link between grammar and imagination for better creative writing

Brett Healey , Curtin University

Writing can improve mental health – here’s how

Christina Thatcher , Cardiff Metropolitan University

In an AI world we need to teach students how to work with robot writers

Lucinda McKnight , Deakin University

To succeed in an AI world, students must learn the human traits of writing

‘Lit therapy’ in the classroom: writing about trauma can be valuable, if done right

Yannick Thoraval , RMIT University

Too many adjectives, not enough ideas: how NAPLAN forces us to teach bad writing

What my students taught me about reading: old books hold new insights for the digital generation

Kate Flaherty , Australian National University

Life sentences – what creative writing by prisoners tells us about the inside

Dr Michael X. Savvas , Flinders University

Frozen in time, the casts of Indigenous Australians who performed in ‘human zoos’ are chilling

Katherine Johnson , University of Tasmania

‘I’m in another world’: writing without rules lets kids find their voice, just like professional authors

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King's College London

Creative writing research phd.

Key information

The PhD in Creative Writing at King’s is a practice-led course, incorporating taught elements and aspects of professional development. It is designed to cater for talented, committed writers who are looking to complete a book-length creative work for publication and sustain a long-term career in writing.

Key Benefits

Our unique programme offers students:

• a varied, structured framework for the development of their creative work, with regular feedback from experienced author-lecturers in the department through supervision and workshops
• purposeful engagement with professionals from the publishing and performance industries throughout the course, building potential routes to publication
• valuable teaching experience in creative writing at HE-level through our Graduate Teaching Assistantship scheme
• practical experience in public engagement, through curating and chairing public literary events at King’s
• a community of fellow writers and collaborative projects

English Department

We have over 100 doctoral students from all over the world working on a wide range of projects. Together with our community of postdoctoral fellows, our early career researchers both organise and participate in our thriving seminar and conference culture.

The English department is home to award-winning novelists, poets, essayists, biographers, non-fiction authors, and literary critics, who supervise creative projects at doctoral level within their specialisms.

Works by our staff have won or been shortlisted for a number of literary accolades, including: the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Costa First Novel Award, the Costa Poetry Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Commonwealth Book Prize, the Biographers’ Club / Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize, the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award, the European Union Prize for Literature, the RSL Encore Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Letters, le Prix du Roman Fnac, le Prix du Roman Etranger, the Kiriyama Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Many of the creative writing staff are Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature.

Their most recent publications are:

Benjamin Wood

The Young Accomplice (Penguin Viking, 2022) – fiction

A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better (Scribner, 2018) – fiction

Edmund Gordon

The Invention of Angela Carter (Chatto & Windus, 2016) – creative non-fiction

Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015) – poetry

Anthony Joseph

Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) – poetry

The Frequency of Magic (Peepal Tree Press, 2019) – fiction

Lara Feigel

The Group (John Murray Press, 2020) – fiction

Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (Bloomsbury, 2018) – creative non-fiction

Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings, and Why We Return (John Murray Press, 2019) – creative non-fiction

Daughters of the Labyrinth (Corsair, 2021) – fiction

Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life (Chatto & Windus, 2020) – poetry

Emerald (Chatto & Windus, 2018) – poetry

Andrew O'Hagan

Mayflies (Faber & Faber, 2020) – fiction

The Secret Life: Three True Stories (Faber & Faber, 2017) – creative non-fiction

*may vary according to research leave and availability.

King's Alumni

The list of King’s alumni not only features many acclaimed contemporary authors—Michael Morpurgo, Alain de Botton, Hanif Kureishi, Marina Lewycka, Susan Hill, Lawrence Norfolk, Ross Raisin, Alexander Masters, Anita Brookner, and Helen Cresswell—it also includes major figures in literature, such as Maureen Duffy, Arthur C Clarke, Thomas Hardy, Christopher Isherwood, BS Johnson, John Keats, W. Somerset Maugham, and Virginia Woolf.

Course Detail

Our postgraduate writing students are given a supportive environment in which to enhance their technique, to explore the depths of their ideas, to sustain their creative motivation, and to prepare them for the demands of the writer’s life beyond the College.

At King's we know that writing well requires self-discipline and an ability to work productively in isolation; but we also appreciate that postgraduate writers thrive when they are part of a community of fellow authors, an environment of constructive criticism and shared endeavour.

That is why we offer our PhD students the guidance of knowledgeable and experienced practitioners. They will have frequent opportunities to interact and collaborate with peers and forge lasting connections within London’s writing industry.

Students will be expected to attend the quarterly Thesis Workshop, and also to take an active part in curating literary events at King’s, including the Poetry And… quarterly reading series. They will be invited to apply for positions teaching undergraduate creative writing modules as part of the Department’s Graduate Teaching Assistantship (GTA) scheme.

After three years (full-time) or six years (part-time), students are expected to submit either:

• a novel or short story collection
• a poetry collection
• a full-length work of creative non-fiction

In addition, they are also required to submit an essay (up to 15,000 words) that examines their practical approach to the conception, development, and revision of their project, and which explores how their creative work was informed by research (archival, book-based, or experiential).

• How to apply
• Fees or Funding

Many of our incoming students apply for AHRC funding via the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. Please see their website ( www.lahp.ac.uk ) for more detail of deadlines, application procedure and awards available. Also the ‘Student Funding’ section of the Prospectus will give you more information on other scholarships available from King’s.

UK Tuition Fees 2023/24

Full time tuition fees:

£5,820 per year (MPhil/PhD, Creative Writing)

Part time tuition fees:

£2,910 per year (MPhil/PhD, Creative Writing)

International Tuition Fees 2023/24

£22,900 per year (MPhil/PhD, Creative Writing)

£11,450 per year (MPhil/PhD, Creative Writing)

UK Tuition Fees 2024/25

£6,168 per year (MPhil/PhD, Creative Writing)

£3,084 per year (MPhil/PhD, Creative Writing)

International Tuition Fees 2024/25

£24,786 per year (MPhil/PhD, Creative Writing)

£12,393 per year (MPhil/PhD, Creative Writing)

These tuition fees may be subject to additional increases in subsequent years of study, in line with King’s terms and conditions.

• Study environment

Base campus

Strand Campus

Located on the north bank of the River Thames, the Strand Campus houses King's College London's arts and sciences faculties.

PhD in Creative Writing students are taught through one-to-one sessions with an appointed supervisor in their chosen specialism (fiction, creative non-fiction, or poetry) as well as through quarterly thesis workshops. They are also appointed a second supervisor whose role is to offer an additional perspective on the work being produced.

We place great emphasis on pastoral care and are a friendly and welcoming department in the heart of London. Our home in the Virginia Woolf Building offers many spaces for postgraduate students to work and socialise. Studying in London means students have access to a huge range of libraries from the Maughan Library at King’s to the Senate House Library at the University of London and the British Library.

Our PhD Creative Writing students are taught exclusively by practicing, published writers of international reputation. These include:

Benjamin Wood (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing)

Supervises projects in fiction.

Edmund Gordon (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing)

Supervises projects in fiction and creative non-fiction.

Sarah Howe (Lecturer in Poetry)

Supervises projects in poetry.

Anthony Joseph (Lecturer in Creative Writing)

Supervises projects in poetry and fiction.

Jon Day (Senior Lecturer in English)

Supervises projects in creative non-fiction and fiction

Lara Feigel (Professor of Modern Literature)

Supervises projects in creative non-fiction and fiction.

Ruth Padel (Professor Emerita of Poetry)

Andrew O’Hagan (Visiting Professor)

*Teaching staff may vary according to research leave and availability.

Our programme also incorporates the following taught components:

Thesis Workshop

A termly writing seminar for the discussion and appraisal of works-in-progress. These are taught on a rotational basis by all members of the creative writing staff, so that students get the benefit of hearing a range of voices and opinions on their work throughout the course.

The Writing Life

A suite of exclusive guest talks and masterclasses from leading authors, publishers, and editors, in which students receive guidance from people working at the top level of the writing industry and learn about the various demands of maintaining a career as a writer.

Recent speakers have included Amit Chaudhuri, Chris Power, Rebecca Watson, Mendez, Frances Leviston, Joanna Biggs, Joe Dunthorne, Francesca Wade, Kishani Widyaratna, Jacques Testard and Leo Robson.

Other elements of professional development are included in the degree:

Agents-in-Residence

Candidates in fiction or creative-nonfiction will meet and discuss their work in one-to-one sessions with invited literary agents, who are appointed to yearly residencies. These sessions offer writers a different overview of the development of their project: not solely from the standpoint of authorial technique, but with a view towards the positioning of their writing within a competitive and selective industry. Poetry candidates will meet and discuss their work with invited editors from internationally recognised poetry journals and presses.

Undergraduate Teaching

Through our Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) training scheme, our PhD students can apply to lead undergraduate creative writing workshops in fiction, creative non-fiction, and/or poetry, enabling them to acquire valuable HE-level teaching experience that will benefit them long after graduation.

Reading Series

Our students are required to participate in the curation of literary events at King’s. They are also responsible for curating Poetry And… , a quarterly reading in which leading poets illuminate the powerful connections between poetry and other disciplines. Students will develop skills in public engagement by chairing discussions and may also perform excerpts of their own writing.

Postgraduate Training

There is a range of induction events and training provided for students by the Centre for Doctoral Studies, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the English Department. A significant number of our students are AHRC-funded through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) which also provides doctoral training to all students. All students take the ‘Doctoral Seminar’ in their first year. This is a series of informal, staff-led seminars on research skills in which students can share and gain feedback on their own work. We run a series of ‘Skills Lunches’, which are informal lunch meetings with staff, covering specific topics, including Upgrading, Attending Conferences, Applying for Funding and Post-Doctoral Awards, etc. Topics for these sessions are generally suggested by the students themselves, so are particularly responsive to student needs. We have an Early Career Staff Mentor who runs more formal workshops of varying kinds, particularly connected to career development and the professions.

Through our Graduate Teaching Assistantship Scheme, doctoral students can apply to teach in the department (usually in their second year of study) and are trained and supported as they do so.

• Entry requirements

Find a supervisor

Search through a list of available supervisors.

Accommodation

Discover your accommodation options and explore our residences.

Connect with a King’s Advisor

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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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• CAREER COLUMN
• 09 May 2018

Write fiction to discover something new in your research

• Amanda C. Niehaus 0

Amanda C. Niehaus is a scientist and writer in Brisbane, Australia.

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In the final month of my Australian Research Council fellowship at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, I published papers about sex-crazed marsupials, wrote grant applications and finished The Breeding Season , an as-yet-unpublished novel.

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On the Fine Art of Researching For Fiction  

Jake wolff: how to write beyond the borders of your experience.

The first time I considered the relationship between fiction and research was during a writing workshop—my first—while I watched the professor eviscerate some poor kid’s story about World War II. And yeah, the story was bad. I remember the protagonist being told to “take cover” and then performing several combat rolls to do so.

“You’re college students,” the professor said. “Write about college students.”

Later, better professors would clarify for me that research, with a touch of imagination, can be a perfectly valid substitute for experience. But that’s always where the conversation stopped. If we ever uttered the word “research” in a workshop, we did so in a weaponized way to critique a piece of writing: “This desperately needs more research,” we’d all agree, and then nothing more would be said. We’d all just pretend that everyone in the room already knew how to integrate research into fiction and that the failures of the story were merely a lack of effort rather than skill. Secretly, though, I felt lost.

I knew research was important, and I knew how to research. My questions all had to do with craft. How do I incorporate research into fiction? How do I provide authenticity and detail without turning the story into a lecture? How much research is too much? Too little?

How do I allow research to support the story without feeling obligated to remain in the realm of fact—when I am, after all, trying to write fiction?

I heavily researched my debut novel, in which nearly every chapter is science-oriented, historical, or both. I’d like to share a method I used throughout the research and writing process to help deal with some of my questions. This method is not intended to become a constant fixture in your writing practice. But if you’re looking for ways to balance or check the balance of the amount of research in a given chapter, story, or scene, you might consider these steps: identify, lie, apply.

I recently had a conversation with a former student, now a friend, about a short story he was writing. He told me he was worried he’d packed it too full of historical research.

“Well,” I said, “how much research is in there?”

“Uhhh,” he answered. “I’m not sure?”

That’s what we might call a visualization problem. It’s hard to judge the quantity of something you can’t see.

I’ve faced similar problems in my own work. I once received a note from my editor saying that a certain chapter of my novel read too much like a chemistry textbook. At first, I was baffled—I didn’t think of the chapter as being overly research-forward. But upon reading it again, I realized I had missed the problem. After learning so much about chemistry, I could no longer “see” the amount of research I had crammed into twenty pages.

Literature scholars don’t have this problem because they cite their sources; endnotes, footnotes, and the like don’t merely provide a tool for readers to verify claims, but also provide a visual reminder that research exists within the text. Thankfully, creative writers generally don’t have to worry about proper MLA formatting (though you should absolutely keep track of your sources). Still, finding a quick way to visually mark the research in your fiction is the least exciting but also the most important step in recognizing its role in your work.

Personally, I map my research in blue. So when my editor flagged that chapter for me, I went back to the text and began marking the research. By the end of the process, the chapter was filled with paragraphs that looked like this one:

Progesterone is a steroid hormone that plays an especially important role in pregnancy. Only a few months before Sammy arrived in Littlefield, a group of scientists found the first example of progesterone in plants. They’d used equipment I would never be able to access, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectroscopy, to search for the hormone in the leaves of the English Walnut trees. In humans, aging was associated with a drop in progesterone and an increase in tumor formation—perhaps a result of its neurosteroidal function.

My editor was spot-on: this barely qualified as fiction. But I truly hadn’t seen it. As both a writer and teacher, I’m constantly amazed by how blind we can become to our own manuscripts. Of course, this works the other way, too: if you’re writing a story set in medieval England but haven’t supported that setting with any research, you’ll see it during this step. It’s such an easy, obvious exercise, but I know so few writers who do this.

Before moving on, I’ll pause to recommend also highlighting research in other people’s work. If there’s a story or novel you admire that is fairly research-forward, go through a few sections and mark anything that you would have needed research to write. This will help you see the spacing and balance of research in the fiction you’re hoping to emulate.

(Two Truths and a) Lie

You’ve probably heard of the icebreaker Two Truths and a Lie: you tell two truths and one lie about yourself, and then the other players have to guess which is the lie. I’d rather die than play this game in real life, but it works beautifully when adapted as a solo research exercise.

It’s very simple. When I’m trying to (re)balance the research in my fiction, I list two facts I’ve learned from my research and then invent one “fact” that sounds true but isn’t. The idea is to acquaint yourself with the sound of the truth when it comes to a given subject and then to recreate that sound in a fictive sentence. It’s a way to provide balance and productivity, ensuring that you’re continuing to imagine and invent —to be a fiction writer— even as you’re researching.

I still have my notes from the first time I used this exercise. I was researching the ancient Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang for a work of historical fiction I would later publish in One Story. I was drowning in research, and the story was nearing fifty pages (!) with no end in sight. My story focused on the final years of the emperor’s life, so I made a list of facts related to that period, including these:

1. The emperor was obsessed with finding the elixir of life and executed Confucian scholars who failed to support this obsession.

2. If the emperor coughed, everyone in his presence had to cough in order to mask him as the source.

3. The emperor believed evil spirits were trying to kill him and built secret tunnels to travel in safety from them.

Now, the second of those statements is a lie. My facts were showing me that the emperor was afraid of dying and made other people the victims of that fear—my lie, in turn, creates a usable narrative detail supporting these facts. I ended up using this lie as the opening of the story. I was a graduate student at the time, and when I workshopped the piece, my professor said something about how the opening worked because “It’s the kind of thing you just can’t make up.” I haven’t stopped using this exercise since.

We have some facts; we have some lies. The final step is to integrate these details into the story. We’ll do this by considering their relationship to the beating heart of fiction: conflict. You can use this step with both facts and lies. My problem tends to be an overload of research rather than the opposite, so I’ll show you an example of a lie I used to help provide balance.

In a late chapter in my book, three important characters—Sammy and his current lover Sadiq and his ex- lover Catherine—travel to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). They’ve come to investigate a drug with potential anti-aging properties that originates in the soil there (that’s a fact; the drug is called rapamycin). As I researched travel to Easter Island, my Two Truths and a Lie exercise produced the following lie:

There are only two airports flying into Easter Island; these airports constantly fight with each other.

In reality, while there are two airports serving Easter Island (one in Tahiti; the other in Chile), nearly everyone flies from Chile, and it’s the same airline either way. On its surface, this is the kind of lie I would expect to leave on the cutting room floor—it’s a dry, irrelevant detail.

But when I’m using the ILA method, I try not to pre-judge. Instead, I make a list of the central conflicts in the story or chapter and a list of the facts and lies. Then I look for applications—i.e., for ways in which each detail may feel relevant to the conflicts. To my surprise, I found that the airport lie fit the conflicts of the chapter perfectly:

Ultimately, the airport lie spoke to the characters, all of whom were feeling the painful effects of life’s capriciousness, the way the choices we make can seem under our control but also outside it, arbitrary but also fateful. I used this lie to introduce these opposing forces and to divide the characters: Sammy and Sadiq fly from Tahiti; Catherine flies from Chile.

Two airports in the world offered flights to Rapa Nui—one in Tahiti, to the west, and one in Chile, to the east. Most of the scientists stayed in one of those two countries. There was no real meaning to it. But still, it was hard, in a juvenile way, not to think of the two groups as opposing teams in a faction. There was the Tahiti side, and there was the Chile side, and only one could win.

This sort of schematic—complete with a table and headers—may seem overly rigid to you, to which I’d respond, Gee, you sound like one of my students. What can I say? I’m a rigid guy. But when you’re tackling a research-intensive story, a little rigidity isn’t the worst thing. Narrative structure does not supply itself. It results from the interplay between the conflicts, the characters, and the details used to evoke them. I’m presenting one way, of many, to visualize those relationships whenever you’re feeling lost.

Zora Neal Hurston wrote, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Maybe that’s why I’m thinking of structure and rigidity—research, for me, is bolstering in this way. It provides form. But it’s also heavy and hard to work with. It doesn’t bend. If you’re struggling with the burden of it, give ILA a shot and see if unsticks whatever is holding you back. If you do try this approach, let me know if it works for you—and if it doesn’t, feel free to lie.

__________________________________

Jake Wolff’s  The History of Living Forever is out now from FSG.

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Creative Writing

General books on writing, finding books using subject headings, search the nyu libraries catalog, call numbers, books beyond nyu.

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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.

Subject headings  are words and phrases which constitute a "controlled vocabulary" to categorize books by subject field.  Subject headings often indicate the contents of books in terms that their titles (or your keywords) do not use, which often may be very general.

Use general subject headings for searching a broad topic or more specific subject headings for a specific author, historical period, or animal. You will find (more) headings specific to the subject category within the left-hand facets in our online catalog.  If you want to see the subject headings for a specific title, click on the "details" link in the title record. 

Here are some examples of subject headings:

• Creative writing
• Writing & editing guides
• Fiction -- Technique
• Playwriting
• Poetry -- Authorship
• Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)

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• Interlibrary Loan Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a service through which eligible library users can obtain materials (books, articles, and more) from other libraries. Delivery turnaround time can vary. If you're in a rush, request just the chapter you need instead of the entire book. There is a one-chapter limit.
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Awarded teaching prizes, granted a variety of national research fellowships, and presently holding five of the College's endowed chairs, the English and creative writing faculty have been amply honored as scholars and as teachers. We are active in our research and our publishing, and participate regularly in national and international conferences. We take equal pride in the excellence of our classroom teaching, our commitment to improving student writing and thinking, and our readiness to work one-on-one with English majors in planning their course of study and in undertaking special research projects.

In contrast to universities where distinguished professors teach only advanced undergraduate or graduate courses, everyone in the Department of English and Creative Writing regularly teaches a first-year course (Writing 5 and English 7) or an introductory course to the major. We offer approximately fifty different courses each year, all of them serving as part of the English major. Ranging in subject matter from Old English sagas to contemporary literatures, from advanced essay writing to various genres of creative writing, from the history of the English language to digital texts and the new media, these courses demonstrate our breadth of pedagogical and scholarly interests.

In addition, many members of the English and creative writing faculty teach in related academic programs at Dartmouth, including African and African-American Studies, Native American Studies, Comparative Literature, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Jewish Studies, and the Master of Arts and Liberal Studies programs. An exceptional number of English and creative writing faculty members are active in campus-wide affairs -- advising undergraduate clubs and groups, hosting academic conferences, chairing college committees, and helping to shape the future direction of the College. Every member of the department holds regular office hours each week, and welcomes into their office each and every student interested in discussing the study of literature.

The One Method That Changes Your—and All Students’—Writing

Science-based writing methods can achieve dramatic results..

Posted May 14, 2024 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

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I remember spending hours commenting painstakingly on my students’ papers when I was a graduate student teaching in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. My students loved our classes, and they filled my sections and gave me terrific course evaluations. Yet I could see that their writing failed to change significantly over the course of the semester. I ended up feeling as if I should refund their money, haunted by the blunt instruments we had to teach writing.

As I’ve learned from directing five writing programs at three different universities, methods matter. When I reviewed comments on papers from instructors who taught in my programs, I discovered that the quantity and quality of comments on students’ papers made only a slight impact on writing outcomes. For instance, one notoriously lazy instructor took several weeks to return assignments and only used spelling and grammar checkers to automate comments. But his conscientious colleague made dozens of sharp observations about students’ arguments, paragraphs, and sentences. However, Mr. Conscientious’ students improved perhaps only 10% over Mr. Minimalist’s students. Even then, the differences stemmed from basic guidelines Mr. Conscientious insisted his students write to, which included providing context sentences at the outset of their essay introductions.

Educators have also poured resources into teaching writing, with increasing numbers of hours dedicated to teaching writing across primary, secondary, and higher education . Yet studies continue to find writing skills inadequate . In higher education, most universities require at least a year of writing-intensive courses, with many universities also requiring writing across the curriculum or writing in the disciplines to help preserve students’ writing skills. However, writing outcomes have remained mostly unchanged .

While pursuing my doctorate, I dedicated my research to figuring out how writing worked. As a graduate student also teaching part-time, I was an early convert to process writing. I also taught those ancient principles of logos, ethos, and pathos, as well as grammar and punctuation. Nevertheless, these frameworks only created a canvas for students’ writing. What was missing: how writers should handle words, sentence structure, and relationships between sentences.

Yet researchers published the beginnings of a science-based writing method over 30 years ago. George Gopen, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams created a framework for identifying how to maximize the clarity, coherence, and continuity of writing. In particular, Gopen and Swan (1990) created a methodology for making scientific writing readable . This work should have been a revelation to anyone teaching in or directing a writing program. But, weirdly, comparatively few writing programs or faculty embraced this work, despite Williams, Colomb, and Gopen publishing both research and textbooks outlining the method and process.

Peculiarly, this framework—represented by Williams’ Style series of textbooks and Gopen’s reader expectation approach—failed to become standard in writing courses, likely because of two limitations. First, both Gopen and Williams hewed to a relativistic stance on writing methods, noting that rule-flouting often creates a memorable style. This stance created a raft of often-contradictory principles for writing. For example, Williams demonstrated that beginning sentences with There is or There are openings hijacked the clarity of sentences, then argued writers should use There is or There are to shunt important content into sentence emphasis positions, where readers recall content best. Second, these researchers failed to tie this writing framework to the wealth of data in psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience , or cognitive psychology on how our reading brains process written English. For instance, textbooks written by these three principal researchers avoid any mention of why emphasis positions exist at the ends of sentences and paragraphs—despite the concept clearly originating in the recency effect. This limitation may stem from the humanities’ long-held antipathy to the idea that writing is a product, rather than a process. Or even that science-based methods can help teachers and programs measure the effectiveness of writing, one reason why university First-Year Writing programs have failed to improve students’ writing in any measurable way.

Nevertheless, when you teach students how our reading brains work, you create a powerful method for rapidly improving their writing—in any course that requires writing and at all levels of education. Students can grasp how writing works as a system and assess the costs and benefits of decisions writers face, even as they choose their first words. This method also works powerfully to help students immediately understand how, for instance, paragraph heads leverage priming effects to shape readers’ understanding of paragraph content.

Using this method, I and my colleagues have helped students use a single writing assignment to secure hundreds of jobs, win millions in grant funding, and advance through the ranks in academia. However, we’ve also used the same method without modifications in elementary and secondary classrooms to bolster students’ writing by as much as three grade levels in a single year.

Perhaps the time has arrived for this well-kept secret to revolutionizing student writing outcomes to begin making inroads into more writing classrooms.

Gopen, G. D. and J. A. Swan (1990). "The Science of Scientific Writing." American Scientist 78(6): 550-558.

Gopen, George. The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Perspective . Pearson, 2004.

Gopen, George. Expectations: Teaching Writing from the Reader’s Perspective . Pearson, 2004.

Williams, Joseph. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace . University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Williams, Joseph. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace . Harper Collins, 1994.

Williams, Joseph. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace . Longman, 2002.

Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Ph.D. , is a consultant on writing and organizations. She is also the author, with Maria B. Grant, MD, of The Biomedical Writer: What You Need to Succeed in Academic Medicine .

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Common Writing Assignments

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

These OWL resources will help you understand and complete specific types of writing assignments, such as annotated bibliographies, book reports, and research papers. This section also includes resources on writing academic proposals for conference presentations, journal articles, and books.

Understanding Writing Assignments

This resource describes some steps you can take to better understand the requirements of your writing assignments. This resource works for either in-class, teacher-led discussion or for personal use.

Argument Papers

This resource outlines the generally accepted structure for introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions in an academic argument paper. Keep in mind that this resource contains guidelines and not strict rules about organization. Your structure needs to be flexible enough to meet the requirements of your purpose and audience.

Research Papers

This handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre, choosing topics, and finding sources.

Exploratory Papers

This resource will help you with exploratory/inquiry essay assignments.

Annotated Bibliographies

This handout provides information about annotated bibliographies in MLA, APA, and CMS.

Book Report

This resource discusses book reports and how to write them.

Definitions

This handout provides suggestions and examples for writing definitions.

Essays for Exams

While most OWL resources recommend a longer writing process (start early, revise often, conduct thorough research, etc.), sometimes you just have to write quickly in test situations. However, these exam essays can be no less important pieces of writing than research papers because they can influence final grades for courses, and/or they can mean the difference between getting into an academic program (GED, SAT, GRE). To that end, this resource will help you prepare and write essays for exams.

Book Review

This resource discusses book reviews and how to write them.

Academic Proposals

This resource will help undergraduate, graduate, and professional scholars write proposals for academic conferences, articles, and books.

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Creative Writing Concentration

Hone your personal creative voice and study the art of creatively stringing words together to create meaning, inspire action, and tell a story – from social media to children’s books.

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Develop who you are as a writer.

If you don’t go a day without writing—journal entries, blog posts, poetry, impassioned emails, or witty social media updates to friends—the Creative Writing concentration offers a rewarding way for you to develop the practice.

This concentration is designed for students inspired to pursue their own artistic vision. You’ll study the craft and discipline of writing, learn how writers create their unique voices, and explore world literature. You’ll have opportunities to study—and participate in—personal and group performance at Champlain and beyond. With our Creative Writing concentration, you will develop your individual style and add versatile skills to a toolbox that can be used in a variety of career settings. Through courses in this concentration, you can:

• Pursue your artistic vision through developing your unique voice.
• Study contemporary and historical writing from various world regions.
• Build your portfolio so you can show the world what you can do.

Courses in the Creative Writing Concentration

All Creative Media students are required to select a Primary Area of Focus and a Complementary Area of Focus. Shown here is the curriculum for the 24-credit Primary Area of Focus. If you choose Creative Writing as a 12-credit Complementary Area of Focus, requirements will differ from those shown.

8 courses through at least the 300 level are required for Creative Writing Primary Focus Area

Choose at least one of the following:

• WRT 220: Intermediate Creative Writing
• WRT 221: Intermediate Poetry Workshop
• WRT 226: Intermediate Fiction Workshop
• WRT 237: Intermediate Creative Nonfiction

Primary area electives:

• WRT 180: Introduction to Songwriting
• WRT 200: Fundamentals of Journalism
• WRT 235: Writing Children’s Literature
• WRT 236: Writing About Food
• WRT 280: Reading & Writing in the Wilderness
• WRT 324: Advanced Poetry Workshop
• WRT 325: Advanced Fiction Workshop
• WRT 327: Seminar in Playwriting
• WRT 337: Advanced Creative Nonfiction
• WRT 346: Publishing in the 21st Century
• FLM 128: Screenwriting I
• FLM 328: Screenwriting II

WRT 120 Creative Writing, Introduction to

Introduction to Creative Writing explores techniques used by poets and fiction writers in their crafts. Students will analyze examples of published works and will produce portfolios of original works. Workshop activity is required; students must share their work with the entire class.

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The Young and Teen Writers Workshops have served the community for over 38 years. Take a journey into the world of creative writing.

About the Workshops

Our program is one of the oldest workshops for young writers in the nation and remains one of the most affordable options for academic programs. We offer generous need-based financial aid packages.

Students will work on their craft and meet and learn from professional authors and artists. We offer two workshops:

• The Young Writers Workshop accepts applications from creative writers entering 5th through 8th grades. The 2024 YWW will meet on weekday afternoons, July 8-19.
• The Teen Writers Workshop accepts applications from creative writers entering 9th grade through rising college freshmen. The 2024 TWW will meet on weekday afternoons, July 22-August 2.

Past Guest Authors

The very first Young Writers Workshop guest author was the great Clyde Edgerton in 1986!

Our 2023 guest artists include returning authors Frances O’Roark Dowell and David Carter.

In recent years, YWW has featured NC Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green, award-winning songwriter JR Richards; novelists Miriam Polli, Nahid Rachlin, Ben Shaberman, David Carter, Sean DeLauder, Kyle Winkler; poets Dorianne Laux and Al Maginnes; nonfiction author Cat Warren, and voice-over artist Graham Mack.

Previous guests through the years have included Jhon Sanchez (fiction), Eric Roe (fiction writer), Stephanie Van Hassel (poet), Chris Tonelli (poet), Bianca Diaz (poet), Ravi Tewari (poet), Alice Osborn (poet), Ian Finley, (drama), Ed Mooney, Jr. (fiction), Eric Gregory (fiction), Kayla Rutledge (fiction), Sarah Grunder Ruiz (fiction), David Tully (YA novelist), Cari Corbett (comics), Jeremy Whitley (comics), Megan Roberts (fiction), among so many others.

Dr. William K. Lawrence [email protected]