Robert McGill | February 2022

Robert McGill

Research is at the heart of many a creative writer’s work. We dig through archives, interview people, and travel to far-flung sites, seeking to tell untold stories with authenticity and accuracy. Yet we rarely claim that what we publish is itself a form of scholarly research. How could it be, when creative writing so often takes liberties with the facts, and when our aim is frequently less to generate new knowledge than to astonish and delight—sometimes, even, to confound?

Increasingly, though, writers who teach in Creative Writing programs face demands to frame their writing as a form of scholarship—and not just their creative nonfiction, but also their fiction, poetry, and drama. Partly, it’s because college tenure committees, granting agencies, and other institutional bodies want to apply the same assessment criteria to creative writing as to traditional research. Also, it might seem easier to justify the academy’s inclusion of Creative Writing programs if such writing can be cast not as flights of fancy but as having the same knowledge-building function that’s associated with scholarly work.

At worst, the drive to classify creative writing as research can appear disingenuous, an attempt to pass it off as something it’s not. But there’s a case to be made that creative writing can, in fact, create knowledge, standing as what has variously been called “research-led practice,” “practice-led research,” and “research-creation.”¹ In particular, I want to suggest that fiction, poetry, and drama can constitute valuable research precisely because of their affordances as writing that doesn’t expressly identify how much of it is true.

The question of how creative writing can do so depends partly on how “research” is defined. Here’s one definition: “Creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of humanity, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications.”² The word “systematic” might seem to throw a wrench into the works at the outset. After all, when it comes to procedures, writing a story or poem doesn’t involve anything as universalized as the scientific method. But creative writing has its own systems: not least, conventions of form and genre to which writers adhere, and which they exploit in order to innovate. For instance, the invention of stream-of-consciousness narration in the early 20th century built on conventions of depicting human interiority that had been established in lyric poetry, dramatic monologues, and diary fiction.

What about the idea that creative writing can “increase the stock of knowledge”? It seems a tough proposition when readers can’t know how much of a poem, play, or story is true. Some writers address this concern with prefaces, postscripts, and footnotes, laying out their creative work’s factual basis. It would be more elegant, though, if creative writing could claim to create knowledge without such supplements. It would be even more impressive if, in certain ways, it could do so more effectively than traditional scholarship and other nonfiction.

To address these possibilities, let me propose eight ways of creating knowledge that creative writing does: eight ways in which it has even greater potential than traditional scholarly nonfiction. It’s not that you have to incorporate these eight ways into your own writing to teach your readers about already-established knowledge. But if you want to claim that your creative work is generating new knowledge, without any nonfictional supplements to clarify its relationship to the facts involved in the production of knowledge, then incorporating one or more of the eight things I’m about to identify might just be helpful.

1. Modeling the future

One type of research at which creative writing excels is the imagining of how things could be, whether what’s posited are future technologies or alternative societies. A fictional narrative can stand as an elaborate, richly textured thought experiment that’s also a manner of research-and-development operation—and a terrifically cost-effective one, given that each author is often the only full-time employee in this figurative lab, and their materials run as cheap as pens and paper. Science fiction is emblematic in this regard: for instance, automatic doors were foreseen by H.G. Wells in his serialized 1898–98 novel, When the Sleeper Wakes, and in 1964, Arthur C. Clarke imagined a version of the internet in his story “Dial F For Frankenstein.” In 1898, former sailor Morgan Robertson’s novel The Wreck of the Titan told the story of a new steamship of unprecedented size, the Titan, vaunted as “unsinkable,” and carrying too few lifeboats, hitting an iceberg on a transatlantic voyage and sinking with the loss of nearly all aboard. Robertson’s narrative didn’t prevent an eerily similar scenario from playing out in 1912 when the Titanic sank, but the novel’s uncanny accuracy did suggest the predictive power of creative writing, especially when the text is—as was Robertson’s—underwritten by authorial expertise about the subject matter.

Meanwhile, creative writing that imagines possible forms of community has influenced real-world social experiments by closely describing such communities and dramatizing daily life in them. Edward Bellamy’s 1887 novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887 and B.F. Skinner’s 1948 novel Walden Two are two examples that, in offering fictional models of alternative living, inspired actual efforts to realize socialistic and intentional communities, respectively.³ And if creative writing has helped people to imagine utopian possibilities, it has also helped them to anticipate grimmer turns. For instance, Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which presents a populist demagogue becoming US president, was a touchstone for political commentators in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Likewise, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale has retained an alarming currency as various policies regarding women’s rights have echoed the patriarchal developments in Atwood’s near-future narrative. And George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a cautionary tale par excellence about the potential of surveillance to facilitate authoritarianism.⁴ Science writing and other nonfiction can forecast technological and political developments, too, but because creative writing undertakes such work through stories of particular characters involved in particular events, it features an unparalleled granularity that’s valuable when considering both what developments might occur and what their consequences could be.

2. Filling gaps in the historical record

Creative writing can also contribute to knowledge by inventively, plausibly imagining the past with the same depth of detail as when imagining the future. Creative writers who revisit history in this way don’t necessarily produce verifiable knowledge, but they do valuable work by shedding light on forgotten stories and figures, connecting dots between different phenomena in revealing ways, and helping us to a better understanding of how and why things might have played out as they did. For instance, Timothy Findley’s 2000 play Elizabeth Rex imagines why and with what consequences England’s Queen Elizabeth I ordered the execution of Robert Devereux in 1601, while Annabel Lyon’s 2009 novel The Golden Mean, about Aristotle’s tutelage of the young Alexander the Great, reconsiders the philosopher’s influence on the future ruler.

Historians can undertake hypothesizing, too: for instance, Marjorie Garber has given the name “speculative biography” to books about historical figures that engage in supposition when faced with gaps in the record. But Garber is critical of such inferential work in nonfiction when it happens more or less covertly, using “language heavily laden with subjunctives and similar suppositions,” because the technique involves an “authorial sleight of hand” that allows some readers to take speculation for fact.⁵ In contrast, writing expressly identified as fiction can go about this suppositional work more honestly, as its speculative quality is clear from the outset.

3. Illuminating the private

Just as a lack of evidence often hampers nonfiction accounts of the past, a lack of tellable detail can impair traditional scholars investigating the private sphere. They have a hard time representing individuals’ personal experiences without the risk of upsetting someone’s sense of propriety, violating ethics rules, or even breaking privacy laws. A general reluctance to share details publicly about things such as sex, addiction, and mental illness may have diminished in the last few decades, but many people still aren’t comfortable having their private lives exposed. Moreover, as Patricia Leavy observes, issues such as “social class and economics, and the personal ways they impact people’s lives, are challenging to address in nonfiction writing… because they are so intimate, are linked to issues of status and pride, and are highly politicized.”⁶ In contrast, the veil of fictionality in creative writing allows private life to be represented candidly. Changing individuals’ names and other details about them—and writing in a literary form that doesn’t purport to be entirely factual—permits creative writers to document real experiences while preserving their subjects’ anonymity and staying on the right side of the law.7

Creative writing also lets authors depict private thoughts that they might otherwise be afraid to publish. Some essayists have written with seemingly total candor in nonfiction, but fiction, poetry, and drama still have a unique role in allowing writers to address taboo thoughts, deeds, and situations. For instance, the difficult romantic relationship depicted in Hanif Kureishi’s 1998 novel Intimacy was sufficiently similar to Kureishi’s own at the time that his ex-partner, Tracey Scoffield, spoke out publicly against the book,⁸ which features frank confessions by the narrator that even the typically forthright Kureishi might not have considered appropriate to represent in nonfiction. By featuring such intimate material, creative writing has improved our understanding of swathes of human life that traditional scholarship has trouble addressing.

4. Exploring radical ideas

The same masking function that permits creative writing’s relatively unfettered depiction of private life also allows for the exploration of ideas that might be considered beyond the pale if taken up in nonfiction. A famous example is the description in Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia about the titular country’s practice of allowing prospective marital partners to inspect each other naked. More might have been mocked or condemned if he’d advocated for the custom himself; his attribution of it to an invented society distanced him from it, even as the presentation of it as a successful actuality encouraged readers not to dismiss it out of hand. A modern example is Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock, in which a character goes about making the case for a Jewish diaspora from Israel to Europe. If mooted in nonfiction, the idea surely would had led to much more personal criticism of Roth than he received. As a New York Times reviewer put it, Roth’s use of fiction let him “explore territory that, even for a Jewish writer of notable courage and independence, must still seem impermissible.”⁹

In a society where the mere association of a person with an idea can be devastating for that person’s reputation, creative writing gives writers and readers a forum for discussing radical notions. Humanity benefits from the circulation and testing of such ideas, especially when we’re invited, as creative writing invites us, to consider them without the easy out of launching ad hominem attacks against the person articulating them.

5. Innovating with respect to literature

Creative writing can also serve as a form of research by investigating the possibilities of literature itself, innovating with respect to things such as form, style, and genre. The term “writer’s writer” is often applied to authors who innovate in this way, experimenting to break ground. They add to our stock of knowledge by renovating and revitalizing how we use language and tell stories. If it’s true that, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,”¹⁰ then innovative creative writing expands those limits.

It’s uncommon for a writer to create something wholly original in literature—say, a new verse form or narratorial technique—but as the world has changed, creative writers have been celebrated for finding new ways to represent and think about it, whether through formal innovations such as the Twitter novel or generic innovations such as Cyberpunk, which, with its combination of “low life and high tech,”¹¹ gave us both a new aesthetic and a new way of looking at our relationship to technology. Creative writing can renew our means of representation, expression, and narration, and these means become available not just to creative writers but to everyone.

6. Recasting understandings of earlier literature

At least since Ezra Pound listed “new composition” as the “most intense” form of literary criticism,¹² it has been recognized that creative writing can itself be a form of commentary on literature. By echoing earlier texts in certain ways, and departing from them in others, a new work can direct readers’ attention to—and reshape their understanding of—what has been conventional, cliché, problematic, or, conversely, exciting in past literature, while modeling and suggesting new directions. In doing so, the new work corroborates what Ralph Ellison once said of the novel: namely, that every “serious” novel “is a discussion of the craft.”¹³

Nonfiction literary criticism does this work, too, and often more straightforwardly, insofar as it characteristically avoids deploying things like irony and ambiguity. In contrast, creative writing often puts its literary criticism into the mouths of unreliable characters or performs it in other indirect ways. For instance, Anne Carson’s 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red is, in part, a meditation on the conventions of life writing, but much of what it has to say in this regard is implicit, as it goes about reworking those conventions, demonstrating how life writing can be done differently.

Similarly, creative writing has the ability not only to critique canonical texts but actually to change the shape of canons by becoming part of them. Consider Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which, as it reworks Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, both stands as a commentary on that earlier book and, now, has joined it on many college syllabi. As T.S. Eliot once observed, a new artwork reconstellates all the works that came before it, so that “the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.”¹⁴ We’re called on to see everything in a new light by virtue of what has been added.

7. Presenting indisputable situations to assess

When presented with an account of someone’s behavior, people are often compelled to scrutinize it morally or psychologically. Almost inevitably, though, especially if the situation doesn’t involve us directly, our judgments are impeded by a lack of knowledge about the specifics involved, or by the fact that the facts come to us filtered through conflicting testimonies. Often enough, a situation ultimately seems to be a version of “He said, she said.”

Creative writing allows us to put aside the question of whether something happened exactly as described and to focus, instead, on what it means that it happened as described. An example is Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person,” which sparked widespread discussion after it appeared in a 2017 issue of The New Yorker. The story, about a brief, disastrous romantic relationship, offers one participant’s perspective on the relationship. If the narrative were a memoir, unkind readers might doubt whether the narrator is telling the complete unvarnished truth about what happened. In contrast, because “Cat Person,” as fiction, uses third-person focalized narration to grant readers unmediated access to the protagonist’s thoughts and perceptions, there’s little question of whether to believe that things have transpired for her more or less as described. Other kinds of narratorial perspective used in creative writing—in particular, omniscient narration and “camera eye” narration—present facts about characters’ deeds and thoughts with even less room for doubting the story’s account of its events.

When such narratorial perspectives are deployed, readers are compelled to accept the facts of the story as a given, and to go from there in assessing the characters’ words and actions. Of course, readers are also free not to believe that things would really happen in real life as they do in the story, but except in situations with unreliable narrators, fiction provides a platform for readers to evaluate the significance of people’s actions or events rather than remaining caught up in trying to ascertain whether they happened in the first place. In this respect, fiction can constitute research analogous to philosophical thought experiments. If a story’s well designed, rendering its scenario comprehensively and plausibly, it will prompt dialogue and debate, test readers’ intuitions, draw attention to their biases, and help them to see people and situations in new ways. “Cat Person,” for example, helps readers to recognize and discuss how things such as patriarchal gender roles and miscommunication can turn a romance toxic. As the story challenges the reader to grapple with these issues, it has the potential to go beyond merely confirming established scholarly insights about these matters and to spur new ideas about them.

8. Enlisting readers as collaborating researchers

As I’ve suggested, a fundamental challenge for creative writing as a way to share research is that it doesn’t straightforwardly transfer information; without looking elsewhere for verification, readers often can’t know if the presentation of reality in a story, poem, or play is factually true. As a result, creative writing’s “takeaways” can be unclear, left to readers to work out for themselves. But if this ambiguity causes trouble when it comes to disseminating knowledge, it also means that creative writing has a unique potential: to enlist readers as collaborating researchers: people who, along with the texts’ authors, create the new understandings that constitute the texts’ research output. To put it another way: as Camilla Nelson observes, the research quality of creative writing exists, in no small part, in “potential knowledge… to which the work gives rise.”¹⁵

In this respect, literary critics are emblematic readers: their analyses and exegeses formalize a process that all readers have available to them in terms of discovering knowledge through reading creative work. So, for example, while I’ve noted that Autobiography of Red has much to say about the character of life writing, it has been the role of critics such as Stuart J. Murray, in his article “The Autobiographical Self: Phenomenology and the Limits of Narrative Self-Possession in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red,” to identify what, exactly, the book says.¹⁶

Not all readers are obliged or equipped to take up this role. What is more, few are liable to consider comprehensively a creative text’s research contributions. But while scholarly articles typically stick to laying out an argument and presenting information, seeking to instruct readers rather than treating them as collaborators, creative writing invariably invites readers to play a more active role: for instance, by adjudicating the narrative’s plausibility and significance; by deciding whether its picture of history, the future, or the private sphere seems reasonable; and by assessing whether the writing style is innovative. In this respect, consider Hélène Cixous’s identification of “écriture feminine”—her term for a distinctively female way of writing—as something emblematized by Molly Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness narration at the end of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses. One can imagine that Joyce shared Cixous’s goal of enacting a language that reflects embodied female subjectivity, but it was left to Cixous to extrapolate from Joyce’s text various characteristics of such a language, making the claim, for instance, that “[t]he feminine… affirms.”¹⁷

It’s true that readers of traditional scholarship can also gain understandings of it that exceed its authors’; they might, for example, psychologize about a literary critic via their words in ways the critic didn’t intend. But creative writing, with its ironic assertions and its ambiguous relationship to factual truth, constitutionally compels readers to take up an active, investigative role. In doing so, it makes a unique research contribution by expanding the research team, putting more minds to work on the writing’s subjects of interest.

9. Implications for writing and teaching

Recognizing the unique ways in which creative writing can create knowledge has some crucial implications. The first is for writing practice, and it involves embracing the fact that there are many routes to producing a creative work with research value. Indeed, these routes need not even always be followed consciously. Just as some scientific discoveries have come about through happy accidents, so too can research contributions be made by writers who have the good fortune to develop an innovative literary form without an awareness of what has been previously written, or to create an illuminating glimpse of the future without having studied current social trends. But creative work is more likely to create knowledge when one follows an appropriate methodology. Chris Rust has gone so far as to claim that artists who want their work to be seen as research:

must “own” their research in several important ways. They must declare the subject of their inquiry and their motivation for investigating it. They must demonstrate that they have a good understanding of the context for the work and what has gone before. They must have both methods and methodology and they must set all these things out in ways that the rest of us can recognise and understand.¹⁸

Rust’s list of requirements helpfully identifies elements that granting agencies might well wish to see in proposals for research-creation projects. What’s more, adjudicators for the agencies might consider whether projects involve one or more of the eight research elements I’ve identified, as their presence confirms that the author’s choice to undertake the project through creative writing rather than traditional scholarship makes sense.

Another implication is for creative writers who teach at colleges. Given that academic funding opportunities often require demonstrations from faculty members and even from graduate students that their writing constitutes scholarly research, it behooves instructors to introduce their graduate and undergraduate students to conceptualizing their work in this way. While this introduction might be most important for students hoping to teach at colleges themselves, it could be just as valuable in helping all students to reflect more broadly on their writing’s possible social value.

It remains to be said that because there’s no necessary correlation between creative writing’s achievements in generating knowledge and its commercial viability, colleges and scholarly granting bodies have a pivotal role to play in supporting creative writing as research. The marketplace alone is unlikely to support many writers whose work places as much stock in assiduous knowledge-creation and innovation as entertainment value. For that reason, just as the academy is an essential home for basic scientific research that doesn’t bring an immediate financial payoff, it can be important in nurturing the production of knowledge through creative writing. Not all writers need to think of their work as scholarly research— creative writing’s function in instructing, entertaining, and persuading is valuable on its own—but those authors who approach it as research deserve to be supported for their work in using creative writing’s ability to build and share knowledge in inimitable ways.

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Beatrice Szymkowiak is a French American writer. She obtained her MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. She is the author of RED ZONE, a poetry chapbook. Her work has also appeared in many magazines. She is currently a PhD Candidate and a Research Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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Notes