1.1 âŠ
Why does writing matter? As I ask this question, innumerable answers are going through my mind. Affected by how I feel in this moment, I am inclined to go for the âmoveâ I usually (or not?) go for when I writeâto just write what I observe âinsideâ of me. Slowly. A brave leap of faith into an order of symbols that might potentially touch you: tell you my truthâyou, the reader.
âWhy do we have to write it Miss?â is a question I am often asked by my first, second and fourth form secondary school students. âWhat does it mean to take what you have from inside of you and manifest it onto these symbols?â I ask them, usually in simpler wording for my 11-, 13- and 15-year-old non-native speaker students in my English class. The most definitive answer about writing is a question. I mean to be enigmatic for a reason.
We are not made of letters and yet letters can both liberate and oppress us. Perhaps, we make ourselves through these symbols. This quest of turning our lived experience into symbols that tell a story, for me, is a quest to connect both with oneself and with others. The Other1 (what we consider not us), many times, is part of ourselves, what we fear and what we admire; the Other which disgusts us may be thought of as a deeply hidden part of who we are, a part we forbid ourselves from. The idea that what we forbid ourselves from may reveal much about who we are and how we can grow beyond our limitations in order to connect, and is the gist of what we will explore in this psychosocial writerâs workbook. The idea that we forbid ourselves from certain pathways of thinking, being, doing may be applied to our practice of writing, how we understand it and how we can develop it. The desire to write may be a call to suppress and release oneself from anything.
The act of writing can be thought of as creating a âpotential space [âŠ] the ground where the imaginary [our associations of meaning-our unconscious] can find an outlet and resolve conflicts symbolicallyâ (Hecq 2015, p. 104). Creative Writing, like any practice of art, acts as a space that allows the escape of disguised emotions, an exploration of self without our complete awareness. Our practice of writing, like our practice of anything, is an extension and a repetitive remaking of who we are, or who we think we are. It is a simultaneous continuous creation of our identity.
Even though Creative Writing can be directly concerned with the psychological exploration of self, it is not only about that, but it is about the exploration of writing itselfâof humanity too. Our Creative Writing indirectly communicates assumptions about what we think Creative Writing is. Thus, even though these assumptions may be more widely related to our ideas/assumptions about the world, this workbook inherently argues that there is path to explore the assumptions we have about writing through the concept of writing fantasy in a manner that helps us learn more about writing and our writer identity.
This book presents an experimental method you can use to explore your writer identity. It constitutes an experiential engagement with your writing through a series of exercises and a reflective engagement with your writing via guideline questions and examples of case studies of writing fantasies. Overall, the workbook aims to help you go onto a small-scale exploration of your writer practice, and thus identity, using a Lacanian-inspired methodological stance to analyze the data (your writing) elicited by the six exercises and prompts provided.
This book builds on doctoral research I conducted at the Institute of Education, University College London (UCL), from 2011 to 2014. In that research project, I explored the application of aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in the pedagogy of Creative Writing, mainly because of this theoryâs particular focus on language (more on that in Chap. 3). This led me to discover/invent the term âwriting fantasyâ through an experiment course with Creative Writing undergraduate university students. My research has shown that the ambiguous stance of these Creative Writing exercises helps in manifesting exactly what we are looking for when we write; (albeit what we do not know we are looking for) it facilitates that or those Other writing pathway(s) that we avoid/prohibit to surface, and this provides us with additional insight for why writing matters for us, for you, potentially birthing the emergence of something new.
1.2 How My Quest for Otherness Led Me to My Own Teaching Fantasy
In 2008, I started teaching a Creative Writing workshop for a local womenâs organization in Thessaloniki, Greece. The workshop was conducted in Greek and all of my students were female, aged from 30 to 60, some without any formal university education.
Being a graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme in the UK and an aspiring writer, I had already had the opportunity to witness and practice a variety of Creative Writing teaching styles or pedagogies. In the Creative Writing workshops in Thessaloniki, I used some Creative Writing exercises or games, not entirely aware of their purpose, because I had enjoyed them myself as a writer and because my previous mentors had recommended them. For example, I presented my students with an exercise called âWrite About this.â The âthisâ would be an object, which I would usually place in the middle of the group of students; for example, the object could be a candle. In class, I would write along with my students. After the writing session, we would read and comment on each otherâs work. The aim of the discussion was not to make our writing âbetterâ2 but, with a view to get reactions and comments, to see what âeffectâ what we had written had on each other in terms of the interpretation of the exerciseâs request. As classes went by, some of my students were surprised with themselves, with the fact that they could write in ways they thought were closed or blocked to them, in ways that were âother than myselfâ or ânot like myselfââthis being a repeated phraseology in what they said. They seemed to think this writing was unbecoming of or unsuited to the writer identity they thought they had. I am aware here that writing with them might have helped them feel differently about how they wrote too.
This ânot writing like oneself,â that is, like not the writer one expects oneself to be (to sound or read), made me very curious about the use of such âambiguousâ Creative Writing exercises and subsequently about the act and process of writing in the Creative Writing classroom.
Considering that I was not directing the students to particular assumptions about what they should write, we might call this pedagogy an ambiguous pedagogy of writing. I call such a pedagogy âambiguousâ because it does not exactly dictate what is supposed to be written or learnedâyet for each individual, depending on the interpretation of the exercise or my stance, there is an element which guides what they write or what they say about what they write. One cannot separate teacher-stance from the tool of the pedagogy: the Creative Writing exercise. An ideology of writing is always embodied in the praxis of writing and in its pedagogy as a stance.
Another factor in this setting is that I did not evaluate my studentsâ writing as âgoodâ or âbadâ at the time. I must admit that, sometimes, I thought it might have been considered âbad,â according to some, perhaps elitist, aesthetic norms or standards. I tried to keep such opinions to myself and work with how they developed their writing in different avenues that they had not tried. For example, if someone tried to write in description for the first time after writing always in monologues, I would not comment on how they would be able to further improve their description (in whatever stylistic assumptions one would make that a description could be improvedâŠ); I would ask them to talk about the experience of trying this method out and tell me about it in general.
My interest in the studentsâ responses about their feeling of âOthernessâ led me to the decision to conduct doctoral research. I became very curious about Creative Writing exercises and began to look for relevant reading on their use in the pedagogy of Creative Writing. I did not find any research that confirmed or discussed such experiences of feeling âOther than oneselfâ or âUnlike Oneselfâ in relation to engaging with exercises in the literature back in 2010, nor does this hold for today. The more I read about Creative Writing pedagogies, the more curious I became about exploring the operation of these seemingly famous and yet so under-researched pedagogic tools: the Creative Writing exercises.
On a reflexive note, I am aware that wanting to research about âwriting exercisesâ might represent my desire to write (if that desire can ever be articulated) to become other than my(that)self. I heard my studentsâ comments and focused on that particular aspect of what they told me about their engagement with the exercises. I cannot say I knew who I was to be-come at the start of this journey, nor will this self attempt to put in words here how it has changed that self personally (if the past and the present subjectivities we think we have can be thought of as separate!), as I do not believe in linear narratives when it comes to (writer) subjectivity. In fact, the narratives of change/shift in writer subjectivity about my participants provided in this workbook are only partial narratives of the represented shift or of the subjectivity of my students, as I do not think that it is possible to represent the Real ...