11

addRessing The

‘anCienT QuaRRel’:

CReaTiVe WRiTing as

ReseaRCh

Jen Webb and Donna Lee Brien

Introduction

Creative writing as a university- based discipline is simultaneously an art form and a part
of the humanities. its focus is the production of works of high literary quality across
many forms and genres, including poetry, fiction, creative non- fiction, life writing,
ficto- criticism, scripts for film, television, radio and theatre, digital texts, and genres
that cross into professional writing and journalism such as travel, food and historical
writing. The study of creative writing as a tertiary level discipline may include close
reading of published texts, but the discipline’s focus on the production of texts and,
indeed, the types of texts themselves, distinguishes it from other disciplines.
despite the discipline’s focus on creative production, it is rare for creative writing to
be housed within an art school, alongside other art forms such as the visual arts, craft,
design, performing arts, film, television and electronic media production. although
its practice, traditions, orientations and trajectories lack a good fit with the logic of
most faculties of the humanities, this is where it is more commonly housed, alongside
the disciplines of communication, literature, cultural and media studies. The problem
with this arrangement is that the research orientations of creative writing and the
humanities disciplines have little in common. as paul Carter points out, what the
makers of artworks do is productively reflect on the creative thinking that created their
works, integrating this usually unarticulated knowledge with the craft ‘wisdom’ of the
artist to retrieve the ‘intellectual work that usually goes missing in translation’ during
the process of making works of art (Carter 2004: xi–xiii). Researchers in the humanities,
in contrast, offer exposition, critique or analysis of the finished artefact, and cannot
usefully rationalize the creative process. nonetheless, writing is often collapsed into the
humanities, probably because the medium used in writing is the same as that used in
humanities’ disciplines – words, sentences and linguistic construction.