addressing the ‘anCient quarreL’to shift beyond either emotion or reason, to achieve a state that provides room for
both: in effect, to mobilize a practice that might resolve the ancient quarrel.
one way to confront the challenge of this quarrel then, is to explore the questions
opened up by both the process of making the work and the content of the work.
practice- led research in writing, as in other creative forms, begins at the point of
practice; and practice begins with an idea, a context, a set of questions and a body
of knowledge. it does not begin in a vacuum, or merely at a moment of inspiration:
creative writers make work by relying on a set of creative writing and/as research skills.
These include imagination, technical training, and a certain knowledge of the field
- the rules or conventions of form, what the content is likely to be, and what are the
main discourses, including the history and current trajectory of the field – that will
necessarily inform the creative work. it is imperative that these be considered before
plunging into the project because, in the absence of a relatively clear idea of the question
and the context, any creative writing research project risks becoming what Jupp terms
‘disastrous research’ (2006: 73). it may be, for instance, that the necessary data cannot
be collected; that the topic is too dangerous or fails to pass ethical clearance measures;
that confidentiality issues prevent the work from being fully realized for publication; or
simply that flaws in the epistemological preliminaries result in a flawed project overall,
so that whether or not the creative work has professional value, the research findings
lack validity or originality.
This embrace of the possibility of failure is, however, one of the hallmarks of blue-
sky experimental research in any academic field, and a forerunner of real innovation
and, therefore, should be valorized rather than guarded against. it is certainly one of
the hallmarks of creative writing research, with failed drafts and deleted passages being
the norm rather than the exception in the writing process. This is because although
writing as research is committed both to the delivery of a creative work and to the
delivery of knowledge, it has its own imperatives, as author milan Kundera points out:
the history of science has the nature of progress. applied to art, the notion
of history has nothing to do with progress; it does not imply improvement,
amelioration, an ascent; it resembles a journey undertaken to explore new
lands and chart them. The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better
than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not
say.
(Kundera 2006: 15)Research in creative writing does not, then, have a teleological orientation as its
aim; creative writers cannot ‘advance’, as science can advance; we can rarely ‘prove’
or demonstrate that our findings are correct. But we can interrogate our own field,
offer new ways of seeing and, in doing so, contribute some interesting and perhaps
provocative facts to the knowledge community. By defining, reflecting, intuiting,
paying attention, and experimenting, as Kundera suggests in the same chapter, it is
possible to make an original contribution to knowledge. This contribution is about
writing, surely, but it is also about observing and analysing context and, perhaps,
about human society.
The oeCd describes ‘research and experimental development’ as comprising: