voi Cescreative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock
of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use
of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications.it goes onto clarify that:
any activity classified as research and experimental development is
characterized by originality; it should have investigation as a primary objective
and should have the potential to produce results that are sufficiently general
for humanity’s stock of knowledge (theoretically and/or practical) to be
recognisably increased. most higher education research work would qualify as
research and experimental development.
(oeCd 2009)in order for creative works to be understood as these ‘stocks of knowledge’ in
themselves, creative writers must understand themselves as researchers and the
work they engage in as experimental development. once the research starting point
has been clarified – both the epistemological issues and the ethical questions – it is
possible to begin making the creative work and then, using the lines of thought that it
generates, to tease out and analyse the contextual, theoretical or formal questions that
are likely to deliver the required ‘stocks of knowledge’. The initial work of thinking and
structuring allows the subsequent creative research practice to develop experimentally
in its own unique way: to move between order and improvisation; to make intuitive
leaps or guesses; and to go off in unexpected and tangential directions. That is to say,
good preparation allows flexibility in practice.
one example of how this has worked in practice is the case of creative non- fiction,
a form with a genealogy almost as long as that of poetry, but that has, until fairly
recently, been somewhat overlooked in literary circles. Yet, it is particularly in this
form that the mechanisms, techniques and methodological imperatives of research
become visible. Those writing creative non- fiction (in any of its many modes) work in
a ‘between space’, one that is committed to both professional and imaginative writing,
to both invention and documentation and, to recall plato, to both the ‘true/rational’
and the mimetic/intuitive. The writing of creative non- fiction requires a complex range
of authorial tools and positions, what shawn gillen identifies as ‘the diligence of a
reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of a
poet and the analytical modes of the essayist’ (gillen 2007). it is thus a form in which
both sides of the ancient quarrel are brought face to face, and in which practitioners
have made a contribution both to knowledge and to form, in generating a new way of
writing, perceiving, thinking and knowing.
a striking example of how it provokes questions about truth, imagination and
meaning is the novel The Fog Garden, by australian author marion halligan (2001).
This opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-
loved husband, one that had been previously published as creative non- fiction (an
autobiographical memoir) titled ‘The Cathedral of love’ (1999b) and again in an essay
collection as ‘lapping’ (1999a). The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed
writer named Clare, but the inclusion of halligan’s essay, together with the book’s