voi Cesof such work can often show how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its
source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how
distant that finished product may be from the original facts. This has, of course, been
challenged, as in peter ackroyd’s statement:
i don’t find any real sacrosanct quality about so- called facts and so- called truths
... as far as i am concerned, everything is available for recreation or manipulation.
(onega 1996: 214)in this, he seems to be echoing Jacques derrida’s point that ‘there is no testimony
that does not at least structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra,
dissimulation, lie, and perjury – that is to say, the possibility of literature’ (derrida
2000: 29). Certainly the fact that someone offers a memory, a set of facts or an account
does not constitute proof of the verity of that material, but only a perspective, a point
of view based on that individual’s experience and context. This demands of writers
the capacity to understand the limits of what they observe, are told or found in the
archives, as michael hicks observes:
Facts cannot lie, but they can be interpreted differently [...] our facts do not
come to us unvarnished, but are loaded, slanted, and embedded in narratives
[...] almost every so- called fact comes with its accompanying bias.
(hicks 1991: 69–70)Finding a way to minimize bias while interpreting and presenting facts in a manner
that draws on modes from across the human sciences, while still committed to the logic
of creative practice and its knowledge capacities, is a significant and ongoing aspect of
creative writing research, in all writing genres.
of course, works of the imagination are far less reliant, than are works of non-
fiction, on conventional or factual investigation; however, in any mode or genre of
creative writing, the research element must be experimentally developmental in its own
terms; intentional, deliberate and systematic at heart; and committed to producing an
outcome that is accessible both as knowledge and as artefact. When it achieves this, it
is research, despite the fact that as creative writing it often appears to be an intuitive
process while it is being carried out. The methodological frameworks cannot, though,
usually be set in advance. Creative practice as experimentally developmental research
is likely to rely on eclectic and diverse methods, determined by the needs of the project
under consideration. Consequently, the researcher in writing is likely to function as
Tess Brady describes it below:
... a little like a bowerbird that picks out the blue things and leaves all the other
colours. ... This bowerbird researching requires its own skill. The skill to locate
quickly, sort through, and accurately select all the blue pieces. it is also the skill
of knowing where to look, where to find the blue pieces in the first place. ... the
writer needs to be able to work quickly, to know the questions to ask and to be
able to isolate the essence.
(Brady 2000)