Thinking and researching through writing – Creative Research Methodologies

There’s something of a unity that many of us creatives have around writing – a fear of committing our thoughts to paper. I thought it was curious that this week’s PgCert resource seemed to reiterate a certain research hierarchy and so I jumped right to the last chapter titled ‘writing up’. When I meet students for tutorials, they too are often daunted by ‘writing up’, seeing it as the final point in their research process. But I wonder how can we disrupt this and encourage students to see research and writing as less like a linear line, or a contents page to work through, and more of an unspooling thread to discover? In praise of the motion of lines, I think of Ingold (2010) here…

…“Whether encountered as a woven thread or as a written trace, the line is perceived as one of movement and growth.” (Ingold, 2016)…

…I find the fluid momentum of flicking back and forth between research and writing helps me to crystallise my own thoughts, sometimes it makes no sense and I’m left with a tangle of words, but sometimes when a connection emerges and some sort of narrative appears, it feels like lightning, an ‘aha!’…

So yes, my research and writing is often messy…

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jumbled…

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unspooling…

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the flow between the thoughts forming in my head…

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sparks of electricity running down through my veins…

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static spreading out into my fingertips…

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distilled into the gentle ‘tap, tap, tap’ of my keyboard keys…

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or flowing through the ink of the pen I hold in my left hand…

…There’s a lovely example of where Richardson (1992, cited in Blaxter et al, 2010) describes how writing her data as poems enabled her to engage with the subject of her research in a much more intensive and joyful way…

…Perhaps then poetry, or other forms of experimental writing could be an interesting way to remove the clutter of academic jargon and instill playfulness and narrative within our research…

…As Blaxter et al (2010:266) state “the idea is that as the clutter diminishes, so the potential for thinking and feeling around, within, and through the words and lines grows. The point is to open up the potential for new and unexpected ways of knowing.”

List of Illustrations

Bell, A. (2024) Thinking through writing. [Photograph] In possession of: the author.

References

Blaxter, L., Hughes, C. and Tight, M. (2010) How to Research. (4th ed.) Berkshire, UK: McGraw-Hill Education. At: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucreative-ebooks/reader.action?docID=650302&ppg=6 (Accessed 16/03/2024).

Ingold, T. (2016) Lines: A Brief History. London, UK: Routledge.