Writing creatively to catch flickers of ‘truth’ and beauty

Abstract

This paper examines creative writing in academia through writing as a form of inquiry. Writing about lived experiences is a creative and empathetic form of ontology that unravels the flickers of 'truth' and beauty that elude the rational mind. Writing creatively requires letting go of the rigid structures of dominant academic discourse to write the unknown into being. To experience writing's potential, academics need to pay attention the resonance felt through their bodies and memories to uncover these flickers to writing and living well. Catching the flickersThere is subtle truth, magical truth, lyrical truth, visceral truth, truth that implies verisimilitude (Rinehart 1998, 200). Creative writing's open-ended, metaphorical and expressive form enables writers to draw out and capture what has yet to materialise. It allows writers to convey the fluid, mysterious and constantly evolving nature of lived experience, and can evoke a resonance that animates. This paper illustrates how academic writers can write creatively to capture flickers of hidden meaning and generate powerful stories to live by. To uncover the steps in this process, I have read examples of creatively written academic texts like a curious child who pulls apart her favourite toy to understand how it works. As I deconstruct examples of such writing, I notice how ideas can emerge from fleeting flickers of intuitive understanding that are intuited through a half light, and can easily be overlooked, as "they never come at you all at once, more like in fits and starts over extended periods of time, small isolated events that seem to be unrelated to each other or to anything else," and yet during other moments, their frequency makes them difficult to ignore, as "these so-called isolated happenings cluster together and their import can no longer be ignored, denied or repressed" (Frentz 2011, 798). Catching these flickers requires a certain level of skill and craftsmanship, which can be acquired and refined through practice.The first steps of writing are the most difficult as there is only a faint trace of a trail to follow. It begins when I feel a weight bearing down on my consciousness, which I tentatively trace out with my words. The pathway is unknown, but the general destination is clear. I write to uncover writing's life-evoking potential to guide us towards a better life, as Bochner (2012) relates, "Those of us who have been seduced by the call of stories realise there may be no better way to come to terms with how we want to live and what we can understand and say about how others live than to listen to and converse with their stories" (162). Bochner proposes that academics should write to understand life rather than to simply dispense knowledge. This act of putting the isolated flickers together occurs in the dim spaces of the subconscious, but the more it is practiced, the more fluently we can decipher and construct a richer narrative for our lives. Unpacking this process of writing creatively to pursue the flickers can accordingly help us to navi...

Flickers of Hidden Meaning – Braiding Essays as Creative Experience for Academic Writers

“…Writing creatively can help academic writers to explore those ideas and connections that a researcher is not able to see clearly yet. As Yoo (2021) puts it: "Our journey through the academic writing process often follows an unknown path. Along this journey we may glimpse flickers of hidden meaning that present an opportunity for learning" (p. 82).…”