Diary of a Viva Ninja: Day 15
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Finding a way across the hemispheres… Brodmann’s Areas (1909).
How has undertaking a Creative Writing PhD changed me as a writer? This is the $64,000 question, which I wish to reflect upon here, after reading Sophie Masson’s timely article (published in New Writing 17 May, 2018). An essential aspect of preparation has been searching for recent, relevant research in peer-reviewed journals, as things keep moving forward. Like painting the proverbial Forth Bridge, keeping abreast of current developments is a never-ending task, but one should cultivate a healthy awareness of the field. Subscribing to key blogs, newsletters, and feeds, can be a way of having the essentials on your radar. Anyway, back to the big question – one that may come up in the Viva, certainly in a Creative Writing one.
There was a risk with undertaking a Creative Writing PhD that one ends up becoming chronically aware of the canon, critical debate, and the apparent pointlessness of ever trying to emulate ‘the greats’. This hyper-critical awareness can have some positives (e.g. the raising of one’s standards) but can also lead to creative paralysis. This is the spectre that haunted me from my first degree (Fine Art BA), which in many ways was like aversion therapy: after growing up with pencil or paint-brush in hand, when making art was as natural as breathing to me, I stopped – disillusioned by the commercial cynicism and deadening hard materialism of the (late 80s/early 90s) art world and by my own inadequacies as an artist. Yet in my second degree (MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing, at Cardiff University) I had experienced the opposite – despite the dysfunctionality of the course it jumpstarted me as a ‘serious’ writer and teacher of creative writing (soon after I published my first novel and started teaching for the Open University). After 10 years my writing (and teaching career) had become stuck in a groove and I felt it was time to push myself again, in the hope of experiencing the quantum leap of the MA: to take things to the next level. When I saw a Studentship advertised in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, I went for it. I formulated a project, got some references, and applied. I didn’t get the studentship, but the effort did catalyse my wish to undertake a PhD, even if it meant self-funding. It felt like an exciting challenge and I knew it was what I needed.
And so the journey began. My supervisor encouraged me to focus on the novel for the first couple of years, and only then turn to the commentary. Through our bimonthly sessions (I was part-time) I was challenged and pushed again and again, examining all of my ‘bad habits’, and trying to write fully with the lights on. With nowhere to hide, and hypercritical scrutiny it is all too easy to start second-guessing yourself, of over-thinking the whole thing. And my unwieldy 2.5 draft was the result of that. A PhD novel is a singular beast – one is not really writing it for oneself, or for the general reader, but for (initially) a very minute and highly specialised readership (your supervisor, your examiners). And, with the exhaustive research one undertakes, the whole thing can quickly become overwhelmed — a creaking pantechnicon of a novel, crammed full of everything you’ve come across. You are desperate to show your research, when most readers are desperate for you to hide it. For a while it feels as though the whole thing will collapse in on itself – academic soufflé. That the whole endeavour has been a colossal waste of time, money and effort. But then things start to crystallise. You finally start to see the wood through the trees. With your supervisor’s help, achieve some kind of critical distance. This may result in nausea, even disgust – you can’t stand the sight of it, and struggle to see any merit in it whatsoever. After years of working on something, it is understandable in one starts to loathe a labour of love. But finally, things start to fall into place. The excess is jettisoned as, like William Blake, you ‘(strive) to seize the inmost form (‘A Crystal Cabinet, Pickering Manuscript). Most of the last year was spent hacking away at the calcified ideas and phrases, aspiring to elegance – the grace of the swan above the furious thrashing below.
During the 4 years of my research I feel I have developed not only a critical voice – in my conference papers and peer-reviewed articles; but a creative-critical voice – in award-winning essays, commissions, and on my blog. I have honed my critical faculties, which has certainly helped my creative writing pedagogy, if not my own writing. I would like to think my creative writing has improved – that I’ve lost some of the tics, the blindspots, the bad habits. Inevitably these blips will still happen – but what is different now is the lengths I go to to edit a piece of writing. The four years of critical supervision has inculcated in me a lot of good habits – an inner critic who occasionally has a voice not dissimilar to my supervisor’s, crying out something along the lines of ‘Cut the sentimentality! Dump the exposition! Drown the kittens!’ His grumpily good-natured put-downs have become internalised as my own inner critic.
Undertaking the Creative Writing PhD has made me interrogate every aspect of my writing: my process, the forms I write in, the genres I engage with, the representation of my characters, the hidden discourses of my work. It has made me more self-reflexive as a writer, but not neurotically so. I still get swept along when I’m ‘in the zone’ – hammering out thousands of words, knowing that it is only the start of the journey. If anything my subsequent fiction has become ‘looser’, lighter, less over-wrought. Compared to the writing I was doing at the end of my MA (a dense maximalist style) my current fiction has a cocky swagger to it – it is more confident, but critically more controlled too. I feel I have found my voice – one that allows stories to ‘speak for themselves’ without signposting their cleverness. Complexity often occurs beneath the surface, between the words. Now I feel more aware of those hidden codes, but as I write, I focus on telling a story as well as I can. The critical analysis is a secondary wave, which can occur side-by-side with the creative, or even sometimes within the same sentence.
Before the PhD I wrote almost entirely from a ‘right-brained’ perspective (to use a crude distinction): in a lateral, intuitive, imagistic way. The research degree lit-up the neglected ‘left-side’, stirring it into life, allowing it to speak. And now it feels like I write from both sides of the brain: I have become an inter-hemispheric writer. The PhD has helped nurture a corpus callosum of creative-critical connective tissue, allowing for synaptic communication – sparky cross-fertilisation resulting in exciting exchanges and developments, a process I have dramatized through my novel, which depicts two worlds (The Iron and the Silver) sundered by ‘the Rift’ – one that my wily Wayfarer character, Sideways Brannelly, can traverse, smuggling contraband between the worlds: lost journals filled with hidden knowledge. In this way my novel brings to life the mysterious ecosystem of the creative process — the near miraculous occurrence when neuro-chemistry irrupts into inky actuality.
Notes:
Masson, S., 2018. Imagination’s afterlife: influences on and transformations of literary creative process within a Creative Practice PhD. New Writing, 15(1), pp.31-37.
