On Creative and Critical Writing

and Trying to Do Both

I’ve had some very thought-provoking responses to yesterday’s entry. All of which were welcome. One of which was about overgeneralising.

I hope it’s understood, because these are notes I write day by day, and it’s between the covers of a writer’s diary, that I’m not laying down rules, or saying everything is always such and such a way.

If, for example, I say that taking a PhD — any PhD — can be a real challenge to your mental health, that’s not to discount the experiences of people who go through three or four postgrad years easily enough.

All I am trying to get across is that part of the test of a PhD, meaning the way it’s structured within academia, is — in my opinion — an existential challenge to someone as a thinker.

Can you hold your own in this kind of company? What do you say back to this or that authority? Are you able to look all what’s been written on your research topic so far and still make a contribution to knowledge?

If you can survive this , and the anxiety and depression that often (but not always) accompanies it, then you’ve proved you have part of what it takes to function as an academic.

However, the Creative Writing PhD adds something on top of this. As well as writing critically, and self-critically, you are also expected to write creatively. Probably for a non-academic audience.

Again, I’m not making a false distinction here. Critical writing is creative; creative writing of any sort involves critical thinking. But I will say that, for someone midway through a CW PhD, what they’re likely to find is that they are expected to do two very different kinds of writing, both to a very high level.

Critical writing is constructed to exhaustively lay out the merits of a very particular thesis. To leave nothing important unsaid. It is a preparation for the viva examination. For that reason, it is very defensive. It aims, if possible, to close up all gaps in its argument. Because, if there are gaps, the PhD examiners will surely find them. Let’s say, four monographs have been written about the subject of your research question. Critics A, B, C, and D are the main authorities. But because you find C so unsympathetic, you leave them out, or mention them only glancingly. Then it will be the examiners’ job to detect this and bring it up, as a point of discussion. They want you to demonstrate that you’ve covered the relevant bibliography. For this reason, PhD prose can end up very claustrophobic. It can’t afford to leave the reader to draw any inferences. It has to be explicit in all it says. And so you are forced to write inelegant paragraphs which go on and on, meticulously detailing what A says about what D said about C that B later rebutted in a footnote. You have to advertise that you’ve read this, thought about it, and have your own take on it. That’s why it’s better to choose a limited field for your PhD — because you’re less likely to end up with gaps.

Creative writing, by contrast, can’t afford to be this kind of claustrophobic or any sort of gapless. As I’ve said elsewhere, a lot of writing a novel, and even more of writing a short story, is about creating spaces for the reader to fill in. How could that happen? What were they thinking? Some literary fiction may give the impression of being exhaustive, of saying everything there is to be said on a subject, but its mode is still suggestive. It doesn’t have to engage with A, B, C and D as dominant influences. It doesn’t have to include them, as a footnote or chapter, even at the cost of elegance or narrative excitement. And the writing of any fiction is not about creating a defensive/defensible object — a chinkless suit of armour. Creative writing is, if nothing else, an open-handed gift to the reader. Elsewhere, I’ve said that fiction is often a making vulnerable of the self. Unless there’s a sense that the writer is gesturing toward things they can’t yet say, the writing can lack a sense of world — an acknowledgement that everything extends further than those characters can go.

That’s a sketch, anyway — perhaps of two extremes of two different kinds of writing.

But the tl;dr is —

Creative writing is about opening gaps; critical writing, about closing gaps.

I hope you can see how the Creative Writing PhD student might feel themselves being pulled in very different directions.

It’s a very rare person who is able to flip back and forth easily between different, perhaps even conflicting, ways of thinking.

There are some lucky PhD students who are able to keep both types of writing running in parallel the whole way through their three or four years.

For many, the solution is to chunk their time — to get to the end of the Creative part, to finish the novel, and then to put their gap-making selves aside and write what amounts to an extended introduction to that book; almost, sometimes, as if it had been written by another person.

But the difficulty I have seen, and the frustration, and anger, is when a PhD student feels, ‘I was just getting into being really defensive, and justifying everything down to the tiniest nit-picky whatabout, and adding a dozen footnotes, and now you’re asking me to go wild and just make stuff up again?’

Or, ‘I was having such a great time being really subtle, and treating my reader like a sophisticated adult who could pick up the most deliciously veiled hint, and now you want me to provide a four page footnoted explanation of eight rival definitions of the concept of an “epiphany”?’

The worst crises can come when the student feels they are doing each kind of writing at the expense of the other, and neither is benefiting from the looming prospect of an exam.

If you’re considering taking a Creative Writing PhD, this is the main thing I’d ask you to think through.

Can you ride two horses at the same time?