Creative Writing

Creative writing consists of writing in literary forms such as poetry, fiction, plays, creative nonfiction, and memoir. Creative writing in qualitative research has several facets. One could consider that all writing is creative whatever the purpose. Indeed, in qualitative research circles, the use of literary forms such as poetry, fiction, plays, creative nonfiction, and memoir has proliferated. Literary writing is usually situated in the humanities, especially literature, theater, and creative writing, where people who use creative writing as a technique usually have some instruction and background. In the social sciences, the increase of literary writing has posed certain problems, especially with regard to the quality of the writing.

Using poetic representation in qualitative research usually takes the form of free verse. Free verse is also called vers libre. Qualitative researchers who use the technique of vers libre often break up interview transcripts into small (or short) units, or lines, without regard to foot, syllable, or meter. The purpose is to focus and intensify the expression of what the participant said. The poetic technique is usually enjambement, which breaks up the text by clauses or phrases, proceeding through the verse to the period at the end. The use of other verse forms such as blank verse (where there is meter but the ends do not rhyme), the sonnet, the ballad, the villanelle, the rondeau, the epic, and the haiku is rare.

Fiction as a technique in qualitative research is generally frowned on. Rather, qualitative researchers in social science may “fictionalize”; that is, they may be required to change the names—to use pseudonyms—to protect their participants. However, changing the essential facts and findings is not recommended. Audit trails should yield evidence that what researchers purported to find was indeed true.

However, debates have occurred about whether a dissertation can be a novel; for example, the debate among Robert Donmoyer, Elliot Eisner, and Howard Gardner at the 1996 American Educational Research Association annual conference in New York City. Donmoyer and Eisner advocated that, indeed, a dissertation could be a novel, whereas Gardner advocated that writing a novel for a dissertation views fiction as narrative and not as a complex artistic effort requiring familiarity and background with the history of fiction and of writing fiction, a background usually gained when one majors in literature and has studied the tradition, beginning with its inception during the 18th century. The subject is still controversial, and whereas some programs permit fictional qualitative dissertations, others do not.

Those who advocate that one can write a novel for a qualitative research dissertation seem to view the [Page 137]novel as mere narrative, rather than as art and metaphor rendered more true than the accretion of the facts. They may see fiction in the Aristotelian sense, where the writer is viewed as an imitator of nature. The humanities sees fiction as an art, a creation that is itself, through plot, scene, structure, story, climax, and other elements, a totality that through technique is rendered more than the sum of its parts in the truth that it tells. Often that truth is not consciously intended but is experienced by readers through some mysterious synthesis that occurs through the process of reading. Again, the question remains whether the qualitative researcher seeking to write a novel (or even a short story) based on the data gathered is being a qualitative researcher or a literary artist and whether the researcher should study fiction so as to write it.

...