Abstract
Charalambous starts with the premise that we constantly make and remake our writer identity through writing and that what we forbid ourselves from in our writing practice may reveal much about our writer identity. She explains how her Creative Writing students’ experiences of writing Other than themselves initiated her interest in researching Creative Writing exercises. To construct the rationale of the workbook, a brief account of the historical emergence of Creative Writing as a discipline and of its current multifaceted perception in terms of its relationship to literature and other disciplines are provided. Finally, her research investigating the sequence of six Creative Writing exercises and the exploration of writing fantasy are connected to the structure and goals of this workbook.
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Notes
- 1.
I capitalize here the “o” of the “Other” to emphasize the separation between us and “it” the other but also because, in psychoanalytic terms, the term “Other” is capitalized to show that it is opaque to us. I provide more context to the term later.
- 2.
Throughout the book, I use double quotes for highlighting or defining words by me, and single quotes for words/phrases used by other authors and research participants.
- 3.
By “Real ” here, I refer to Lacan’s register of the Real , a psychic platform to describe our experience of the world before and beyond using language, and beyond language, put simply here. The Real signifies what cannot be represented by language and also what has not yet been verbalized. I explain this term more analytically in Chap. 3.
- 4.
The term “Literature” with a capital “L” is used here to denote works of Literature—as art, and with a lower case “l” literature will denote papers written in the field about its practice and theory.
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Charalambous, Z. (2019). Why Does Writing Matter?. In: Writing Fantasy and the Identity of the Writer. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20263-7_1
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