‘Becoming’ and POET literary placemaking as creative methodology for writing character and place in biofiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Biofiction, a genre that produces ‘literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure’ [Lackey, M. 2016. The American Biographical Novel. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1] presents significant technical, imaginative, and ethical challenges to its writers. This article gives a brief history of the biofiction novel and explores creative methodologies used by biofiction authors. The article then describes a post-graduate attempt at writing the manuscript of a novel about Scottish author, Naomi Mitchison and English explorer, Zita Baker. Employing an autoethnographical approach, I explain how I used a dual-methodology of Colm Tóibín’s idea of ‘becoming’ (2010) as creative practice and Meg Mundell’s POET model of literary placemaking (2018) and give examples of how these techniques worked in two ways: the writing of character and place.