The Writer Tells: The Creative Process in the Writing of Literary Fiction

Abstract

The experience of creating fiction, a topic that has been taken up independently in literary publications and in psychological works on creativity, is a promising topic for interdisciplinary conversation. I interviewed five contemporary fiction writers, focusing on their experiences in creating fiction. The commonalities, along with theoretical concepts from psychology, phenomenology, and literary theory, allowed me to construct a tentative modal account. Writers identified seed incidents whose meanings went beyond their narrative understanding and so stimulated exploration and discovery. Writing progressed through alterations between a "writing realm" (in which the writer withdrew from everyday life with intentions to write, to plan actively for specific works, and to reflect on what had been written) and a "fictionworld" (which was described in more passive terms, in which story elements came to the writer as narrative improvisation unfolded). Like other creative endeavors, the creative process in fiction writing is a voyage of discovery but differs from most other arts and sciences (even the art of poetry) in one of its major modes of thought--narrative improvisation, a nonreflective mode that typically involves stances in a fictionworld from viewpoints different from one's own. A response to the suggested account by one of the interviewed writers appears as a postscript to this article.