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Creativity Research Journal

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The Writer Tells: The Creative Process in the Writing of

Literary Fiction
Charlotte L. Doyle
Published online: 08 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Charlotte L. Doyle (1998) The Writer Tells: The Creative Process in the Writing of Literary Fiction,
Creativity Research Journal, 11:1, 29-37, DOI: 10.1207/s15326934crj1101_4

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 Creativity Research Journal
1998, Vol. 1 1, NO. 1,29-37
The Writer Tells: The Creative Process in the
Writing of Literary Fiction
Charlotte L. Doyle
Sarah Lawrence College
ABSTRACT: The experience of creating fiction, a topic
that has been taken up independently in literary publi-
cations and in psychological works on creativity, is a
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promising topic for interdisciplinary conversation. I
interviewedfive contemporaryfiction writers,focusing
on their experiences in creating fiction. The common-
alities, along with theoretical concepts from psychol-
ogy, phenomenology, and literary theory, allowed me
to construct a tentative modal account. Writers identi-
fied seed incidents whose meanings went beyond their
narrative understanding and so stimulated exploration
and discovery. Writing progressed through alterna-
tions between a "writingrealm" (in which the writer
withdrewfrom everyday life with intentions to write, to
plan actively for specific works, and to reflect on what
had been written) and a "jictionworld" (which was
described in more passive terms, in which story ele-
ments 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-narra-
tive improvisation, a nonreflective mode that typically
involves stances in a fictionworld from viewpoints dif-
ferent from one's own. A response to the suggested
account by one of the interviewed writers appears as a
postscript to this article.
How do particular works of fiction come into being?
What is the writer's experience of creating a
story-from the first impulse to its final realization?
These questions are promising beginnings for an inter-
disciplinary conversation between the literary world
and psychology. Writers and literary commentators
have been interested in such questions for many years
(see, e.g., the regular "Art of Fiction" feature in the
Paris Review and Cowley's 1959 introduction to the
first volume). In the past, psychological theories and
Creativity Research Journal
Copyright 1998 by
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
methods for exploring the creative process have tended
to deemphasize conscious experience (e.g., Freud,
190811925; Weisberg, 1986). But recently, psycholo-
gists interested in the arts have turned again to fine-
grained descriptions of experience as a rich resource for
gaining insight into the making of creative work (Csik-
szentmihalyi, 19%; Franklin, 1994).
In the present study, I asked contemporary fiction
writers to describe the creation of particular short stories
and novels and how their works developed over time.
Each writer had an individual voice; by offering many
quotations from each interview, I hope that those unique
voices can be heard in this article. But there were also
commonalities in the stories the writers told-com-
monalities that brought to mind the work of psycholo-
gists (Bruner, 1986; Gruber, 1981; Polkinghome, 1988;
Werner, 1948), literary scholars (Bakhtin, 1981;Burke,
1945), philosophers (Gadamer, 197511989; Same,
193911948). a phenomenological sociologist (Schutz,
1962). and a phenomenological anthropologist (Young,
1987). Combined, the interviews and the theoretical
work allowed me to put together a tentative, composite
account of the experience of creating fiction. The re-
sponse of one of the interviewed writers, Joan Peters,
appears as a postscript to this article.
The Interviews
The five writers who collaborated with me in this
study-Peters, the late Jerome Badanes, Kathleen Hill,
- --
This article is in memory of Jerome Badanes.
Manuscript received May 3 1, 1996; revision received September
6.19%; accepted June 21, 1997.
Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Char-
lotte L. Doyle, Department of Psychology, Sarah Lawrence College,
Bronxville, NY 10708. E-mail: cdoyle@mail.slc.edu.
29
 Mary LaChapelle, and Grace Paley-had achieved
some recognition for their fiction. They were also teach-
ers of writing who enjoyed describing and reflecting on
the writing process. Two had just p u b W their f h t
works (Hill, 1983;Peters, 1985);two were working on
their second books after having received awards for
their first writings (Badanes, 1989;LaChapelle, 1988);
and one is among the most honored writers on the
contemporary literary scene; a large volume of col-
lected stories was about to be published when the
interview took place (Paley, 1994).
In interviews, I asked the writers to describe their
experiences in creating fiction. First, I asked them to
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talk about how they came to write their very first
fiction-a question that often elicited narratives about
their lives prior to becoming fiction writers. During the
rest of the interview,I asked for descriptionsof how one
or more of their published works had developed from
first awareness that a story had begun through to the
finished text. Although works-in-progress were also
mentioned, the questions stimulated accounts with a
beginning, a middle, and an end-a complete creative
episode over time (Doyle, 1976). For examplesof stud-
ies of the creative episode in other creative domains,see
Arnheim (1%2) on Picasso's creation of Cuemica;
Gruber (1981) on Darwin's theory of natural selection;
and Rothenberg (1979) on the creation of a poem.
The interviews followed Kvale's (1983) for-
mat--open-ended yet with a clear focus. This is one of
the differences between the current study and the inter-
views published for the literary public. The latter tend
to range over many issues without detailed questioning
in a specific area. Before the interviews,I read or reread
all of the authors' works carefully so that I could ask
informed questions and understand the answers about
specific works. The interviews had no preset time limit,
but most took about 2 hr. All but one of the interviews
were conducted in the spring of 1993. Paley's first
interview was conducted earlier, but we also had a short
follow-up interview in 1993. The interviews were tape-
recorded.
The writers entered the project with enthusiasm.
Although most had been interviewed before, no one had
questioned them so closely about the development of
particular works. Several spoke of the interview as
allowing them to relive some aspect of their own crea-
tive process, and they were grateful for it. Hill continued
to think about the questionsraised by the interview after
its completion, and a second interview was arranged.
30
The writers were true collaborators,and their generosity
in sharing some of their deepest and most personal
writing experiences was very moving to me.
Although each writer told a different story about the
making of a story, there were some common themes.
Here now is one way of putting these stories together
into a tentative modal account, drawing from the work
of psychologists and theorists from other fields.
The Creative Episode in
FictEon WdecRg
I asked each writer how a particular work of fiction
had begun. The answer was always a description of an
event-something lived through, heard about, or read.
LaChapelle spoke of living in a house with a 100-year-
old Norwegian landlady who had adog. Pdey spoke of
meeting aman, whom she had known to be a bigot, with
a Black child in tow. Badmes spoke of making a film
in which he had interviewed Holocaust survivors and
then reading about a survivor who had stolen docu-
ments from the Jewish Institute for which the film had
been made. These incidents, which writers identified as
the events that had begun their stories, can be called
seed incidents.
Why had a particular incident become a seed inci-
dent? Each writer spoke of the incidents as being
touching, intriguing, puzzling, mysterious, haunting,
or overwhelming. These experiences did not fit the
narrative logic through which we ordinarily make
sense of everyday life (Burke, 1945; Polkinghorne,
1988>-experiences that brought writers the recogni-
tion of knowing that they didn't know (Gadamer,
197511989). Speaking of the family anecdote that had
become the seed for her story, "Willie" (1983), Hill
said, "It seemed full of meanings 1couldn't even begin
to grasp." Paley said, "You really have to be sort of
buffaloed by something."
Many psychdogists see the creative process as a
kind of problem solving (e.g., Perkins, 1981; Werrke-
imer, 1959), but the nature of the problem to be solved
has been more difficult to identify in rhe arts than in
domains such as science. For writers, seed incidents
provide a mystery, an invitation to exploration and
discovery.
Creativity Research Jollrmal

Gadamer (1975/1989), among others, suggestedthat
recognition of a question already points in the direction
of possible answers. In fiction, that direction is the
creation of an imaginary world, one that draws on a
particular kind of narrative thinking (Bruner, 1986).
Seed incidents provide a starting point-sometimes a
major character, sometimes a central incident, some-
times the sweep of the plot. In addition, we see in the
present articlethat there is a felt sense of story direction,
which at times tells the writer that the story is going off
course.
The 'Writingrealm"
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Are seed incidents really the beginning? In most
cases in this study, sometimes even with an author's
very first stories, something else had happened first.
Each had decided to write fiction. As Gruber (1981)
pointed out, creative people actively construct condi-
tions that allow creative work to happen. Talking about
this explicitly was sometimes part of telling the story of
a story. For example, Hill told of acritical step in writing
her first stories.
I had atiiend who went out everyday, and I rented
her place. ... I would go to her apartment, and that
gave me a sense of sanctuary. I wasn't going to
read her books. I wasn't going to answer her
phone.
Others spoke of home offices, going to writers' colo-
nies, and, in general, designating certain places to be
their writing places. Paley spoke of writing everywhere
she could, including subways and trains, but even she
spoke of renting a hotel room at critical points in her
work in order to give herself a chance to put things
together.
The designated writing places were not just places.
They were occasions for a particular way of being-a
withdrawal from the hurly-burly of everyday life. The
places had to be solitary, because fiction is "the kind of
writing you do in a room by yourself," as Badanes put
it. There was a sense of self as someone whose task is
to write.
The works of Heinz Werner (1948) and Alfred
Schutz (1962) are relevant here. Werner suggested that
it is useful to distinguish among distinctively different
spheres of experience. Schutz called them "finite prov-
inces of meaning" (p. 341) and pointed to
Creativity Research Journal
The Writer Tells
the paramount world of real objects and events into which we
gear our actions [the everyday world], the world of imagin-
i n g ~... such as the play world of the child, the world of the
insane, but also the world of art,the world of dreams, the
world of scientific contemplation. (p. 341)
For Schutz, each distinctive sphere involves specific
cognitive modes-a specific kind of experience of self
and a specific form of sociality.
As the writers described what it was like to sit at their
desks in their writing places, it seemed as if they were
describing such a distinctive sphere of experience. Its
form of sociality was solitariness; the experience of self
was highly self-conscious; thinking was intentioned,
purposeful, reflective. Drawing on Young (1987), such
a sphere of experience can be called the "writingrealm."
Sometimes, while sitting in their writing places,
writers had recognized an event from the past as a seed
incident. Hill had been a child when she first heard her
mother tell about an experience with her father (Hill's
grandfather). Only after Hill had set up a writingrealm
did this incident become the beginning of her story,
"Willie." Just as often, the seed incident occurred long
after the self-definition of self as fiction writer; then,
an incident may have been recognized as the story seed
as soon as it occurred. Paley became intrigued as a
writer as soon as she met the bigot with his Black
grandson.
The "Fictionworld"
In fiction writing, the self-conscious, intentioned,
purposeful mode of being gave way to another mode of
experience. Writers typically spoke of this mode after
describing the seed incident, and I asked, "What hap-
pened next?"e usual answers were "I got an image,"
"I wrote a sentence," or "I wrote a paragraph."
LaChapellesaid that the story based on her landlady had
begun with the line, "Iam a poodle." Writing that line,
she had begun to feel her way into being a poodle. With
a stroke of the pen, she had imaginatively transformed
herself into a dog, allowing the sounds and sights and
smells of a dog's world to come to her. She had left the
writingrealm and had taken a step into another world of
experience-what can be called the "fictionworld," the
unfolding world of characters and events as they appear
in the imaginative experience and words of the author.
It was only a glimpse of the fictionworld. Immedi-
ately after, LaChapelle remembered thinking "Could I
- - -
31
 ever take a poodle's point of view" aRd "How would
that work." She had nnnncd to the writingdm, re-
flectively evaluating a literary decision--choice of
viewpoint.
Fiction is an artistic form in which the imaginary
world as it unfolds is creatGd by the words of n-1s
with a point of view. The writers spoke of starching for
the right "narrative voice." Sometims the right narra-
tive voice Wemerged fFom tke first s t a p h writ&n.
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Sometimes, though, fiadiq the n d v e voice is a
major prabaem in because, as -tin (1981)
taught, the voice is not only a style of spaech, it is a
stance toward the wadd f in this caw, the fictionworld),
a sitwed consciournress wiih
right narrative voice has to be found before the author
can sustain residence in the fictionworld. It is found,
typically, by entering rtre fictionwdd and improvising
an imaginative possibility-a form of thought typical
in the fictionworld. LaChapelle said:
You don't think it out. You become the poodle
and see what happens. ... I first was doing it from
a first-person poodle. I am a poodle, the mailman
comes ... but it just wasn't true ... it was too
farcical. So then 1tried a third-person poodle, and
it seemed more real.
Sometimes finding the rigbt viewpoint is a long
struggle. Paley had w r h n the h t two pages of her
story of the man with the Black grandson from the point
of view of a woman who him in the park. After
that, Paley had been stuck for 2 ycsars, &though she had
worked on other storks. Then she came back to it, wrote
another incident, and realized what had betn wrong.
The woman didn't really know the story. Paley spoke
of saying to herself, "It's his story. Why don't you let
him tell it, for Chrissakel' So she did.
This seerch for the narrative voice iliwtratw another
typical featm of the creation of fiction in all of its
stages-alternation between reflective and nonreflec-
tive thought (Sartre, 1939/1948), between refiective
thou* in the writiagrdrn and nm&lective m t i v e
improvisation in the fictionworld. For the writms, the
fictionwodd had udolded for a sentence, a pmgqh,
or pages, and then they had b n thrown back into the
writingdm Often9the sense of samcthing wrong had
flooded than--thc sense that they had been off course
from the d W o n of the story. Somtirnes t b y M e
of a general sense of being off course. Pdey said of
some abandoned directions: "They were just r d l y
wrong ...I couldn't go on." Hill said of an d y zaEtaanpt:
"I couldn't make it work." Other times, the writers
sensed more specific problems. For example, Peters
said of one of her characters: "She wmm't coming
through clearly enough."
Some writers, Paley for e ~ typically
~ put a ,
difficult story aside and did something e k , thus albw-
ing the story to incubate (see Watias, 1926). ahem,
such as pQta?as,explored the difplculty in vanious ways
(e.g., camid out writing research on the &ngs of their
works).
Features oi the Fictionworld
When b r i b i n g their expdaiences in the writingre-
alm, writers terrded to speak in the first person: "I
wanted to ...,""I saw that ...."W b n describiag writing
that had gone well, though, they no lower spob of
themselves as active agents. Rather, they described their
experience in much more passive terms, as if the fic-
tionworld were acting on them,even possessing them.
Hill told me "Some voice had taken over in the writing."
Paley said, "I had to let w o w s 1 6 see it with his own
eyes." Peters cmtrasted two chtuwbrs in her
novel-Manny, who had come to her in the fiction-
world, and Elkn, with whom she was still net fully
satisfied. "Ellen was more constructed. ... Manny came
to me. He possessed me."
Bsdancs, in the writingreslm, had had dl sorts of
inteations for his Holocaust novel: He had wmted to
give voice to the survivors' stories, to deal with con-
tern- Black-Jewil issues,to use all of the ssnses
in his writing. He h d begun a novel h u t a filmmaker,
somewhat like himself, trying to make sense of survi-
vors' lives. He had w d on it for several months,
knowiag s9nne$tingwas wrong. EQie had finQy realized
that asurvivorhad to t d J the stmy directly. But
had felt he could not do it; the survivor's pemality
and history were too different from his own. So,

Badanes had continued doing it the old way. Then, one
day, he heard his survivor's voice speaking the opening
sentence. At another point, Badanes said:
I was halfway through the book, and I felt I
needed something, but I didn't know what I
needed. And she came to me ... one day as I was
writing. And I wrote her name-Malkala-and I ginia). Paley has a second story about Mrs. Rafferty told
could see her face ... her large lips and a certain
sort of, like a clown smile. ... It moved me
greatly. It gave me chills.
In the fictionworld, characters take on a reality of their
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own. As in our everyday experience of people, the
writers experienced their characters with all their
senses-hearing them, even smelling them at times.
The authors also spoke "getting to know" their charac-
ters and, at times, of "rooting" for them. They spoke of
feeling deeply affected by the characters emotionally at
the very same time the characters and events were being
conjured up through narrative improvisation.
LaChapelle had just begun a story of a man and his
son when something was revealed in the fictionworld
that moved her to sadness. She described the revelation
and her reaction this way:
Well ... he has a wife. He's lying in bed with his
wife. And there was a feeling ... people lying
together but not being together. I was in his point
of view ... and there was this sense of her looking
down on him as he's lying there ... and she says
to him, "Lakund, is it happening again? Are you
trying to talk about Jimmy again? Jimmy's not
real." ... It was just so awful. Oh, he's not real.
LaChapelle felt the horror of Lakund's delusion when
it was revealed in the fictionworld. Badanes got chills
when, as his narrator, he suddenly saw the face of his
dead sister. Two authors spoke of weeping while writ-
ing. Peters said, "As I wrote the Manny passages, I
would sit there sobbing. I would have to keep my
keyboard clean ... mopping up ... I'm sure many of
those tears were for myself, though it didn't feel that
way.
At times, authors told of feeling as if they are their
characters. Peters said of writing her book, Manny and
Rose (1985), "I really became Manny. I became heavy,
big, lumbering ... the incapable child that he is."
Creativity Research Journal
The Writer Tells
LaChapelle said, "It's real weird. You can feel like part
of everybody, every character. I felt like Lakund, too,
and like the little boy."
Authors also told of feeling responsible to their
characters. Several spoke of doing or not doing their
characters justice. In one Paley story, we meet Mrs.
Rafferty through the eyes of another character (Vir-
from a different point of view. She explained what had
compelled her to write the second story:
I always felt that girl Virginia didn't see her
[Mrs. Rafferty] straight. ... That bothered me.
I didn't like leaving her in that rotten condi-
tion. She turned out a lot different than Vir-
ginia gave her credit for [in a later Mrs. Raf-
ferty story]. ... I never really stop thinking
about those people. They have for me a very
real life ... It's sort of eerie when I think about
it sometimes.
All of the writers spoke of their characters as if they
were personalities they had come to know. And yet
all of the writers said that their characters were not
replicas of people they knew in the everyday world.
People from their everyday world had sometimes
been the starting point for characters, but usually, in
the writing, they had changed. Paley said, "You can't
really put them in. ... You'll screw them up and louse
them up unjustly. ... It's though I got on someone's
back and jumped off ... that's the only way to de-
scribe it." Of his autobiographical character, Badanes
said: "He started out to be me, but then he turned into
whoever he is ... He's sweeter than me, more inno-
cent." Peters said of her characters: "All of them are
collages."
Hill spoke of the development of her character,
Willie. Hill had started with memories of her grandfa-
ther, a martinet who had made her life difficult. But, in
the second paragraph, Willie teaches his daughter to
swim, just as Hill's father had taught her to swim-a
happy, tender memory. Then Hill wrote a scene in
which Willie feels the kind of shame Hill herself had
once felt. With that scene, Hill said, Willie "wasn't the
other anymore."
The experience of the fictionworld thus contrasts
sharply with the writingrealm. Rather than being soli-
tary, it is peopled with characters conjured up by narra-
tive improvisation. Rather than feeling self-conscious
33
 C.L. Doyle
and purposeful in the fictionworld, authors feel as
though characters act and events unfold in-tly
of their conscious control, sometimes in ways that
surprise the authors. In the fictionworld, the self-con-
scious "writing self' disappaars (Csiksmntmihsdyi,
1990, 19%); if there is a sense of self at all, it is as the
fictional narrator or as one or more of the characters.
Emotions ate not connectad to the writer's aims and
purposes but to the exptrien;cesand fates of the charac-
ters. Although characters and events may begin with
seed incidents and characters from the everyday world,
they typicaHy change as events in the fictionworld
unfold.
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In telling the story of their stories, writers aiso spoke
of their everyday social worlds and of their interactions
with their professional fields (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).
Each writer told about long periods during which their
stories and novels could not claim their attention. Two
writers became very sick and had to recover. Other
commitments prevented fiction writing. Getting back
into the fietionworld sometimes involved a difficult
reentry process. Badanes spoke of "a very heavy semes-
ter, and I couldn't work. When I came back to it, I
thought I'd lost the voice. Lost the voice. I could not
write the way he wrote. It was driving me crazy." The
fate of their works in the publishing world had an
impact, too. Peters said:
When I began to write Manny, when I wrote the
fmt two chapters, someone introduced me to a
fancy-shmancy agent ... who took it to read and
... said, 'This is so depressing. I could barely read
it. It was disgusting."
Peters continued, "1 actually didn't write for a year."
On the other hand, stories or excerpts of novels
accepted for publication made fhe trips into &he writin-
grealm and the fictionworld easier.
All of the writers spoke of what had sometimes
seemed to them like endless revisions. Most revise as
they write, eveu first drab. Paley, fore ,said, "I
talk to time ptople all dK:time. And I must ralkto &em
60 times before I'm sure they sound right."
Several writers spoke of a particular kind of
revision-reflecting on the themes and i q e s in
their work. Althouah some of the writers had had
some idea (before beginning to write) of the more
abstract themes they had wantnd the fiction to deal
with, new meanings and central images had
emerged from the fictionworlds. Will had written
some passages with references to Orpheus 9ad De-
meter seemingly carried along by the rhythmn of
the language. She said,
Two days later, I looked at them and saw the
whole thhg was going to be h t Otpbus and
Demter, the return to a place you am forbidden
to look at, the beloved that ha$been lost, that you
can't look straight at without losing. ... The un-
derpinnings were all in the first pages I had writ-
ten.
Upon ndhcing a theme in the writiagrealxn, the writ-
repeatad it. LaChape11e said,
as meaning and ...it'slib with
music, you just keep repeating the pattern so it becomes
more and more clear."
When satisifed with a draft, all of the writers had
given their work to one or more pefSons they Mtsted
for comment, usually friends who were also writers
or respected editors. Then they reflected on the sug-
gestions, taking some as in the spirit of the story
direction and rejecting others as leading away from
it. This, too, involved alternation between active
judgment and intent in the writingrealm and what is
experienced as more passive narrative improvisation
in the fictionworld. One of ~ ~ i l emanuscript ' s
readers had n o w an incest theme. LaChapetie felt
that this theme led away from the story direction, and
so she now doamphasized it inseead. Bdanw's6ditor
had felt that rhg hero's wife was too weak in a family
argument. Bgdanes a g r d immedirately and now
asked his own wife to help him improvise an argu-
ment. Then he went back to solitary writing, entered
the fictionworld, and wrote what became one of his
favorite scenes in his novel.
"It takes a lot of courage," I s to Peters as
she demibsd her many revisions. She answered, "It
takes a lot of work."

Completion and the Sharing of the Work
The pull toward completion (Lewin 1935) must be
strong in order to be chosen and sustained over long
periods of time, disappointments, interruptions,feelings
of failure. The writers did not speak of the pull in terms
of making a choice: Badanes spoke of being haunted by
the Furies; Peters, of being possessed by her character;
Hill, of an obsession, as if everything had depended on
getting to the end of her story; Paley, of the compulsion
to tell the truth about an invented reality.
Authors have a sense of when their work is fin-
ished-a sense that the story as written gives the expe-
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rience toward which their writing was reaching. Per-
haps there is still some minor revision to be done. When
it is completed, the creative episode could be considered
to be over.
Perhaps another phase should be included. The writ-
ers spoke of wanting to share their work with others; in
fact, creating fictionworlds so that readers could expe-
rience them too was one of the intentions that had
guided the writers' work. LaChapelle spoke of it this
way:
The other big part is the sharing of the experience
with somebody else. You make something over-
whelming sort of understandable in an experien-
tial way. You try to render it so that somebody
else can also kind of get it.
Some writers spoke of specific social responsibilities.
Peters felt that novelists like Roth and Bellow had given
a false picture of immigrant Jews and that she needed
to give them an authentic voice. Badanes spoke of
having privileged information from Holocaust sumi-
vors-information he felt compelled to share. Others
spoke more generally of what they had discovered and
shared: "how we are" (LaChapelle) and "how life is"
(Paley1.
Comparing Fiction Writing With
Writing Poems
Fiction writers, like all creative people, are on voy-
ages into the unknown. "A dive into the void" is how
Badanes described it. "An extraordinary adventure,"
Hill said, "being on a tightrope, but you're spinning the
tightrope. It wasn't even just keeping your footing,
there wasn't any rope."
Creativity Research Journal
The Writer Tells
Still, the process of writing fiction-planning for
and then using narrative improvisation to conjure up
and enter a fictionworld-is a particular way of con-
fronting the unknown. Two of the writers were poets
too. In the interviews, each spontaneously offered a
sense of the difference between writing fiction and
writing poetry. Paley said, "You can say poetry is a
person's way of addressing the world. Fiction is the way
you get the world to address you." Badanes put it this
way:
A lyric poet celebrates his or her own voice, his
or her soul in some way. ...This is me in the world
... this is how I see it. ... Fiction is very good
training for moral behavior. It teaches you to see
other points of view. You really see the other
point of view, feel it, get the other point of view.
Interestingly, both Paley and Badanes started works
using narrators somewhat like themselves and found
that they could not tell the stories without taking the
viewpoint of people very different from themselves
(Badanes with his Holocaust survivor, Paley with her
bigot with the Black grandson).
Although some works of fiction are closer to auto-
biography than others, the very act of writing the voice
of a person other than oneself in conversation with an
autobiographical character can change understanding.
(Hill gave an example of this in her account of writing
a story based on her grandfather.) Allowing the voice
of an other to inhabit oneself was an essential part of
the process of making fiction for the writers inter-
viewed. This differed from their work in nonnarrative
arts, such as lyric poetry, in which the writer expressed
his or her own viewpoint directly.
Concluding Reflections
This study had some limitations. First, the interviews
with the five authors concerned past events, so inaccu-
rate remembering is possible. Second, five is a small
sample size, so any conclusions based on the authors'
accounts must also be tempered by the possibility that
other writers might have very different stories to tell. In
particular, the experience of writing fictional satire or
in the postmodem mode may have different features.
For example, one way to look at Barth's (1968) famous
short story, "Lost in the Funhouse," is as a chronicle of
the writer's alternation between writingrealm and fic-
35
 C. L. Doyle
tionworld-a story about the fiction-writing process
itself. The story of writing that story may be very
different what was described in this study. Exploring
differences in the experience of creating diffmnt kinds
of fiction (e.g., short story, realistic novel, postmodern
work, satire) is a subject for further research.
Even this tentative modal account has implications
for psychologists to consider. Psychologists have sug-
gested that the creative process is a kind of problem
solving, but the problem to be solved in the arts is less
evident than the problem in the sciences.For the authors
in this study, a seed incident that had gone beyond
ordinary narrative logic provided the problem to be
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 21:54 24 December 2014
explored. Many psychologists (e.g., Gardner, 1983;
Sternberg & Lubart, 1996) have suggested that each
creative domain involves some domain-specificcogni-
tive processes. The interviews here suggest that one of
the major methods of fiction, nonreflective narrative
improvisation in a fictionworld, is a method unique to
writing. Some (e.g., Perkins, 1981)have suggested that
the creative process is a fortunate combination of ordi-
nary cognitive processes, such as recognizing, compar-
ing, analogizing, and evaluating. The interviews sug-
gest that just such processes are typical of the
writingrealm but that narrative improvisation in the
fictionworld, typically from a viewpoint other than
one's own, is fundamentally different from thinking in
the writingrealm.
The account presented here also has implicationsfor
how best to capture the course of the creative process
over time. Many contemporary psychologistsstill draw
on Wallas's (1926) general four-stage model (prepara-
tion, incubation, illumination, verification). The inter-
views pointed to a more fine-grained, less linear ac-
count for fiction writing: After seed incidents start the
process, writers find themselves navigating among sev-
eral different spheres of experience, revisiting spheres
such as the writingrealm and fictionworld repeatedly.
Thus, the concept of spheres--each characterized by
typical cognitive processes, a typical kind of sociality,
and a typical experience of self-provides a family of
theoretical constructs for understanding the course of
the creative process over time. It wouM be interesting
to see whether this kind of construct could be useful in
exploring the creative process in the other arts as well.
The schematized description of the creative episode
outlined here is a tentative one. A major purpose in
presenting this description to an interdisciplinary audi-
ence is to invite, again, the collaborative help of fiction
writers and those who write about fiction: Does the
account resonate with their experience of fiction writ-
ing? What is left out? What should be elaborated?What
should be modified?
One of the interviewed writers, Petets, has already
responded. In a letter, she sugp~tedthat the proposed
account can be rnmingful and relevant to a writer, that
it provides a framtzwork about which a writer can aug-
ment and query. Petam's letter appears in full as a
postscript following the refeaences. Again, the fruitful-
ness of interdisciplinary conversation between those
who create and those who study the creative process
becomes manifest.
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Postscript: A Letter From Joan Peters
Dear Charlotte,
I loved "The Writer Tells." Reading it, I entered, if
not the fictionworld, the writingrealm. It felt so true; it
even had that half-magical, half-spooky quality the
writingrealm always has for me.
The terms themselves convey the experience pre-
cisely and were particularly effective for describing how
an author moves in and out of a work. You got it
absolutely right, as in, "The right narrative voice often
has to be found before the author can sustain residence
in the fictionworld." "Sustain residence" is a great de-
scription. It is the task, the challengehow to "sustain
residence" in the fictionworld. The problem is, as you
said, navigating between the writingrealm and the fic-
tionworld.
Creativity Research Journal
The Writer Tells
I would add one thought here that might interest you.
I've heard a lot of authors speak of something that often
happens to me. When I'm "in" the fictionworld, I can
get restless or overexcited and decide to leave, which I
later regret. It's as if, at times, you wade too deeply into
the fictionworld, or you get scared of the power of it, or
you feel so sure of it you think you can leave and come
back any time, which isn't necessarily true. This is a
very different experience from being "thrown back into
the writingrealm." It's almost the opposite.
I think that everyone who writes seriously has the
experience of being outside the writing and then,
suddenly (or finally, after much effort and time),
being "in" it. I have that same feeling when I'm
writing nonfiction, as I am doing now. The difference
seems to me important, though I'm not sure what it
is. In fiction, one goes more deeply "in" and the
territory is so uncharted, it feels scary and wondrous
and thrilling in a way that other kinds of prose do not.
I loved Hill's "tightrope" image. Going "in" and
going "out" are then more dramatic experiences.
When I leave the fictionworld after being there a long
time, I'm often talking to myself, spacey, disoriented,
as if I've been hanging upside down a while or
travelling through time zones. I love the way your
terms capture this difference.
The only other comment I wanted to make, really
wanted to talk more with you about, was the relation-
ship between having a story to tell and deciding to
write, which you say comes first. I wonder. The two
seem so interconnected to me. I hear of people who
wanted to write ever since they were ten years old.
Others seem to have begun with a story to tell and then
gone on to create solitude and place. I'm not even sure
what my point is here, just that beginnings are very
intriguing to me and I'd love to headknow more about
them.
Many thanks for including me in this fascinating
project.
My best,
Joan Peters
37