My research begins . . .

Research Notes #1

Dec 06, 2024

Welcome to Research Notes. This is a new series where I hope to share my reading, reflections and research for the MSc Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes which I am undertaking at Metanoia Institute, London. Hope you find this interesting and useful for your own thinking about your writing and your writing practice. I’d especially love to read your responses to anything that comes up for you. Let’s begin!

Dear You—

I am now in Year 3 of the MSc Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, and this is my dissertation year! I’ve met with my Research Adviser, I’ve sent in my research proposal, and I have received approval from the ethics committee. 🤸🏻‍♂️

My next step is to progress with the Literature Review, a critical evaluation of the available research and writing on my chosen area of curiosity. In a 15,000-word dissertation, the review will make up 2-3,000 words.

Small-scale as it might be, there are some skills I need to develop here. Skills in creating an argument about the literature, skills in commentary and evaluation.

I feel that writing to you will help me develop these skills. I feel that this will also help me improve my writing as well as expand my conception of myself as a writer. I’ve always been drawn to research, philosophy, science. I am starting to evolve into a writer who blends creative writing with research.

I hope this journey will be interesting to you, and inspire you too. I would love for us to meet and chat in the comments.

Okay, enough preamble, let us begin!

I’ll start by sharing some brief introductory notes on what I’m thinking, and I’ll write on a weekly/fortnightly cadence (fate & inspiration permitting).

My draft research title

Here is a draft formulation of the research title:

Writing beautifully: a heuristic and aesthetic-based inquiry into the experience and therapeutic value of revisiting, with an aesthetic attitude/orientation, writings produced within a creative writing for therapeutic purposes (CWTP) context, and then shaping, editing and curating a body of work for self-publication accompanied by a spoken-word performance.

What I’m curious about

I have a whole lot of creative and personal writing which I produced during the past six years and, especially, during the past two years as part of my MSc.

Reflecting on this writing and also on the experience of producing and sharing the writing in various group and individual therapeutic writing settings, I noticed two distinct types of aesthetic experiences.

a) the ‘beautiful’

b) the ‘not beautiful’ or ‘ugly’

Here’s what I think I mean:

a) On some days, during some sessions, I felt my writing and the writing experience was beautiful.

On those days, I noticed ‘beautiful’ qualities in my writing: how the form of a pantoum held my story and transformed it into an evocative incantation; how the repetition of a stem borrowed from another poem served as a scaffold for me to leap off into the uniqueness of my own story; how the sound of my fountain pen marking the page made the words appear like profound, transcendent messages; how compiling a creative portfolio and printing and binding it helped me find coherence and completion in a story which I found to be infinitely therapeutic. Moreover, on my ‘beautiful’ days, I noticed a heightened responsiveness in my peers when I shared my writing, when I read it out loud to them.

b) On other days, most days to be honest, I felt my writing and my writing experience was ugly.

On these days, I noticed that my pen or pencil marks resembled scratches and scribbles, with letters, words, and phrases falling untidily and chaotically on the page, often difficult to decipher afterwards. I saw the representation of a troubled mind. In my body, I experienced this as a tight strapping of my chest and the dreaded, burning red throbbing sensation in my stomach, the source of my anxiety and fear since I was a child. Intellectually, I could rationalise that the writing I was making in these therapeutic writing sessions did not need to be ‘good writing’ or ‘literary’ writing’ or even ‘beautiful writing’ and I urged myself to appreciate the cathartic benefits and the therapeutic insights. Yet, on those days, the harsh judgement of ‘ugly’ and the feeling of shame prevailed.

I wonder:

Why or how do I sometimes experience aesthetic ‘beauty’ — or is it pleasure or enchantment or awe — when writing in a therapeutic setting?
And why and how do I experience ‘not beauty’ or ‘ugliness’?
And how does this help or hinder my therapeutic journey?

I also noticed:

When I returned to some of the writing and spent time shaping, editing, and (controversial word) ‘perfecting’ it, I felt better about the writing and myself. There was something beneficial in the shaping and editing.
The shaping and editing and tidying and ‘perfecting’ made my writing ‘beautiful’ for me.
This felt therapeutic.

So, another question:

How far might the personal therapeutic journey reflect the trajectory of the process of shaping, editing, crafting and preparing my creative writing for sharing through publication and performance? (Yikes, clumsy sentence, but it’s a start!)

Okay - I shall pause here and leave you with this photo.