Autobiographical Creative Writing as a Tool
for Enhancing Consciousness and Reflexivity of Self


Paper presented to the 10th Annual Conference of the Consciousness and Experiential Section of the British Psychological Society, September 2006


Celia Hunt, University of Sussex
(c.m.hunt@sussex.ac.uk)

 

I teach a masters programme at Sussex University which offers people the opportunity of exploring, both theoretically and practically, the potential of creative writing as a means of learning about the self. People attend this MA for a variety of reasons: some because they want to learn how to use creative writing with client groups in health and social care, some because they want to develop their own creative writing in ways they haven't been able to so far, sometimes because of blocks or inhibitions; others because they are at transitional points in their lives - such as moving from work to retirement, changing careers or sometimes even leaving partners - and see the MA as a vehicle for working these through Endnote .

 

The MA has been running now for ten years and it's been obvious from the start that many people who take it undergo striking changes in their sense of self Over the years I've done a couple of small research projects aimed at understanding the nature of these changes and how they come about (Hunt, 2004a; 2004b). I'm now engaged in a larger two-year project and this paper is part of this work in progress. It focuses on the effects on students of the creative writing they do, particularly in the first experiential course of the MA, where they spend time fictionalising themselves and significant people in their lives through a variety of writing exercises. Of course, the changes in sense of self I'm discussing in this paper don't come about solely as a result of these exercises; there are other important factors, such as the collaborative group work students engage in and their study of theories of self and creativity, but time is limited today and I can only give you part of the picture.

 

What is striking about the people who take this MA is how many of them experience difficulties with the writing process and how often these are connected with issues around self and identity. For example, they report difficulties with using themselves as a basis for fictional narrators or characters; or with imbuing their fiction with felt, emotional life; or with developing a voice for creative writing because of a strong academic or non-fiction writing identity. Creative writing almost always requires writers to draw on themselves in one way or another, and self and identity issues can seriously interfere with the fiction-making process. Of course, they can also motivate the writing - witness the examples of, say, Franz Kafka or Sylvia Plath, amongst many others - but in my experience of teaching writing for many years, they are as likely to hinder as they are to help.

 

In thinking about self and identity, I find Antonio Damasio's two tier model of the conscious self particularly useful, as it helps to understand our sense of self as both given and constructed Endnote Endnote . At the level of the body, the non-reflexive and largely innate `core self provides a wordless, bodily felt sense of what it feels like to be oneself in the moment Endnote . This, combined with autobiographical memory and social interrelating, gives rise to the ‘autobiographical self, which, when extended by language, becomes a fully reflexive first person of consciousness, the autobiographical ‘I'. Both the core and extended ‘selves' are in process rather than fixed entities, with healthy self-development arising out of the reflexive cognitive movement between core and extended consciousness.

 

However, as a result of the perhaps inevitable vicissitudes of upbringing, the pressure of powerful narratives and discourses in the societies and cultures in which we are embedded, and the need for self-concepts to provide a sense of cohesion, the ‘extended self, which is what we are usually referring to when we talk about our identity, can become fixed rather than flexible. In psychodynamic thinking, for example the theory of Karen Horney (1951), if our upbringing does not provide us with a safe environment, we will develop rigid and defensive self-concepts, which block access to our spontaneous bodily felt sense of self Endnote , and we will develop self-concepts which are rigid and defensive Endnote . In adolescence or adulthood this loss of contact with our felt core can give rise to psychic fragmentation in the form of inner conflicts between different self-concepts, with adverse consequences for our ability to learn and be creative. Instead of the ‘cognitive fluidity’ that Fauconnier and Turner (2002) regard as a central feature of thinking and creative processes, we will experience blocks or stiffness in cognitive processing Endnote .

 

From my research so far it’s clear that many of the students I work with are grappling with one or more dominant and inhibiting self-concepts, or conflicts between different self-concepts. Some of these have their origins in childhood or adolescence - such as being branded, or branding oneself, a ‘poor learner’, or feeling the need to be the ‘good child’ to compensate for a difficult sibling; others have developed more recently - such as the need to be the ‘caring mother’ to the exclusion of one’s own needs, which is a surprisingly dominant theme amongst my research group, or in the case of one student the sense that a potentially life-threatening disease from which she suffers has become her main identity. What I see happening during the period of the MA is that many of these students begin to distance themselves from these different self-concepts and to ‘see’ them more clearly. This distancing helps them to develop more of a grounding in their bodily felt sense of self and to begin to experience themselves quite differently: I would describe this as a shift in their sense of self from decentred fragmentation, where self-concepts are fixed and often in conflict, towards a more flexible multiplicity of self centred in bodily feeling Endnote .

 

As I’ve said, the creative writing exercises undertaken in the first course of the MA are hugely significant in this development. Students engage in two different kinds of exercise which work with Damasio’s two levels of self The first kind focuses on what it feels like to be oneself at the level of the body, beneath one’s everyday selfconcepts. Students create extended metaphors for self immersing themselves in fictional representations of how they are currently feeling about their lives and using the present tense to draw the past and the future into the present. They use freewriting techniques, which allow spontaneous associations onto the page before the inner critic has time to censor them. They identify rhythms connected with everyday activities, such as walking or skipping rope in childhood, and create poems out of them using their own made-up nonsense words Endnote . I call these ‘semiotic’ exercises, following Julia Kristeva’s use of this term (1984) to denote the prelinguistic bodily felt experience of early childhood Endnote .

 

The second kind of exercise involves students in creating imaginative dialogues between different self-concepts or between themselves and a significant person in their lives. This time it’s about learning to objectify the self and playing with selfcharacters and narrators, usually in the past tense. An example here is to ask students to identify two different self concepts - say ‘the ill self’ and ‘the well self - to create characters out of them and then to bring them into relation in a story where they exchange something of value (Moskowitz, 1998). I refer to these exercises as ‘dialogic’, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s use of this term (1981) to denote fiction writing which gives characters and narrators a voice of their own and allows a dialogue between them as far as possible on equal terms.

 

Students undertake the semiotic exercises before moving on to the dialogic. And this seems right to me, because the semiotic exercises, which work with the felt nature of experience, subvert writers’ sense of themselves derived primarily from their dominant self-concepts and enable them to experience more deeply what it feels like to be themselves in their bodies. This shift of attention to the felt nature of self prepares the ground for the dialogic exercises, in which writers engage in ‘cognitive play’ with their dominant self-concepts.

 

In re-reading students’ creative writing for the research, I have been struck by how often in the dialogic exercises they use the technique known as free indirect discourse or, as Dorit Cohn (1978) calls it, narrated monologue. They sometimes do this intuitively and sometimes as a result of learning the technique through the course. Here’s an example from a student’s work:

 

A Close Encounter of an Unusual Kind (extract)

 

The strident alarm woke Jane from sleep, telling her instantly it was a weekday, time to get up. With only a moment to claim consciousness she was out of bed and into her morning routine, reviewing the requirements of the day for her three children - did they need swimming kit, PE kit, money for this or that trip to come? Quickly, methodically she prepared herself mentally and physically and once dressed she roused her sleeping husband, eventually. A quick check round - had he clean underwear? Make sure he didn’t wear the same work shirt again today - yes, all was ready for him. Lunch pressed into his hand he bade her a grumpy goodbye and it was time to round up the rest of the family. The routine was familiar and the she followed it through mechanically, herding them all out of the door clutching lunch boxes in good time for the walk to school. The two older ones could have made the journey alone now, but she preferred to make sure they were all in school safely - it made her feel better. But this morning old Mr. Jennings was standing by his front door as they passed: would she kindly get him some shopping this morning? Phrased as a request it sounded more like a command, but of course she wouldn’t dream of saying no. After all, poor old man, his lumbago was playing up with the change in the weather and he couldn’t really help being tetchy. Anyway, she already had a shopping list in her bag for Sheila Wainwright opposite who had recently produced her first baby, so why not Mr. Jennings too? Except that if it were for him she would have to go to Sainsbury’s because goods from anywhere else would not do for him, would not do at all. It was well out of her way but she couldn’t say no, that would never do. Now she had to hurry her little brood to reach the school gates before the Juniors’ bell summoned the two older children, and then she had to hang around for the Primary school next door to open to admit her youngest. Then it was into the bus and she just had sufficient time to make sense of the shopping lists, her own included, before they were reaching the stop for Sainsbury’s.

What we have here is the author as narrator engaging closely with a character she has created out of her self-concept as carer Endnote . As you can see, the narrator provides the frame and is very much a presence, but instead of telling us what the character thinks and feels, as would be the case with omniscient narration, she allows us to hear this through the characters’ own consciousness. I’ve marked the relevant passages in bold, but let’s take just one: ‘Make sure he didn’t wear the same work shirt again today - yes, all was ready for him’. Now this is not the direct first person speech of the character; if it were, it would read: ‘I must make sure he doesn’t wear the same work shirt again today - yes, everything’s ready for him,’ and it would have a speech tag such as ‘she said’ or ‘she thought’. Nor is it third person indirect speech as reported to us by the narrator; that would read something like: ‘She needed to make sure he didn’t wear the same work shirt again today. She checked and found that all was ready for him’. It is however a form of third person indirect speech, but it retains the actual words, tone and idiom of the character, whilst also allowing the narrator to have her own ‘Objective position’ (Pascal, 1977, pp.6-9). This means that at these moments in the narrative the perspective of the character and the narrator are present simultaneously, with Jane’s first person monologue of thoughts nested, as it were, within the third person narration. In fact, this is the closest juxtaposition of first and third person that you can achieve in narrative fiction (Cohn, 1978, p. I 11).

 

When used autobiographically Endnote , narrated monologue is extremely useful for learning about the self, because it enables the writer to develop both closeness to and distance from self-concepts which may be fixed and inhibiting. Cognitively this is achieved through the process of deictic shift which lies at the heart of this technique. Deixis derives from the Greek word ‘to show’ and is the pointing or specifying function certain words have: ‘this man’, ‘that woman’ (see Stockwell, 2002). When we read a fictional text we are ‘directed’ by it to imagine ourselves into a particular perspective within the narrative, so that we can understand what is happening. In cognitive terms, we take up a particular cognitive stance at the deictic centre of the narrative, which might be a time-space location or the perspective of a character or narrator, and any text is likely to contain several such deictic centres, between which we will be required to shift constantly (Segal, 1995a, p.15).

 

In my example, we as readers are located at the outset, both temporally and spatially at the centre of the narrator’s deictic field. When we read the first clause: ‘The strident alarm woke Jane from sleep’, we imagine ourselves into Jane’s bedroom on a weekday morning and see her waking up in bed. We are not yet in Jane’s head, but in the narrator’s time-space location observing Jane. Already in the next clause: ‘telling her instantly it was a weekday’, we are beginning to shift indirectly into Jane’s deictic field, through her dawning consciousness of a new day. When we get to: ‘Time to get up’, we are deictically centred in Jane’s consciousness, although this is still third person narration. As the story proceeds, we are shifted cognitively back and forth between the deictic centres of these two fields, and this enables us to experience Jane simultaneously from the inside and the outside. This gives us a much broader picture of her than would be the case if Jane were simply a first person narrator, or the object of the narrator’s third person observations. We are given the opportunity both to read about her and to enter into her consciousness and feel her experience, to empathise with her.

 

In writing this piece, the writer has had to engage in a similar process. She has had to create the character of Jane out of an aspect of herself with a life of her own on the page. This in itself is quite challenging as it involves identifying, and distancing herself from, this particular self-concept, letting go of conscious control of it Endnote and empathically ‘living into’ it in the form of a character (Bakhtin, 1993; in Morson and Emerson, 1990, p.54), with all the imaginative engagement of feeling that empathy involves. She has also had to develop a third person narrator stable and flexible enough to hold the imaginative space and allow deictic shift back and forth between the two fields Endnote . This is even more demanding, as it requires the writer again to distance herself from herself, but this time to create a textual self that is not personified, rather it is a cognitive stance located in time and space, with a felt relation to the character. I would suggest that developing this stance involves learning to trust the felt, bodily sense of self, which happens in the semiotic exercises carried out earlier in the course. Only when the writer is able to do all of these things is she in a position to practice this technique. Of course, this is neither a linear process nor a fully conscious one.

 

In terms of the writer’s self-learning here, not only does writing this story give spontaneous felt form to a self-concept from which she has not been able to distance herself before, but she is also experiencing, through the intimate dialogue between her two textual selves made possible by the narrated monologue Endnote , what it feels like to be a dynamic self-in-process between a dominant self-concept and the felt body. I call this practising reflexivity in the text’ Endnote (see Hunt and Sampson, 2006).

 

This development of a fluid and flexible cognitive stance grounded in bodily feeling is, I think, one of the most important elements in students’ move towards a more fluid multiplicity of self centred in the body. It helps to loosen the fixity of dominant selfconcepts but also consolidates the work done previously on accessing the bodily felt sense of self. It can be achieved to an extent through other combinations of first, second and third person narrative, but narrated monologue is, I believe, its most effective vehicle.

 

It might be reasonable to expect that moving from a sense of self located in one or more dominant self-concepts to a more multiple and process-oriented sense of self might feel unstable or boundary-less, but I have found that this is not the case. Certainly some students talk about feeling more fragile at the beginning, but the impression I am getting is that their multiple, process-oriented sense of self gives them of a sense of identity that can be summoned up in the body when required rather than one that is held onto defensively all of the time. It is a bodily felt ‘boundarying’ of the self. As one student puts it: ‘I really do now give much more voice to the other voices that are inside my head’. But ‘I don’t feel fragmented, I feel more whole Endnote .

 

Acknowledgement: I am grateful to students of the MA for permission to quote from their creative writing and interview material.

 

References:

 

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) ‘Discourse in the Novel’. In M. Holquist (ed) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, pp.259-422.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

 

Notes: