Resident blogger Ebba writes this week about how creative writing can help researchers in their work, be it in terms of taking writing advice from creative writing professionals, practising empathy in their work, or exploring how their research assumptions play out ‘in action’.

Last autumn, during an inspired time, I began to work late into the evenings on a chapter on medieval Scottish heiresses. I was amazed by their legal assertiveness and how they, despite some of them being in their early 20s, managed to assert their interests in the face of immense legal complexity. One night at around 2am, when I was writing the life of the heiress Margaret Keith, I felt a pair of eyes on me. When I looked around, I saw a large woman in her late 50s, dressed in a widow’s black brocade dress, sitting on my bed with her hands on her lap. She observed me with knowing eyes, the way senior people look at you when they approve of your youthful enthusiasm while finding it a little funny. We sat there for a long time without speaking, until I raised my eyebrows and she disappeared.

She was a 2am vision from within, telling me to consider something important: I’m a young person claiming to represent the full lifecycle of the women I study. My fascination with heiresses probably stems from the fact that I can very clearly remember being 21 (the age when an heiress would have been able to access her inheritance), and so when I picture these women, I see them at that early stage in their lives. ‘What about the senior women?’ the fictional Margaret Keith wondered. My subconscious presented her with experience and mature authority, to remind me not to over-emphasise the importance of her 21-year-old self.

With thanks to the reader for indulging me telling this story, I share my thoughts below on the utility of creative writing as a way of externalising your own imagination to see what it’s trying to tell you, as well as a handful other ways that creative writing can help researchers prosper.

Hone your writing and loose the writer’s block

There are many pieces of advice given by creative writing experts that are applicable to academic writing. During my recent creative writing internship, I was asked why I so often tend to include more than one ‘idea’ in a single sentence, even though the reader usually struggles to process more than one idea at a time. I wasn’t sure what to say. That I’m a buffoon and a fool? That sentences tend to write me rather than the other way around and then I get so overwhelmed by what I’ve written than I tend to skip the editing stage, hoping that the reader will be better equipped than I am to deal with text? I didn’t say that. I just started writing shorter sentences.

Shift between perspectives

Empathy goes hand in hand with creative writing. Here are three exercises you can do that turn your thesis into an unfamiliar shape and that will enable you to see it in a new light:

OBSERVE. Write about yourself doing the research. Who is the researcher that you see in your mind when you write about yourself? What drives this character, where do they want to go, and what’s hindering them from getting there?

EMPATHISE. If you, like me, are researching people from the distant past, it can be useful to create fictional characters based on your research subjects and contemplate what kind of assumptions you’re making in your portrayal of them. What are some other ways to write them, and what methods do you have available to access someone’s subjectivity?¹

WRITE DIALOGUE. This idea was presented to me at a SGSAH Summer School event run by Drs Iain Taylor and Sarah Raine, editors at Riffs, in 2023. When asked to imagine an interaction with my research subjects, I wrote a story about a group of medieval women coming to my house for dinner, wrecking my furniture and refusing to answer any of my questions. This and other writings produced on the day were later published here.

Explore how your research assumptions play out ‘in action’

My research, about women’s legal agency in late medieval North-East Scotland, sometimes feels like the academic twin of the strand of historical fiction that likes to imagine certain historical women in specific ways: strength, empowerment and action feature heavily in this kind of fiction, and the same can be said for my research.

When I tried to write a story about a medieval Aberdonian woman who had all the prerequisites to ‘achieve agency’ (a recently widowed individual who had inherited wealth as well as legal expertise from both her mother and husband) but who was ultimately a depressed, passive and hesitant person, I discovered something interesting: the narrative fell apart around her. My chosen reader struggled to understand what was going on and who the character was. It’s difficult to write about a person who doesn’t have any particular desire, goal, or palpable fears. Yet I know from experience that people sometimes do lack these things. I wonder what it means for historians to be so dependent on traditional storytelling devices like plot and character to represent the past. Perhaps alternative fiction that questions the necessity of these things could be a way for humanities researchers to rethink what it is to be a person and what it means to live a life?

Practise ‘killing your darlings’

There is some exceptional editorial resilience to be picked up from creative writing. I don’t know if there is anything more heart-breaking than having glued a piece of yourself to the page only to realise that it doesn’t fit with the rest of the text. George Orwell discouraged writers from producing ‘purple passages’, parts of a text that feature words ‘used partly for the sake of their own sound’, ‘sentences without meaning’.² I take issue with the assumption that such passages are necessarily bad, but training your eye into recognising what’s what in your text is always useful, as is teaching yourself to press delete when necessary.

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1. Some good ways of accessing someone’s subjectivity is through their senses (what would they have been able to see, smell, feel?), illnesses and ailments (the physical suffering in their lives), and pleasure (what might they have enjoyed and longed for?). ↩︎
2. George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, The Orwell Foundation, https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/ (accessed 08/08/2024). ↩︎