Don’t come to conclusions. Come to other things: inquiry, questions, failure, side roads, off-road. (Waite 2019:48)
In my end is my beginning. (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 1944:27)
Creative writing presents social researchers with challenges and opportunities. Writing – more than simply ‘writing up’ – is a form of enquiry in its own right, a means of searching and questioning, exploring and understanding the social world. Moreover, creative writing has radical possibilities for social research, unsettling and as we put it queering our ways of seeing and knowing. We elaborate on these two themes – searching and queer(ing) – in this final chapter. Here, we draw together threads rather than advancing firm conclusions, and we hope readers will pick up and play with these threads and ideas, as we shall continue to do ourselves.
Writing this book, we have struggled and not always agreed about our definitions of creative writing. In one of our writing meetings, Helen argued the case that all writing is creative. Richard felt the need to distinguish creative from other forms of writing, pointing to definitions of the field and practice of creative writing (for example, Harper 2019). We could each see each other’s point; rather than disagreeing, we both had mixed feelings on the subject. We also remain unsure about the term creative writing. Though meaningful and alluring to us, we recognise that this term can be off-putting to some people. The latter include: those who find creativity and/or writing intimidating, seeing it as something for others; those who argue for more critical approaches to creativity (Mould 2018); and those who are suspicious and implicitly snobby towards creative writing as defined and taught in manuals and handbooks, evening classes and university courses.
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