exegesis

My university has a reasonably significant creative writing sector. They’re obviously linked up with humanities so in our gatherings we often have a mix of people and presentations and one thing that’s come up recently (for me at least) is the exegesis. And I’ve found it fascinating.

Primarily because I’d love to see something like the creative writing exegesis being used by non-creative writing PhDs. The writing process, the methodology, is cricial and often overlooked. Fan Studies does have the auto-ethnographic aspect to it but the process of writing, the place and the critique of the process, is not part of the field. Yet, when you get PhDs together there’s this common thread of “oh god writing”. 

I say this as someone who enjoys writing, academic and non-academic, fictional and non-fictional, professional and amateur. It’s hard work but the spectre of it looms excessively within the PhD and I rather think the exegesis could, in some ways, alleviate some of that. Because the endless workshops (write as you go, set aside a time, pomodoro it, break it into pieces, outline it, wing it, bootcamp it) don’t seem to address the anxieties of how.

How do you approach your writing? How do you decide your specific voice? How do you find your place, not within the literature but as part of that literature? How does your field, your topic, shape the choices you make in your text? 

The paralysis of choice lays there I think, not in the actual practice of words on a page.