The mind that writes itself

In its brief history, academic research in creative writing practices has been considered by many as highly problematic, fraught with unanswered fundamental questions, lacking in any clear models and concepts. The greatest impediments for developing creative writing research is the epistemological character of creative writing research and a resistance to theory. However, for some the problem of the production of knowledge in creative writing – and, as others will argue, in any field - cannot be separated from the subjectivity of the researcher. Nonetheless, beyond these two distinctions, the defining characteristic of creative writing research would appear to be its conceptual uncertainty and, perhaps ironically, this incoherency has proved to be the feature around which the debates have found common ground. By identifying the main problems for the development of creative writing research, my aim is to show the benefit of these problems and obstacles for drawing attention to areas which are conceptually unresolved or unable to be articulated. Insofar as the brief history of creative writing research is characterised by certain conceptual stumbling blocks and theoretical impasses, rather than deplore these I will argue for a Lacanian approach of locating and celebrating the failures of knowledge and representation for what they may reveal about the other side of knowledge production, the unknown, of creative writing research. In particular I will argue that the metaphorical or symbolic mapping studied in psychoanalysis, or as conceptual metaphor in cognitive linguistics, structures the mind that writes itself