The Importance of Process

This chapter examines the process by which landscape and (written) text inter-relate, and therefore attends to the process of literary creativity. It explores the apparently ineffable, unknowable and ‘unwritable’ elements of the creative process. It focuses first on the writer as an agent in that process and then, via writers’ accounts of landscape and text, considers the creative process in terms of a dialectic between two phases: a conscious, reflective phase of observing, planning, and researching; and an unconscious, unreflective phase often designated as ‘inspiration’. That second phase becomes the locus of the ineffable aspect of creativity. By considering these two phases within a dialectic, we move closer towards an account of the unwritable aspect of the creative process. Thus, we respond, too, to the tension between representational and non-representational theories of landscape in cultural geography. In the final analysis, we offer two ways of approaching and discussing landscape and text based on two ways of constructing the creative dialectic – the one dealing with the moments at which landscape and text inform each other, and the other treating of coincidences between literary and geographical forms