After reading 10 popular books on creative writing in search of information on the role of research in the creative process, I’ve now shifted my focus to a set of more “academic” books that are specifically about fiction writing. I say “academic” because, of all of the books on a very long list that I found, these are the ones that are a) about fiction writing specifically and b) owned by the libraries at 20 institutions with highly respected creative writing programs at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

This time, the research process is a little more complicated because my access to my library’s print collection is limited and my access to print books through interlibrary loan is currently at zero, which means my best option is to purchase the books I’ve identified for my new study. Most of the books are reasonably affordable but, yeah. How fast this gets done may in large part depend on how often I can spend the money.

That said, I was able to get a hold of a copy of From Where You Dream pretty easily. Robert Olen Butler is credited as the author of the book but really the book is made up of transcriptions of some lectures that he gave as part of a fiction writing workshop that he taught. These transcriptions were captured and edited by Janet Burroway, the original author of Writing Fiction.

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Image by Hebi B. from Pixabay

Recently, I spent some time reading 10 years’ worth of author interviews from Writer’s Digest in search of some insight into the role of research in the creative writing process. After discovering how seldom the topic of research comes up in popular creative writing books, I wasn’t expecting to find much so I was surprised by how often research was mentioned, either because the interviewer specifically asked about it or because the author brought it up on their own.

With a few exceptions, the discussions about research in these interviews tended to be somewhat surface-level if only because there’s a lot of ground to cover in a relatively small space. Because of that, the interviews helped to establish that research is, in fact, part of the creative process and even gave a sense of what that research might look like in some cases but in reading them I felt that for the most part they weren’t really giving me what I was looking for.

So as I’m starting to develop an interview protocol that I’m hoping to use with living, breathing fiction writers, it becomes necessary to consider: what is it, exactly, that I’m looking for?

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