Creative Writing for Personal and Professional Development

Creative Writing for Personal and Professional Development Celia Hunt University of Sussex c.m.hunt@sussex.ac.uk

Aims of the MA Creative Writing and Personal Development at Sussex University To enable participants: • to develop creative writing through reflection on the self in the writing process • to acquire skills to facilitate developmental and therapeutic writing groups • to explore the connection between self and creativity through creative writing

MA Participants • People aspiring to write creatively • Established writers experiencing blocks • Professionals from health and social care, education, business, etc. wishing to acquire skills for use in their work • New graduates seeking professional development • People in transition seeking an opportunity for reflection

Approach to Teaching and Learning in the MA • Fictionalising experience of self and others through creative writing exercises • Small, student-led groups for discussion and sharing creative writing in progress • Study of theories of self and creativity • Critical reflection through learning journals and reflective essays

My Research Project 2004-08 into the Learning Process of students taking the MA* Questions • What is the nature of changes students experience? • What facilitates these changes? • What are the challenges of this kind of learning? *Funded by British Academy and Higher Education Academy

Main Finding: a Significant Change that Students experience • Shift away from reliance on (often unexamined) self-concepts, e.g. what it means to be a writer or a learner or an ill person or a spouse, towards a more fluid and flexible self-experience grounded in what it feels like to be oneself • Often leads to increased flexibility of thinking processes

Example: Change in Self-Concept as Writer • ‘I think in the past I was very worried about […] this idea that I didn’t feel I was a writer, because I was a woman or something, but also this idea of writing having to be good. You know I sort of brought into it all the academic stuff about writing being good, or not being good enough’ (5F Int2). • ‘I used to think if I wrote I could only write brilliant things, I could only write bestsellers, you know whatever I did it couldn’t ever be mediocre or I couldn’t just do it for fun, it had to be going somewhere’ (3F Int2).

‘“Being” a “writer” is much less important to me than it was, now I am enjoying writing in a much deeper way’ (QPS9). ‘It’s left me […] more certain where I want to go with my writing, but left me very much more open as to how I achieve it, and I’m quite enjoying that thought […] I’m very interested in playing with ideas now, whereas I would never be like that before, I would have had a fixed view of where I was going to be. And I know that I don’t know quite where the writing’s going to take me, and I’m actually enjoying that now’ (13F Int2).

Significant Factors contributing to this Change* • Creating space for exploration of self-experience through creative writing(also through learning journals and reflective essays) • Objectifying the self on the page through small group work • Increasing understanding of the above through studying theory of self and creativity • Providing a contained learning environment with tutors experienced in transformative learning *in order of significance

Examples of Creative Writing Exercises used: 1. Focus on Bodily Feeling and Emotion • Freewriting: avoiding the censor (Peter Elbow) • Metaphor for the present self: immersion in the feeling of the present(Ira Progoff) • Rhythm and Rhyme:Identifying rhythms associated with everyday activities and using them to create rhyming poems (Cheryl Moskowitz) • Sound Language: playing with the sound and feel of words, particularly those remembered from childhood (Dominic McLoughlin)

2. Focus on Inner Dialogue • Experimenting with Point of View: creating self-dialogues between 1st, 2nd and 3rd person • Self as Source: creating dialogue between two different aspects of the personality through characterisation (Cheryl Moskowitz) • Future Self: creating dialogue between oneself in the future and a new person in one’s life (Cheryl Moskowitz) • Imagining the Reader: creating dialogue between oneself as author and the reader(s) one imagines one is writing for (Celia Hunt)

Developmental Role of Creative Writing • Exercises focusing on bodily feeling and emotion facilitate opening up to the felt nature of self-experience beyond dominant self-concepts: • ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ the self • creating an oblique angle on oneself • creating/exploring new metaphors for self • Focus on inner dialogue keeps the inner space open by facilitating reflexivity between different voices of the self and others who speak in us: • creating/exploring new self-narratives

Creative Writing for Personal and Professional Development