Of all my electives for this programme, writing speculative fiction is the one I entered with the most expectations regarding content and layout. I’ve been in fiction workshops before; I’ve discussed craft and genre and criticism in similar ways to the course texts. However, the real mystery for me was how the course would factor into my larger ways of thinking.
In many ways, fiction writing is central to my identity as a maker, scholar, and human, but most of its transferable skills are largely invisible in other roles and fields–good communication, understanding of audience, balancing of detail against big-picture connections and themes are all valuable skills, but they’re highly abstract and difficult to trace. The specific practice of fiction writing, which I love so much, is a lot harder to work into academic projects outside of the literary community; its value as a mode of research and discourse is still underestimated in most other disciplines.
But my experiences during the intensive days reminded me how directly fiction can target the things which other forms of academic research must tiptoe carefully around. It thrives at generative and inductive speculation in a world where most research practices are confined to what can be reasonably and directly deducted, and it does not have to rely on heavily obscured theoretical language to get at things like emotion, morality, and the human experience. It generates questions rather than confirming hypotheses, and this space, I think, is exactly where my project needs to be.
I would like to work some manner of creative writing into my final project, in whatever way seems most appropriate to the data and experiences my research generates. I’m still very much interested in creative non-fiction and/or antifictional techniques as a way of not only empathetically exploring the ‘other’ of my digital identity but also making it accessible to a broader audience in an emotionally intuitive way.
