Searching for “the bandaged place”

This chapter asks the question ‘what precisely am I doing when I write?’ and – partly through the nature of creative / critical hybridity – explores the ambivalence I feel towards that question. I investigate the ‘method acting’ I undertake as I write, adopting first or close third person narration as a mantle or mask, creating a paradigmatic filter as I do so. I have included an example of this kind of writing where I ‘became’ Phyllis Lockhart while I was writing – a form of acting on the page. Taking Rob Pope’s work on creativity as inspiration, I engage with some of the cultural idioms that orbit around the term ‘creative’ by creating a taxonomy for the term as it operates in culture. I end by looking briefly at some alternative ways of understanding creative practice, contextually and personally.