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Editing as a creative act

delete2026-05-01
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Everington, Shanta *
DOI:10.1080/14790726.2026.2669078delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
According to English author, essayist, and playwright Fay Weldon, every writer has two personalities: A, who produces first drafts, is 'creative, impetuous, wilful, emotional, sloppy', and B, who edits them, is 'argumentative, self-righteous, cautious, rational, effective.' But can editing itself be a creative act? This article will focus on two separate projects carried out by the author involving editing interview material. Creative practice as research undertaken for a PhD in Creative Writing involved interviewing mothers and shaping the material, using a range of creative processes to produce a form of hybrid life writing, combining edited verbatim material with creative responses (poetry, re-imagined scenes, lyric essay, and collage quotation). A subsequent life writing project, an auto/ethnography on menopause, further developed the author's appreciation for the art of editing. Links will be made to oral historians' work, including Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, described as a 'novel of voices', for which she received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and John Banville's comments on Tony Parker: 'By means of arrangement and pattern, rhythm and tone & mldr; he makes out of these tape-recorded testimonies a kind of art', exploring the extent to which editing interviews can be seen as a creative act.
Keywords:
Ethnography
auto/ethnography
creative practice
creative writing
life writing
creative writing research

Journal

N
NEW WRITING-THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF CREATIVE WRITING
IF:
0.4
Papers:
33
Citations:
0

Organization

O
Open University
Scholars:
23
Papers: 15
Citations: 0
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