Cirrus@Austlit

'What can formalist comics studies contribute to creative writing practice? This consideration of an experience in unconsciously applying comics thinking to creative writing shows how notions familiar to comics studies can enrich creative writing. The essay articulates the challenges of writing contemporary gay male “post-crisis” fiction, which troubles the foundations of many representational strategies familiar to creative writers, raising questions about the relationship between what can be shown and what can be known. In comics, where spatialised relationships are foregrounded and help guide representational strategies such as focalisation and description, these foundations become decentred and malleable. Yet, rather than using comics thinking to resolve problems in creative writing – the temptation of applied practice – this paper shows how looking at representational strategies across media can allow challenges to constitute a piece of creative writing and therefore stop being problems to be “solved” but rather to be negotiated within a particular work. The discussion contributes to comics studies and creative writing through highlighting echoes and distortions between the two linked disciplines; theory and method from one creative discipline may be formally applied to another, but the benefits of using cognate disciplines to “think through” problems can also be indirect and discursive.' (Publication abstract)