Off Cuts
Creativity and Essay Writing

Articles:

*Rhetorics of Fantasy (extract)

*Out of This World

* What We Mean & How We Are Seen

* Denying the Exoticism of the Other

* How to Give a Conference Paper

* Why the Iraq Crisis is on

* Crowning the King

* How I discovered Fandom

* Did you ask any good questions...

* Popular science for children

* Creativity & Essay Writing


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The following is from Diana Wynne Jones's _The Year of the Griffin_ (2000) and is possibly the best description of creative research and creative writing in academia I've ever read. It is reprinted here with Diana's permission.

The scene starts when Corkoran, an unethusiastic lecturer who prefers to teach to a drill, begins marking the essays of our young protagonists.

... Felim kept quoting spells, nearly all of which Corkoran had never met before. He had to keep getting up to consult the enormous _Almanac of Magics_... but Corkoran stopped consulting the _Almanac_ and began skimming when he realised that, with each spell, Felim was pointing out that there were possibilities the maker of the spell had never thought of. Different uses for them and different sorts of magic branched off from them in a hundred directions, Felim said. He ended by saying that magic could explode into a hundred new forms no one had thought of yet...

... And here was Lukin talking about the different possibilities of magic too, in a soaring, joyful way that quite shocked Corkoran. He had thought Lukin was going to be one of your stolid plodders. But not a bit of it. Lukin talked about the boundaries and limitations set on magic and, while he agreed that some of them were there for safety, he thought most of them unnecessary. He pointed out a few. Take these off, he said. Experiment. Have fun with magic.

Fun? Corkoran thought. What nonsense was this? Magic at university was supposed to be work. You were not supposed to have fun with it.

... He gave Olga a C too, again quite generously, he thought, She had at least tried to answer the question, What is Wizard's magic? But her essay was full of opinions which again would never do....

He was determined to skim Ruskin's essay. But it was impossible. Ruskin was a dwarf, used to working with intricate things, and his argument was like chain mail, forged link by link. He put out a suggestion. He followed that with the obvious things that led from it--things you were forced to agree to--and then he went one stage further and wham! You were agreeing to something which was quite unheard of. Then Ruskin took the unheard of idea and did the same thing to that. Wham! A new mad idea. Round and round the links Corkoran went...

Claudia evidently held the same opinion as Felim and Elda, but she had set out to prove her opinion practically, by starting with a fairly common spell and showing how it could be made to do two different things. The first page gave the spell and then was divided into two columns, showing the two new spells. These in turn led to four--no five--more derived spells in four columns and an attached slip of paper. And so on. Ten columns led to twenty five...the last page folded out into a huge family tree of all the spells, their branches color-coded red, green and blue, with extra notes about how to apply them. (extracted from pp. 81-84).