Creative Narrative

For those of us who need an academic justification for expressing their views in the form of a short story:

"A creative narrative, according to Brown&McMillan (1991), tells a story that is factual in content, but uses fiction writing techniques, including plots, scene and characters". (..)

The technique of creative narrative provides one method for the interpretative study of communication and culture. Because it enables a scholarly performance and operates on multiple levels of signification, it reflects the 'multiple domains of experience' thesis advanced by interpretivist epidemologies (Anderson 1987, 1992, Anderson and Meyer, 1988). As a scholarly method, the creative narrative promotes the 'non-elementalistic' study of communication called for by Korzybski (1933). While more traditional methods of scholarship can impose narrowly defined, unidimensional meanings on the subject being examined, the creative narrative strikes to evoke a more complete, holistic semantic reaction' in the reader."

from: 'An Episode of Flaming: A Creative Narrative' published in: 'etc' A Review of General Semantics', Volume Fifty-One Number One - Spring 1994. Published by the 'International Society for General Semantics', Concord, CA, Phone (510) 798-0311

Philip A. Thompsen is Assistant Professor of Communication at William Jewll College in Liberty, Missouri (on leave), currently holds a Marriner S. Eccles Research Fellowship in Political Economy at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.