Writing Qualitative Inquiry

Self, Stories, and Academic Life

H.L. Goodall Jr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315415512
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Responding to the rapid growth of personal narrative as a method of inquiry among qualitative scholars, Bud Goodall offers a concise volume of practical advice for scholars and students seeking to work in this tradition. He provides writing tips and strategies from a well-published, successful author of creative nonfiction and concrete guidance on finding appropriate outlets for your work. For readers, he offers a set of criteria to assess the quality of creative nonfiction writing. Goodall suggests paths to success within the academy—still rife with political sinkholes for the narrative ethnographer—and ways of building a career as a public scholar. Goodall's work serves as both a writing manual and career guide for those in qualitative inquiry.

Chapter 1

The 5 Rs of Narrative Writing

How should we think about writing narratives? In this chapter, I use Lee Gutkind’s notion of the five key ideas central to the practice of creative nonfiction to discuss the basic thought processes associated with this style of writing for qualitative inquiry.¹ For beginning writers, this chapter provides an orientation to practical issues fundamental to crafting nonfiction narratives. For more experienced writers, it offers a refresher course in the rudiments of narrative representation and evocation, framing, reflexivity, and “thick description.”²

How I Came to the Narrative Epistemic

I, like so many others, developed my narrative roots by reading outside of the academy. I read novels and poetry, drama and investigative journalism. I, too, was frustrated by the lack of compelling stories coming out of my discipline (at the time) as well as by the general lack of respect for narratives within my scholarly community. There seemed to be a need for a bridge between what I was reading outside the academy—compelling stories—and what I was reading in my scholarly journals and books.

I was strongly attracted to academic literature—great ideas, interesting theories, inspired applications—and the ongoing conversations about them. I was also dismayed by the tough going that characterized much of the prose that was used to write theory and report on practice. Why couldn’t a research-based form of inquiry also be a compelling narrative?

That was when I decided to supplement my academic training in rhetoric and communication studies with work in creative and biographical writing. My first exploration into that parallel world was in a nonfiction-writing graduate class, where I was introduced to the idea of “new journalism” under the heading “creative nonfiction.”

Lee Gutkind, founder of the Foundation for Creative Nonfiction, defines creative nonfiction as:

Dramatic, true stories using scenes, dialogue, close, detailed descriptions and other techniques usually employed by poets and fiction writers about important subjects—from politics, to economics, to sports, to the arts and sciences, to racial relations, and family relations. Creative nonfiction heightens the whole concept and idea of essay writing. It allows a writer to employ the diligence of a reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of a poet and the analytical modes of the essayist.³

He explains that creative nonfiction emerged in the 1960s and 1970s under the banner of “new journalism,” which was an experiment in genre that infused investigative reporting with structural and stylistic techniques borrowed from fiction, drama, and poetry. Gutkind calls creative nonfiction “the literature of reality,”⁴ and credits Gay Talese⁵ as one of the earliest and best practitioners. Talese described his writing as an attempt to get at “the larger truth,” which is, Gutkind observes:

What the creative nonfiction writer is always seeking, both the literal journalistic fact-oriented truth and the three dimensional truth or the meaning of what it is they have observed and experienced. The meaning is what we are working for and the meaning is the way we are able to render the objectives, the reason we have become writers. We have become writers to help make a change in the world and by capturing the meaning of what it is we see and hear, what it is we observe, we can help change, a very little bit of how a reader perceives an idea, a human being or a situation.⁶

The above definition and description of creative nonfiction has everything in common with what I call “new ethnography”⁷: By new ethnography, I mean “creative narratives shaped out of a writer’s personal experiences within a culture and addressed to academic and public audiences” (Goodall, 2000, p. 9).

Later, in Writing the New Ethnography, I hit on the same themes that Gutkind stresses: a focus on meaning; the skills of an investigative reporter; the importance of attention to language; the use of techniques for storytelling borrowed from fiction, poetry, and drama; and, finally, the centrality of analysis based on careful research, reading, and reflective thought.

So why am I advocating that qualitative writers take as a model “creative nonfiction” for crafting narratives?

There are five very good reasons. Read on.

Real Life Stories: Representation, Evocation, and Framing

The focus of any good narrative is its accurate rhetorical representation and rich evocation of what happened (or what is happening) in a particular time and place. To make both of these work as good stories and good scholarship requires framing. We’ll begin our exploration with an examination of these three key concepts that shape and inform writing about real life stories.

Representation

Representation is never a simple matter of transferring “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” from lived experiences to the page. Of course, the people named (or given pseudonyms) are those of real people,⁸ and the events depicted are events that really happened, but beyond those fundamental elements of reporting are important questions of language and perspective.

Language Is a Partial Representation of Reality

Finding the “right” words is difficult because words—symbols—do not have a one-to-one relationship to reality, nor are our choices of word usage ever neutral. When we use symbols to represent our lived experiences, descriptions of persons and events, and evaluations of meaning attributed to them, we select from an array of language possibilities those words, images, and sounds that best capture our perspective on the whole of it. We construct a truth, but not the only truth. We represent reality; we don’t reproduce it.

This is an important consideration for writers, because it encourages us to become reflective about issues of representation as well as sensitive to nuances of word choices and images. One way to demonstrate awareness of the representational problematic is to include your thoughts about those language challenges in the story. Another option is to include the views and voices of those others who are represented in the text, either as dialogic partners to the construction of meaning or as commentators on what you have written. Of course, neither of these methods fully resolves the constant challenge of representation, because whatever method you select will itself be made in language. There is no “Archimedean language” capable of fully revealing truth. The best we can do is, first, accept that our representations—however richly imagined and imaginatively rendered—are always partial and never complete. Second, armed with that knowledge, we must continue to question our choices and search for better ways to make known those concerns in the body of the text.

Perspective Always Reflects a Partisan Point of View

How do we learn to see things in one way, and not another? Where does our capacity for critical interpretation of experience come from? Why is it that we can be profoundly struck by the insights of writers whose stories open up worlds we never knew existed?

The answer to all of these questions turns on issues of representation that center on perspective. We learn to see things in one way and not another because we are born, reared, and acculturated in a particular way and not in another. How we learn to see and interpret the world is therefore a product of where we come from and who we are. As a Western white heterosexual male of a certain age, child of relative privilege, and product of an elite education, I have a perspective shaped and informed by those accumulated facts of my life. I am, as my cultural studies colleagues put it, “raced, classed, aged, gendered, and abled,” and where I “stand” in relation to all that I see, feel, know, and experience is shot through with those markers of cultural and biological identity.⁹

Perspective, therefore, is never neutral and always partisan.

Why is this important? It is important because there is no such thing as an “omniscient narrator,” any more than there is an “immaculate perception.”¹⁰ I see and interpret meaning with full membership in all of those biological and cultural groups and am rendered partisan because of them.

So are you. So is everyone.

Well, then, how should an understanding of partisanship in perspective inform narrative nonfiction? There are a variety of textual strategies used to identify one’s standpoint, from outright statements such as: “I write as an Asian-American feminist,” to working one’s personal details into the storyline. The point here is less about whether it is preferable to state or envelope the biological and cultural elements of one’s representational perspective into the account and more about what you do with them. Perspectives are like opinions: Because everyone has one, what distinguishes them is their quality. What do they enable? What do they constrain (and is the writer aware of it)? How do these details make the story more credible as well as more interesting?

These reflexive moves help the reader evaluate the interpretations of the author more fully. If we know “who” is writing an account and fully understand her or his position in the world in relation to the subject matter, we are better able to judge the plausibility, utility, and accountability of that interpretation

Robin M. Boylorn provides another writing method for introducing race and gender as an embodied perspective on race and gender in the academy.¹¹ She begins her evocative account with what she calls “A Poetic Beginning”:

Colorblind

Midnight falls into morning

Daylight drifts into day

And it is there

Where now meets eternity

Where Black fades to white

Where every color under the sun touches the sun

That color is insignificant

That you can’t tell where one ends

And the other begins

Here, though

Where I stand

Where I sit

Where I breathe

Where I enter

Here,

Color is everything

It determines worth

Accountability

Fate

me

It labels me

Black

Female

Soul-child

Mysterious

Dark eyed

Beautiful

Brown skinned, girl

In the eyes of the beholder

powerless

vulnerable

helpless

In the eyes of me

“If I know my name,

I know that in the academy,

like in America,

the sister is caught between the rock of racism and the hard place of sexism.”

(pp. 651–652)

Boylorn then provides a transition to her multivoiced account about “institutional racism” that also explains her writing strategy:

Poetry acts as an embodied translation of lived experience. More than poetic prose, poetic ethnography allows for the voices of participants to accurately represent their experience evocatively. While utilizing the sensuousness of poetry, poetic ethnography honors the voices that contribute to the project while allowing the voice of the author to contribute to the discussion without disrupting it.

As the methodology of this text, poetic ethnography proves to be a useful tool for discussing controversial topics such as race because it allows the author and the speaker to be authentic, without alienation.… What follows is an exploration of Self and Other, as I discovered alternative ways of transcribing an interview and an experience. (pp. 652–653)

Robin Boylorn’s novel approach to interpreting interview data allows her to create interest via alternative forms of written expression—poetry, prose, an imagined interview between herself and the published remarks of a black scholar in 1969, her personal experience as a doctoral teaching assistant entering a predominately white classroom, the experiences of other black graduate students, and reflexive passages in which she searches for both unity and difference through the lived experiences of race and gender. By blurring the genres through evocative writing, she maintains reader curiosity and participation in the narrative throughout the story, culminating in a surprising conclusion that I won’t spoil for you here.

Boylorn uses her standpoint to overtly construct perspectives and critique them. Her framing device is the poem that begins the narrative and her explanation of her writing method establis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface: So You Want to Be a Qualitative Researcher Who Tells Interesting Stories?
• Chapter 1: The 5 Rs of Narrative Writing
• Chapter 2: Fingers on the Keyboard Developing Narrative Structures
• Chapter 3: Submitting Narrative Work to Academic Journals and Academic Presses
• Chapter 4: Reading and Evaluating Narrative Scholarship: From Appreciation to Contribution
• Chapter 5: Success in the Academy
• Chapter 6: Success beyond the Academy: Becoming a Public Scholar
• References
• Index
• About the Author