How squirmily embarrassing it is to think about, let alone reveal, what goes on in a writing process, whether creative, critical or confessional. It is an intensely private matter, and, at the same time, darkly and murkily unknown. The reader might want to know, but you, the writer, don’t. It feels a little like being asked to think about your toilet habits, and, thinking about them, to wonder how yours might be like, or unlike, those of someone else (unless, of course, you’re inclined for other reasons to think about these things).

R. S. Thomas, asked once at a poetry reading about what inspired him to write, did not deign to reply. Prompted again, he turned his head and looked out the window. There was a long pause. ‘Surely not,’ he said, eventually. That anecdote may be apocryphal, but if he didn’t actually say it, he could be expected to have said it.

Despite this discomfort, what is common to the production of different forms of writing is perhaps interesting for far less prurient reasons, given what it might reveal about the links between kinds of enquiry and exploration that are seen as separate and often at odds. The ‘creative’ in creative writing, of course, is something of a category nonsense, and serves as an approximate term. ‘Creative non-fiction’ as a genre label perhaps shows most clearly the arbitrary and artificial boundaries the word creates. ‘Creative’ work is work of the imagination (but so, too, is factual work); it is somehow expressive, or uses language of heightened expression (but critical writing can do that, too); it has in common attributes of process (imaginative projection into other lives, imaginative connection between disparate facts), or it contains narrative or other genre-specific structures (but so, too, does writing outside that poorly defined corral put up by the word ‘creative’). In the end, it’s easier to say what is excluded, to say what creative writing is not, though a series of negations makes for a very unsatisfactory definition.

Leaving aside how you might categorise attributes and genres, what about what takes place in the mind when you write poetry and what goes on internally when you write criticism, or literary history?