This manifesto is an exploration of my impetus for writing, a documentation of my ongoing engagement with developing craft, and a statement of my values and hopes. When I put fingertips to keys, I am trying to extract an idea from my mind in its purest form. My goal is to be primarily guided by instinct, and to refine the raw product in later stages of production. Herein I discuss a variety of concepts and works, including writing with altered states of consciousness, and writing without ‘knowing’—this takes many forms. I focus on themes of queerness, self-indulgence, and reality/unreality; while I enjoy and write genre fiction including romance, sci-fi, and fantasy, my current occupation is with creative non-fiction.
In developing this folio, and continuing with other works at the end of my second year as an ‘official’ writer, I’ve arrived at a point where I feel I have enough experience to break the rules. In deciding on a theme myself and exploring new methods, informed but not dictated by the work of fellow writers, I’ve created an independent avenue of creativity and expression for myself. It’s an empowering feeling, and here I explore the reasons behind decisions I made during the writing process. Some things didn’t make sense to my peers—I fixed some, but left others according to my vision—and some things resonated with them; either way, it’s ultimately about how I personally feel about my work. That’s why I’ve made every decision I have in this folio, and how I want to go forward.
E.L Doctorow, American professor and writer, said that it was ‘crass exhibitionism’ to write a book in less than a year (Doctorow & Plimpton, 1986, p. 26). I wonder what he would have thought of my tendency to write thousands of words in a few hours, and then not at all for weeks. Why yes, it is almost midnight, Edgar.
I have always worked in short but intense bursts, when a deadline looms or inspiration strikes. It can come in the form of an image I feel compelled to capture, a character that appears out of the aether and charms me, or yet still an emotion that I desperately need to convey to others. Regardless of the spark, I write from it in an explorative process, which Doctorow describes as ‘put[ting] [one]self in the position of writing to find out what [one] [i]s writing’ (ibid: 28). This is where our beliefs align, as we both see in this intuitive process an ability to access some kind of greater consciousness, a ‘larger mind’ (ibid: 29), otherwise untouchable with a precise and intentional approach.
But what if the methodical approach is designed to facilitate an organic writing flow? Maria Abramović formed and publicised a method for artists to alter their conscious states, inspired by Tibetan and Chinese medicine, meditation, and ‘transitory objects’ connecting the body to the earth (Marina Abramović Institute, ca. 2018, NP). The process involves ‘physical conditioning and preparation which can get the body into the state that makes it possible to become a portal’, an embodied gate to different times and dimensions (Abramović, 2021, p. 47). My experience with altered consciousnesses and writing has previously been unintentional—the result of staying up to hit deadlines, but I have always known that there is a magic to the late hours.
On those nights, one feels connected to one’s past self, experiencing every previous late night. In such a liminal space, where you’ve been so many times, there can be a slippage between times—if it wasn’t for the date in the corner of the screen, it could be any previous night, or future night. The writer is freed from time, and circumstances: free to explore thoughts, and ideas, and feelings. Words flow without the inhibition of the critical, fully aware mind.
When I set out to create a folio of works documenting and writing real dreams that I have had into narrative experiences for a reader, Abramović’s method spoke to me. Rather than crystals and meditation, I was reminded of sleep deprivation, and so I employed this as a tool. Both staying up late and interrupting my sleep cycle were employed for different pieces respectively, and I felt this allowed me to tap into the true feeling of dreaming. Dreaming, which is a space of infinite possibilities. To make two specific references, I slept for a few hours before waking up from an alarm to write ‘orange’, and stayed up hours past my usual bedtime to write ‘would I’. Both instances fostered within me a drive to continue following a narrative thread as it unravelled, without regard for small matters like specific word choice or phrasing.
Julienne van Loon (2023), in A to Z of Creative Writing Methods, defines ‘not-knowing’ as a desirable and effective tool in generating new knowledge and art. In contrast to traditional conceptions of research, van Loon proposes that ‘not-knowing as method privileges ways of doing research that recognise and value uncertainty, play and experimentation’ (van Loon, 2023 p. 115, emphasis in original). She draws on Doctorow’s description of writing as ‘like driving at night in the fog’ (ibid: 114), and reframes his suggestion to emphasise the idea that writers can possess wisdom that guides them through creating literature, yet not be able to access this knowledge without trusting the process.
I have been lucky enough to partake in weekly sudden writing workshops, with prompts provided by insightful and established authors and poets, for a number of weeks. The inexplicable wonder of embracing not-knowing, and following each word with another that suits it in an ever-evolving cascade of thoughts has secured my affection. In attending and responding to these prompts in real-time alongside other writers, I have been able to bare my heart and learn what my own intuition can accomplish. Much of the work I produce, despite no prior planning, no, because of that, has been among the best flash fiction I’ve made. It embraces the moment, the whim, and therefore is honest and fresh.
But the creative and instinctive process doesn’t have to begin with a pen to paper, or a cursor flashing on an empty page. In ‘Agnostic Thinking’ (2008 NP), Jennifer Webb and Donna Lee Brien establish a precedent that the end goal of a creative project is ‘unknowable … [and] it is important to have “agnostic” systems’ of research within which such an unpredictable result can be allowed to form. I would go a step further and say that research is inextricably linked with creativity, and that’s not a unique idea.
Linda Candy (2011) discusses this when she says that what traditionally separated research from creative practice—‘add[ing] knowledge where it did not exist before’ (ibid: p. 33)—is gradually being rejected in favour of accepting a ‘form of research founded in creative practice’ (ibid: p. 34). The researcher follows clues and reoccurring ideas in pursuit of new knowledge, and in combining and collating primary and secondary sources within their mind, become in themselves a newly formed tertiary source.
Everyone that reads a piece of writing may, or will, interpret it in their own unique way. This applies to factual information found during research, too. The new knowledge that is created in linking discovered materials together, and forming original conceptions, is a creative artefact.
An aspect of writing that I haven’t discussed yet, but that it is integral to understand, is how vulnerable a writer has to be. It’s something that I have had to come to grips with. The only way to move forward—to write, to share, to publish—is to accept one’s own imperfection and the imperfection of everything one creates. It’s scary to share work that is, on some level, representative of you and your skill, because it won’t work for everyone; it might not work at all.
Jenny Helin (2019) addresses this, referencing her own difficulties as a writer, when she writes that she has ‘stumbl[ed] around conscious of what the words look like on paper and the writing never really takes off’ (ibid: p. 95). Specifically, as one method of overcoming this, Helin embraces the inhibition of dreams, in which the dream ‘takes over’ (ibid: p. 95) and simply does instead of hesitating.
I would have never thought of any of my stories, were it not for vulnerability. Very directly, dreams one through four were written in a process that Helin describes similarly (ibid: 96): writing as soon as I wake up, all of the details that I can remember. Dreams like ‘please’ and ‘stitches’ left me feeling terrified and helpless, where ‘orange’ and ‘sunset’ left me flustered and wistful. They were created by the unconscious process of my unawake mind, and I would not have ever had the impetus to write them without that commandeering of my processes.
I honour this uncalculated, raw dreaming in the reoccurring incoherence of elements within dreams one to four. The primary stylistic evidence of this is in the fractured details and emotions of the half-censored transitional sections of my writing; it provides the reader with a similarly non-linear experience of the dreams, there is no concrete beginning or end, but a fading and imperfect awareness. In addition to this, the narratorial voice has access to facts that they shouldn’t: the blinded protagonist of ‘please’ knows who is in the room with her, and the protagonist of ‘sunset’ has an inherent feeling of Nicole’s name. These details are not intended to be explained, or evidential, as they are simply ‘beamed into’ the head of the dreamer—there is no sensory evidence, just a fact impressed upon the mind with no rhyme or reason. This is both how I experienced the dreams, and coherent with the idea of surrendering to the writing in the form it emerges.
Dreams force the writer to surrender to their senses, hearts, and minds. In the same way, my process for my final two dreams, ‘plans’ and ‘would I’ involved surrendering: surrendering my agency, and surrendering to my feelings. Firstly, regarding the former piece, Stephen Carlton (2023) directed my method with his article, ‘Observation’.
In ‘Observation’, Carlton (2023) describes a process in which he goes to an unfamiliar place to ‘notice and absorb’ (ibid: p. 120) its characters, characteristics, and rituals, to guide his in-progress writing. I took inspiration from this, and sat at Alley Tunes Records, the morning of the fourteenth of May, 2025. I took notes on the discussions and behaviours of the people around me, and from this, ‘ma[de] strange of the everyday world so that, through observation [I] might recreate it as … theatrical space’ (ibid). I took direction from the dialogue I overheard, and the attitude with which people regarded each other, and told a story: as well as I could, I wrote ‘plans’ to follow the narrative thread I was presented with, and not to deviate according to my own whims. In the end, I think it helped me capture an honesty and genuine-feeling in its dialogue and interpersonal relationships—exactly the aspects I had been listening for.
In ‘would I’, I surrender vulnerable thoughts, in their raw, self-hating, sobbing, wishful reality. These are the feelings that I’ve shared with my closest family members and friends, a group likely numbering under six people, and rarely with this level of honesty. To put them to virtual paper, I rendered those emotions into the form of a dream, titling it with the archaic phrasing ‘would I’, as seen in works Shakespeare’s works: ‘would I were dead, if God’s good will were so; For what is in this world but grief and woe?’ (Shakespeare ca. 1693, 2.5:19–20). This is phrase is analogous to ‘wish’, and thereby ‘dream’, but brings a gravity to the situation, grounded within a long history of human experiences and emotions: I deem this appropriate for emotions that are so monumental for many infertile women’s lives—trans, or cis. The title is also a question, to which the last line, ‘I would’ is an answer.
Writing ‘would I’ in a collection of dreams is appropriate when considering the full meaning of the word, as is the case for ‘plans’. The term encompasses, among other things, ‘images or ideas present in the mind during sleep’, ‘a hope that gives one inspiration; an aim’, and ‘a wild or vain fancy’ (Butler 2017 NP). It hurts to categorise ‘would I’ under the latter definition, but it is objectively true, and the point of the piece in itself: I acknowledge this in the breakdown of formal narrative voice and grammatical construction in the end of the piece. I give up my dream, for the moment, and with it all formality and polite pretences.
To reference Helin (2019) one final time: she suggests that the ‘industrialized need for closure’ (ibid: 97)—and here she references Shantel Martinez—‘actually leaves the student in-complete, partial of an education’ (Martinez 2013, p. 7) as it standardises and sanitises an author’s ideas into a conventionally ‘palatable’ form. So, as Helin says that dreams do, I will finish this manifesto ‘without repetitive clarifications and conclusions’ (2019, p. 97).
