Tricky Writing: Using the Trickster as a Model for Writing Innovative Anthropogenic Fiction


Tricky Writing: Using the Trickster as a Model for Writing Innovative Anthropogenic Fiction


This presentation focusses on a Creative Writing research investigation that examined creative practice and how it led to a written product, a novel, as well as an exegesis that critically reflects upon that practice. The research investigation combines multiple areas of study, including practice-led research, the trickster archetype and eco-fiction/criticism, to create a wholly original approach to creative writing where the figurative adoption of trickster qualities can lead to creative and innovative forms of anthropogenic storytelling.

This project therefore involves creating a unique methodology dubbed the ‘trickster methodology.’ This methodology combines elements of practice-led research with trickster qualities (slippery, subversive, disruptive, unstable, creator, destroyer, ambiguous) by identifying four qualities that are particularly relevant to creative writers: shapeshifting, playfulness, chance, and order. The trickster methodology provides writers with a way to take advantage of the trickster’s greatest strengths, using adaptation, change, or the replacement of a system to initiate movement towards a new reality. At a time of major ecological uncertainty, the trickster writer can reopen these systems to their own internal power so that innovative, imaginative, and creative alternatives can be presented. 

Part of this research investigation draws upon a series of interviews conducted with Australian authors of anthropogenic fiction to articulate how these qualities surfaced within the writers creative practice organically, and how a creative practitioner could intentionally engage with these qualities as a way to challenge themselves to do or make differently while also exploring new ways of representing and experiencing ecological issues within fiction.