Miksi minun piti kirjoittaa juuri ruusuista? Autoritaarisuus, autenttisuus ja autoetnografisuus kirjoittamisessa

Johanna Pentikäinen

My essay seeks to discuss the writing process as a very ambivalent object of study, and I aim to use my own experience as a teacher, researcher, and writer in developing the methods for my study. The discourses of creative writing processes produced in classrooms and in textbooks often emphasise certain aspects of the discovering, selecting, producing and editing phases, while language appears as a medium for a set of activities. However, many professional writers have either stated or mentioned that they have a certain need to write or a set of "writing drives" that enforces and leads them to their activity. These driving aspects of motivation and interest are not easily represented in classroom or textbook discourses, due to their unique and particular nature. I have chosen three terms as a starting point for my study: 1) Authority, because all writing needs to face the questions of authority, sometimes in terms of scientific or aesthetic authority, sometimes in terms of what can or cannot be said in a certain context; 2) Authenticity, because both research and fiction writing need a sense of lived experience and/or some references to real life in order to remain vital and expressive, and 3) Autoethnography, because it too uses the experienced reality as its starting point, and manifests how transformation from silence to voicing is the real process in writing. I am studying my ideas by combining autoethnographic and explorative narrative voices, and I use my own prose text ”Why write about Roses” as an example of the construction of the voice.

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