Abstract
Academic writing, especially from the STEM disciplines, is often invested with greater epistemological value than creative writing (Noakes, 2024). In scientific experiments, laboratory notes taken during research processes are rewritten into research papers later (Swales, 1990). These papers may reimagine or even reverse the real processes that produced them (Swales, 1990), editing out mistakes and dead ends, and placing conclusions in abstracts and introductions (Livant, 2012). Sempert et al. (2017) argue that in creative writing research, the writing itself is both the research process and product. Creative writing, with its evasions, conflicts, complexity, and delayed conclusions, better represents the research process because it is not a re-presentation at all, but a presentation. As process and product, knowledge in creative writing is both coming and already arrived. By drawing on Derrida’s (1994) concept of hauntology, we can see that knowledge in creative writing, which is between becoming and being, is increasingly spectral. The spectrality of this knowledge points to the ways that all knowledge is unstable, provisional, and haunting. By doing research performatively and problematising knowledge production, creative writing is more ‘true’ than scientific writing.