#AmWriting : how authors negotiate their individual creative labour on social media

Abstract

In this participatory arts-based research project, I tasked four poetry and fiction writers, with a creative project to determine how the individual nature of the author’s creative labour is negotiated on social media—participatory spaces where the reader is in direct contact with the text’s creator. I examined the author’s social-media posts from the creative projects in conjunction with qualitative interviews with the authors conducted at the project’s onset and completion to illuminate their own understanding of their identity and labour in the digital-culture era. The data, analyzed through a thematic coding scheme based on Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” (1967), was presented in conversation with other sources including Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” (1998) to reveal how the print-based writing process evolves to accommodate the reader’s input on an interactive platform. When the authors focused on the generative stage of writing by incorporating reader feedback and providing direct access to the writer’s many citations of their artistic research, the reader has unprecedented access engage with and even participate in the author’s creative practice. The research provides a unique perspective into how authors can preserve their creative practice despite increasing market and economic pressures in the literary arts and publishing sector.