There is something strange in the back of my mind. My pen hovers above the paper. The clock ticks away. There was something I wanted to say. But my words don’t seem to come out.

“Forced. Cannot produce. Nothing to write. Concentrate. Slow. Not enough. Short. Write. Why. What. No sense. Not concrete.”

There is nothing useful here. Where did it go?

Spooks and How to Exorcise Them is a practice-based research about inhibitors to the creative process in the Creative Writing class: How to find them, why they might occur and what we can do to overcome or prevent them. The need for this graduation project came from the experience of teaching Creative Writing to students of Fine Arts over the span of three years: While most students were able to evolve in writing as a form of expression, a few showed signs of mental blocks, or motivational inhibition.

In this research I tried to find out what is possible as a teacher that wants all of their students to succeed. What measures can I take when facing these problems and where exactly do they originate. I positioned the research within process-based writing pedagogy: To look at writing not just as the product, the written end-result, but as a process. A process that has an origin and trajectory, mostly invisible and often difficult to entangle.

Following the psychoanalytical paradigm of identifying and then communicating inhibitors to the student in order to dissolve them, I devised a method based on Gabriele Rico’s established pre-writing exercise “Clustering” named “Cluster Pattern Analysis:” By comparing Clusters to the texts produced from them, the research found and described several inhibitions, I called “Spooks”. In order to fully understand the problem, I also ventured into understanding the workings of the writer’s mind and finally came up with a series of individual responses to the individual Spooks that haunted my students.

External critic: Jürgen vom Scheidt (Psychologist and Lecturer at IAK Institut fur Angewandte Kreativitätspsychologie, München)