Standing in the pre-formative: snippets of creative processes in writing movements

In this paper, a group of writers from the University of Edinburgh experiments with the pre-formative as that which stands in opposition to the planned performance that the AcademicConferenceMachine fosters, encourages and demands. In the space opened up by the pre-formative, writing becomes an unindividuated improvisation rather than a finished piece performed by the autonomous individual. Bringing together processual snippets from the group members, in this paper we follow the struggle for words to land on the page. This stage of writing, whilst generally hidden because of its lacking of form, here becomes space of creative possibility and resistance. The snippets presented in this paper show the richness and potential that ordinary, minor movements can have both for the fostering of intimacies that trouble authorial individuality and for the resistance that they produce against the regulating and standardizing tendencies of the AcademicConferenceMachine.