A former colleague, an experienced doctoral supervisor, would always advise his students that crafting a thesis was not unlike creating a sculpture. The task is to write freely and once a mass of words have been slewed onto the page, edit them into the desired shape. Writing involves chipping away – sometimes in chunks at other times in tiny tweaks until the angel in your writing appears.
It’s not unlike the process of changing an unstructured interview into a narrative portrait. I was writing the research methodology section of a research paper – to explain how and why the project moved from interviews to portraits. And here it was. We read the transcripts through the lens of a simple linear narrative plot – driver, pivot and settlement – and wove them together to remake a whole. Our task was to listen for rather than to a story and represent (using the subjects own words) the interview as a narrate portrait.
The first treatment – the unstructured interview is richly textured. Every contour of a life is explained in slow deliberate detail. The experience jumps from the page. It is as if you were there.
The final treatment is different. It is clearer. It identifies the defining features and abstracts them. It’s finely crafted. The narrative portrait has a delicacy, a precariousness, and a simplicity. What emerges is both familiar and exotic.
In creating an aesthetic whole narrative portraits blend empirical choices and aesthetic sensibilities; we seek to capture insights and emotion. we develop narratives that both inform and inspire. It synthesises several processes: a) identifying an overall gestalt that frames, focusses and energies the narrative – the driver b) a scaffold that structures the narrative, moves the action and binds the story together – the pivot c) the aesthetic sequencing that provide coherence and unity – a resolution. (Lawrence-Lightfoot, & Davis, 1997, 259)
Lawrence-Lightfoot, S., & Davis, J. H. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. Jossey-Bass.
woman-in-flight 