In dialogue with fiction on the craft of transforming life into a research text: A collaborative writing strategy when you are alone

This paper describes a collaborative writing strategy when you are alone. It is the story of how I came to bring Phineas, the protagonist in A.S. Byatt’s A Biographer’s Tale (2001), into my writing process as a third voice in my dialogue with my data. It is a self-reflective “messy text” (Denzin, 1997, p. 225) that shows how co-writers are always present, even when you might feel that you are writing all alone.
In A Biographer’s Tale, the academic Phineas renounces his post-structural dissertation project in literature to search for “things” and “facts”. He decides to write a biography. However, Phineas discovers that “facts” are slippery and not easily “pieced together”. Phineas writes about his struggles, and so do I. Through co-writing with Phineas, I gradually found a voice of experience, which helped me to transforming my ethnographic data into research texts.