In this dissertation, I seek to enact an approach to writing fiction that values self-awareness, analysis of and experimentation with sentence level constructions, and an understanding of how the part (the sentence) reflects and contributes to the whole (the book, the book's meanings). This approach to teaching fiction writing seeks to marry writing pedagogy and literary scholarship skills, usually compartmentalized within the university, in an effort to help support and develop writers as agents of their own creations. Through close analysis of the language of two published young adult novels— Speak and Gossip Girl—against my own novel-in-progress, Edge of Seventeen, I attempt to model a new kind of creative process that incorporates both intuitive, or “mystical,” approaches to writing (which creative writing pedagogy commonly invokes) and more “scientific” approaches typical to composition studies (in which analyzing the writing process suggests that a quantifiably map-able formula exists).

My bridge between these is literary critical practice, but instead of engaging in this criticism using the traditional, static “elements,” I engaged in it using categories of my own invention, developed in relation to my artistic goals and values. My methods demonstrate how a writer might draw on other texts to help her develop a more reflective and experimental writing process, and how revision might involve play between unconscious experimentation, conscious reflection on the rhetorical effects of one's writing, and a conscious articulation and re-articulation of goals and artistic problems.

Articulating artistic problems that arise from a writer's work and real concerns is necessary, so that one's writing can arise from and grow out of a sense of investigation, of purpose. I show how reading as a writer means foregrounding one's writing concerns and developing one's own language, which comes out of these concerns. In moving away from the recipes of creative writing how-to-books as well as the hands-off mystical approach to creative writing, I model ways of looking closely at others' texts and one's own text-in-progress, in order to develop one's own writing goals—to help creative writers see, then do.