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We view novelists as people who work alone through the night typing away at their keyboards while deeply absorbed in thought. Although no novel could be published without the performance of the solitary role of the writer, the publication of a novel involves far more than merely the performance of this one role. Book agents must screen writers’ novels for possible representation by their agency, acquisition editors must screen them for possible publication by their publishing houses, and production editors must prepare them for distribution; therefore, the publication of a novel is a genuine “social act.” Nevertheless, a novel's publication is a distinctively creative social act because it affords greater opportunity than most social acts for people to express their “selves” or, more precisely, “phantom communities,” which are etched from their past “significant social actions.” A novelist's phantom community primarily discloses itself through the “voice” in which she tells her story. Thus, the “voice” that an author uses while writing her novel can provide telltale signs of not only her phantom community, but also of the past significant social actions in which she has and has not participated during the course of her life.

In this chapter, we explore genre-blurring writing, where fiction meets theory, following the argument that texts in management and organisation studies suffer from the ‘textbook syndrome’. The stories that we tell through textbooks not only influence, but also set boundaries for, the way understandings are developed through the eyes of the reader. Often textbooks are written in a way that lead the reader into an idealised linear understanding of an organisation – far from the problems, dilemmas and messy everyday life that managers experience. Our discussion builds on previous literature on writing differently and our own experiences of writing a textbook by involving a professional novelist. Engaging in genre-blurring writing opens up how we think not only about writing, fiction and facts but also in our role as scientists. By situating ourselves, as researchers, at the intersection of fiction and the scientific work, not only new ways of writing, but also of thinking emerge. We discuss three aspects through which fiction challenge and develop our writing and thinking, namely to write with voice, resonance and an open end. Through genre-blurring writing, we create opportunities both to learn and to engage students in learning.

‘IT MIGHT BE SUGGESTED’, wrote George Blake in 1956, introducing the BBC radio‐drama series Annals of Scotland, ‘that Robin Jenkins is potentially the most interesting of the younger Scottish novelists’. Nor has the potential gone unrealized: in October 1969 he received a Scottish Arts Council publication award of £300 for his most recent book, The Holy Tree. On that occasion the Scotsman critic remarked that Jenkins ‘should need less introduction than one feels he does’, and this summarizes the paradox which must for long enough now have been troubling his admirers. Jenkins, besides being a prolific and highly praised novelist, is a remarkably neglected one.

WHY ARE THEY neglected or forgotten, those minor (sometimes nearly major) novelists of the first two decades of this century? They have far more than period interest; some of the novels are, in fact, historical, with a theme shaped by historical events. The novelists were all sound craftswomen, scrupulous and professional, having three excellent, even essential talents: that of telling a tale, that of creating character and presenting it in action and dialogue, and that of indicating background. They none of them wrote to order or in a set pattern to be repeated in the next novel.

“I have come to the conclusion,” a Scottish novelist told me recently, “that no novel is worth reading.” His wife heartily agreed with him. She was quite definite in her preference for a good biography.

IT seems to be the belief of many of our novelists that only through fiction can the truth be told. A practice so rare and commendable as truth‐telling should certainly be encouraged, but unfortunately in its literary aspect the method adopted is not ideal. Fiction and fact are becoming indistinguishable; the one is increasingly masquerading as the other.

ON various occasions librarians have had cause to bemoan the representation of themselves in print. Instances have been quoted to show how low an estimate of our worth novelists have and we usually seize the opportunity to cry aloud, “And in any case, it is not true!” I can not claim that I manage to keep abreast of the tide of modern fiction, I have neither the time, the strength nor the inclination, but I have received one or two impressions as to our present adjudged value. I think that there are three headings under which we might consider the subject. Firstly, does it matter how we are portrayed in fiction? Secondly, are any of the strictures true? Thirdly, what, if anything, can be done to amend the present state of affairs?