Writing Processes

This week in the honours studio most of the workshop was taken up with a simple, but surprisingly interesting exercise. Each of us (myself included) described a problem we encountered in doing our writing (everyone is working up a 5000 draft of what will hopefully be the opening of their thesis or exegesis). The problems ranged from needing to plan first, difficulties in knowing if what is being written will be relevant, difficulties in being concise or relevant, stylistic repetition, spending too much time proofing and making things right before writing more, confusion about what ends up relevant or included in the exegesis, being over organised so feel like can only write if have large blocks of time, procrastination where always being distracted and only spending a small amount of the time actually writing, having too many ideas at once and not knowing where to start, struggling forever to find a first sentence (and not being able to write until that first sentence is there), and finally needing to find the essence of the writing and struggling through a lot of writing and not liking the writing until this essence begins to emerge.

We then discussed ways to address these problems. What was interesting was that all of us had problems and in the majority of cases these are quite easily addressed by (a) first recognising what lies within or under the problem, and then (b) having a strategy that either addresses or acknowledges that.

For example, needing to plan first is simple, create the plan then write to it. Relevance is a tricky one, but one of the biggest issues is honours is simply developing the discipline of writing, so it is much more valuable to be writing regularly, on stuff in the field (more or less), than not having the discipline of writing at all. For those who try to make things perfect before moving on, free writing can be very useful, both as a tool to get writing, and also to force yourself to let go of being perfect if this keeps slowing you down. For those who have to have everything just so before writing, it seems you are usually hyper organised, or at least into lists and those sorts of things. Here we talked about putting things like ‘doing the dishes’, ‘tidy my desk’, and ‘clean my room’ as things on your list that you get to tick off and do as part of your writing routine. That way instead of sitting down and then deciding you can’t write until the dishes are done, and so on (which becomes deferral and procrastination) this gets incorporated into the writing activity. (Of course it will be interesting to see if other things then pop up that just have to be done before you can start writing.) Some who write then just do other stuff, are what I call ‘burst writers’ (I’m one). For these people it really is a recipe for frustration if things are approached based on time. It is much more productive to set word quantities, for instance ‘write 200 words’ rather than ‘write for 2 hours’. As a burst writer the 200 words come easily, then go off and do all those sorts of things that you do instead of writing for half an hour or so, then do another 200 words. You end up with more words, less stress, and feel more productive. Finally, when there are just too many ideas floating around writing is the only way to actually make sense of things. In my own practice I would move towards hypertext to manage this idea of connectedness and simultaneity, but when not using hypertext generating a list of sub headings (keywords, a word cloud, a brain storm) and then just writing, somewhere between free and structured writing, under each of these, is enough to begin to sculpt.

In all of this I remain fascinated by writing as the site of a particular sort of practice.