The index post for this series contains a list of the topics I intend to address. I’ve added to the list during the first two posts of the series, immediately turning ‘fringe thoughts’ into new items I want to address. I’ve changed the titles as my understanding of the topics has deepened. But I’ve also rearranged the order of the list a number of times because the sequence in which I’m writing the posts has no connection whatsoever to the sequence in which I formed the ideas. It’s a small point but I think it’s an important one to stress. I’m choosing which post to write based on which one I feel like writing at any possible moment, rather than working with a sense that I should approach them in a particular way.
Even though I tend to write (and think, worryingly) in blog post sized chunks, I’ll move between these over the course of a writing day. If it’s going well then I’ll reliably complete around 1000-1500 words in one sitting before I move onto something else after I’ve had a break. If it’s going less well, I’ll jump around multiple sections of an article* or a chapter until I start to notice the signs that I’m running out of steam. The more fragmented this jumping around becomes, such that I’m adding a few sentences at random places rather than writing in full paragraphs, the greater a sign I need a break. If I notice that my writing has this quality for a few days in a row, then I’ll either switch to a different project or give myself a sustained break from writing. I’ll rarely take a break from blogging during this time, in part because the pressure-free experience of writing here will often lure me back into a lighter and more enjoyable state of writing in my day job.
This might sound chaotic. It certainly can be. It goes some way to explaining why I struggle with journal articles, as described below. But if you trust the process, order will reliably emerge from it. By writing what you feel like writing at any possible moment, you’re doing two things: (1) not placing arbitrary restrictions on the content which curtails flow states (2) tracing out connections within your text that might not be immediately obvious to you. There’s a section in Carl Rogers which has always stayed with as an account of the latter process:
Another example in a very specific area is given by a client in a follow-up interview as he explains the different quality that has come about in his creative work. It used to be that he tried to be orderly. “You begin at the beginning and you progress regularly through to the end.” Now he is aware that the process in himself is different. “When I’m working on an idea, the whole idea develops like the latent image coming out when you develop a photograph. It doesn’t start at one edge and fill in over to the other. It comes in all over. At first all you see is the hazy outine, and you wonder what it’s going to be; and then gradually something fits here and something fits there, and pretty soon it all becomes clear – all at once.”
Carl Rogers – On Becoming a Person Pg 152
My experience is that if you stay with the process, the hazy outline does indeed turn into a meaningful whole. There’s a (depressing) point where you have to change mode, where creative writing becomes strategic editing. But until that stage you can wander all over the text, sketching out parts of a still unknown totality in the expectation that if you keep immersing yourself in the process, something coherent will result from it. That at least is my experience. As I’ll write in a future post, I think writers either plan first or write first. If you fall into the former category, this clearly isn’t going to work for you. But if you think-through-writing, as I do, then I suggest radically embracing this if you haven’t already tried it. Keep running with it and see what happens.
*The fact there’s less flexibility about genre for a journal article is one of many reasons I dislike writing them. It’s harder to jump around in the way I’m suggesting, at least without fatally damaging the coherency of the paper. If It wasn’t a requirement of my job, I wouldn’t write journal articles, whereas I would write books and chapters even if it was just a hobby. As indeed it is really when I seriously think about it.
Mark Carrigan 