The Writing Process



For the last 5 years we’ve had an interesting little experiment here at Dal – the Write Here, In Plain Sight (WHIPS) initiative. Volunteers with substantial writing experience, whether academic, journalistic, or fiction-oriented in nature, produce their material in a fully public way, with everything they do projected for public view. They also talk about what is going on in their heads while they write.

I am always one of the volunteers, and in my case the topic is chosen by the audience. That way I can’t show up with something fully formed in my head. This year they asked me to talk about The Writing Process.

 

I’m hardly the first person to step up to this topic.  For a view about the art of writing, we could do worse than to look to Aristotle and the tradition of rhetoric among the Greeks. In medieval times, rhetoric took second place only to logic in the trivium and it has always been understood as the art and science of persuasion, both oral and written.

This is in contrast with Twitter, Facebook, and even blogging (ahem), which often seems limited to venting (i.e., it’s all abut me). But the word “persuasion” necessarily suggests the involvement of more than one person (i.e., it’s all about someone else and, of course, how my thinking should affect them). The objective of rhetoric is to  influence someone else’s thinking.

Academic writing (and probably all expository writing) intends to be persuasive. So it’s in our collective and individual interest to understand how to be as persuasive as possible, and to develop a deeper understanding about what processes will help to achieve this objective when we write.

The problem with much of our public discussion around writing is that we talk past each other. Part of this ships-passing-in-the-night phenomenon is because we are at different levels of abstraction For example it’s easy to overlook the fact that the phrase “communication skill” means at least five specific sub-skills:  reading, writing, speaking, moving (e.g., gestures, dance), and listening.  And it is easy when we talk about “writing skills” to overlook the many phases and even more specific skills involved.  For example some of the skills of the pre-writing  phase are: 1) “early exploration” (the Wikipedia moment); 2) early concept identification; and 3) early new connection formation.

As part of the WHIPS process, I went to have a look at the literature on writing. It is huge. The number of books about writing (never mind the scholarly articles) runs into the thousands. We had a quick look on Amazon.com for the narrow phrase “how to write” yielding over 6,000 titles. Put in the phrase “the art of writing” without quotations produces over 88,000 books. You’ve got to wonder whether books about writing might even outnumber the books about dieting.

We might have talked about “The Phases of Writing and the Impact on Their Writing Processes” such as 1) pre-writing (i.e., Engaging the topic, Exploring the topic, Research (what is already known), Narrowing the topic / narrowing the approach, Generating initial ideas); 2) writing (i.e., the concept, logic, and first draft processes); 3) the re-writing (editing, reorganizing, getting a second set of eyes, or creating a second set of eyes); and 4) the post-writing (i.e., fact-checking and confirmation, copy editing, submitting). But obviously a lot of other people have already done a lot of work on this front.

It eventually became clear that reviewing that literature and producing a succinct blog on the topic was not in the cards. So I had to settle on writing about the lessons about writing that have come to me through my own experience and reflection.  This is a much smaller document indeed.

The things I’ve learned about writing:

1. Writing continues to be painful for me, partly because I have not yet acted on the lessons I have already “learned” about the art, science and craft. Learning a lesson does not always translate into action, or I’d be a lot fitter than I am now, and would likely drink less. This is known as the “Knowing – Doing Gap” to use Pfeffer and Sutton’s expression. I am not immune.
2. Of course, there is the horror of the blank screen and likely a looming deadline. But it is really painful to discover in the middle of drafting something important that my thinking is:
   • incomplete;
   • inadequate;
   • not well supported by literature, or empirical evidence, or much in the way of evidence of any kind; and,
   • some combination of the above.
3. Writing without thinking is a bad practice. But thinking without writing is also a bad practice, and quite possibly more common among graduate students and faculty.  They have read good material, and they have thought deep thoughts, some of them possibly original ones. The problem is now, at the last minute, they can only remember they had deep thoughts; they just cannot remember the thought itself.  This contributes to the deep pain of writing. The Chinese say it perfectly – the faintest ink lasts longer than the best memory.  So write your thoughts as you find them, when you find them.
4. It can’t be perfect when you write it down. It certainly can’t be perfect right out of the box.  So I have the following four rules on a poster in my office.
   • It can’t be perfect at the beginning. (Lower your expectations so they won’t act as a barrier.)
   • Start anyway. (You can’t improve it until you’ve made a start)
   • Make it better. (It’s not the writing that counts; it’s the rewriting)
   • Then make it good.  (You know what good is.  It speaks to the audience. It makes a point.)
5. There is an elephant in the writing room too, and its name is procrastination. There are answers to this problem. It is MUCH easier to produce a first draft if you have a set of thoughts you have already generated during your exploration, research and reading phase. Once you have a set of thoughts, it is usually not a problem to classify them, and sort them by theme as a kind of pre-draft. Another trick is to recognize when you are procrastinating – I know I'm in touble when my wife finds me cleaning the bathroom.  So get a cheap kitchen timer, and set it to 20 minutes. Give yourself permission to quit after 20 minutes. Chances are you will have writing momentum when the alarm goes.

 

As a list of what I've learned, it's not long. But it's a start.

 

Sunny