Generative writing

I need to plan and map how I'm going to get my draft thesis to my supervisors by July.

Will I?
Really?
Er how?

Murray advises moving on from generative writing. Generative writing which is one step further from free writing. It's writing without stopping, writing on a particular topic, writing for someone to read. And hurrah! Isn't that what I've been doing for this blog?

I don't know who you are reading it - only the occasional comment from readers who post, or perhaps in the OU who tell me they read it. Thank you because you being there has given me someone to generate writing for a la Rowena Murray. Last year my blog generated over 45,000 words. Now I have to generate enough writing for my thesis - around 80,000 words.

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MURRAY, R. (2002) How to write a thesis, Buckingham ; Philadelphia, Open University Press.

Glum: how it feels not to be able to write

Write about how it feels not to be able to write. Scott Berkun says:

It’s sneaky, but damn, it works. The voice in our heads is always saying something, so get it down. Writer-weenies call this free writing, implying something unfortunate about other kinds of writing, but I find it easier to think of as listening. Imagine yourself as a recording device, writing down the radio broadcast of some other person who happens to live in your head. If you think this is weird, write about why it’s weird (See: you can’t win. There’s always a way). Eventually your mind will hit thoughts on the topic itself and, presto, you’re on your way.

But when I write badly, then I feel glum. When my supervisors say they can't understand what I've written, then I feel glum. It's not, not writing that's my problem. It's writing badly. It's not that I don't get the apostrophes in the right place, or split infinitives or misspell. It's writing the right content in the right way to say what I mean and say it so that readers understand, and so that readers find it interesting.

Glum.

Free writing

I'm always writing blocked - anything seems more important, but there's a fun blog at One Minute Writer that gets at least a minute's worth of writing out of you - perhaps a better transition activity (what you do between doing things that you should be doing) than jigzone or playing cards.

However, as I wrote a month ago I need to write as inquiry so I need a load of prompts that are relevant to what I'm researching, like:

• engagement,
• knowledge management,
• Foucauldian analyses,
• trust,
• power
• transaction costs,
• collaboration.
• social capital
• communities of practice
• intellectual capital
  

But I don't have relevant prompts that are also easy to write freely about.

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Transition activity: what you do between doing things that you should be doing

Writing as inquiry: an experiential workshop

The last session I got to at BAM was on writing, run by Daniel Doherty. It was called an experiential workshop, which seems a bit of a tautology to me, as I assume that workshops will involve gaining a bit of experience - hence the work bit of workshop. He started by quoting

"How can I know what I think until I read what I write"

or something like that, perhaps from Richardson. I understand this and that's why I need to talk to people about my research because otherwise I don't know what I'm thinking. I don't know what I'm thinking until I hear what I say.

Then he gave us a 10-minute free writing exercise with a starter of

"My writing garden of Eden is when ..."

Free writing is when you just write, and keep writing for a predetermined time, disregarding spelling, grammar, punctuation and legibility. You write, even if you get stuck and have to write, "I'm stuck, stuck, stuck and don't know what to write, and why is everyone else writing so much and I'm just dribbling on and on and on".

After ten minutes, we stopped and discussed. I've never read my writing out to people before and no one else in there had done free writing before. I think the exercise surprised some of us. Some were initially shy, but eventually more of us volunteered to read our work. It revealed an insecurity that seemed surprising for such competent academics. They described earlier experiences of literature and teacher expectations. One said that at school she'd been reading a novel, when a teacher told her:

"You won't need novels where you're going!"

Another, going through some difficult times at home was reading "Grapes of Wrath" and realised that it spoke to him, despite being decades earlier in the 1930s, resounded with his experiences of mines closing and unemployment in his town in the 1980s.

We had a few minutes for another exercise, starting from

"As I write my physical/emotional responses..."

I found this harder, perhaps because I couldn't visualise in the same way as with the first starter, but also when we read back, I discovered that people responded better depending on their styles. One wrote how the feel of the pencil and its sound going over the paper mattered. And that initiated some discussion on preferences for hand writing or typing at the computer. There's advice here on using the computer for free writing.

Dan gave us what he promised - an experiential workshop.

Perhaps readers of this blog could try their own 10 minute responses to these two prompts. I'll put mine up another day.

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(Laurel Richardson and Elizabeth St. Pierre). 2005. Pp. 959-978 in Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Third Edition).
Also see Richardson's book here.