Archives for April 2023

I posted a version of this on a blog long since defunct. Some readers found it useful, so here is a lightly modified version.

A few months ago a conversation with my dad helped me to think differently about managing work—the projects, the teaching, the writing, the research, and all of the administration that goes along with that.

I grew up on a farm (drive-by picture below), and was curious as to how he has been able keep track of all the things going on over the years—planting crops, harvesting crops, managing livestock, having employees, conducting maintenance, taking on additional tasks when my grandfather (the other main set of hands) is away, etc. It’s often the case that several these things can be happening at the same time.

When I asked about this, the response amounted to, “well, you get to see what’s going on every day, so it’s pretty hard to miss things”. That was a lightbulb moment.

There is serious efficiency to be found in passive visibility of the lay of the land, and the low-friction feedback that goes with that. For that reason, seeing the farm has become a useful metaphor for evaluating the way I go about my own day-to-day efforts.

Basically, if I can’t take a quick drive down the paddock, glance around, and know what’s what, I need to find a way to make the right things more visible.

This material was once published on a blog that has since perished. I revisited these ideas while planning a workshop recently, and this seemed like a good place to keep them from disappearing into the ether of my hard drive.

These notes accompany a short workshop on creative reading and writing in any field.

Reading and writing go hand in hand, because when we get down to it, what we’re really talking about is creative work as an expression of meaning-making.

In this workshop, the word creative applies to any writing endeavour in which the process of writing (and the outcomes produced) is one of many legitimate possibilities. There are infinite ways to put together a book, a blog post, a business plan, an email, a set of workshop notes, etc.

Creative work is about meaning-making

The first and most important point is that the basic task we’re dealing with is one of connecting and expressing meanings.

The things we read and write have meaning in relation to other things. Recognisable practices are established when groups of things come together in relatively consistent ways. This is why, if I asked you to describe a traditional school classroom, your response would likely bear some similarity to others.

Practices provide a context for our work. We don’t generally write academic papers using slang, because the literary practice that has built up around academia tends to lean towards more formal expression.

So, when we read or write something, it always has meaning in relation to other things. This set of expectations is what sets up a genre.

Concepts and text are different things

What a text is about is not the same thing as the physical form taken by the text.

For a famous example that illustrates this point, see Magritte’s The Treachery of Images.

There’s a whole world of meaning associated with any passage that includes meanings which aren’t written down. This has to do with the fact that meanings are relational, and co-constructed between readers and the world around them. Put another way, the meaning we perceive in a given moment is not exclusively that of a text, but of that text in relation to other things (e.g. our prior experiences).

The point is that we can’t usually put down a perfect picture of these worlds of meaning. More to the point, we might not want to!

Some brief points on process

How will you say (that is, make) something worthwhile?

Firstly, the point that process matters more than immediate outcomes has been exhaustively discussed. Trying to write something perfect every time is a fool’s errand; better to write the bad stuff and move on.

Related to the previous point, writing is closely bound up with thinking (or perhaps more precisely, being). It is a human enterprise, in the sense that we are the instruments of our work. Therefore, general good advice about managing human biology in the current day and age is largely applicable. How you deal with sources of both distraction and inspiration will have a direct effect on what you produce.

Writing as experimentation

Writing is always to some degree experimental. As mentioned at the beginning, this is the essence of creative work, in the sense that we are talking about it here (there is more than one possibly worthwhile result).

How you set up your experiment will influence the results. More specifically, how you organise the interaction of your written meanings influences what happens within your writing process, over minutes, hours, days, months, and years.

There are many strategies to be considered here. The point is to experiment and reflect.

Note that the writing experiment you set up and the text you eventually send into the world are not the same thing. As mentioned at the beginning, practices provide contexts that set the terms of engagement for texts we publish (publish = send out into the world), but our writing experiments do not usually have to account for the same rules.

Evaluation enables development

To know what you’ve created you need something to compare it to. To develop in a meaningful direction, you need to know how to compare it. This is where finding a teacher or some sort of instructional resource is an abundantly useful complement to what you can achieve on your own.

If you are engaging with text for some sort of creative reason, it usually means making some sort of evaluation, even if this is left implicit.

There are two distinct angles on this:

1. How good is whatever you’re looking at, why, and does it matter?

2. What does it mean for you?

The first question helps us to understand quality, and how our own works stacks up. The second question has an important bearing on how we make use of what we’ve just read, so that we can make something worthwhile of our own.

Seeing past the text

The point was previously made that the world of meaning associated with a text is only partially captured by the text itself—much remains unsaid and/or implied. How, then, can we thoughtfully engage with what is going on at this deeper level?

Our friends in linguistics help us to see that there are three dimensions always in play here.

·  Field—how are you (or the author) articulating what is relevant to the context of the practice you are writing in or about?

·  Tenor—what is the tone of voice of the writing?

·  Mode—how is the text organised structurally?

This framework is particularly useful for solving problems in our own writing, and understanding feedback from others. In particular, it is usually productive to ask how the expression of field/tenor/mode in our own writing aligns or contrasts with the expectations of the practice in which we are situated.

Bonus points

Modality matters, but it’s not the most important thing—great text has been written by hand, etched, typed, dictated, and more.

Distance helps analysis. Because we make meaning in the moment, waiting for a different moment sometimes produces different insights about our work (and the work of others).

The sunk cost fallacy applies. Find ways to allow for major changes and/or complete re-writes. Frequent version archiving is one way to deal with this. The feeling of always being able to go back is surprisingly liberating.

Assessment works, in part, by proposing that the quality of some piece of work can be described on a continuum—some version of ‘good’ at one end, and some version of ‘fail’ at the other.

What could it mean to grade in the ‘middle’ instead? The objective might not be to maximise quality. Instead, the focus could be on something like ‘harmony’ or ‘balance’ or ‘unity’.

This is quite a different way of thinking about evaluation. There is an implicit assumption, usually, that things on the ‘good’ end of the spectrum tend to exhibit some sort of balance, but grading models tend not to emphasise this—the valuable middle ground is subordinate to the overall emphasis on quality.

What might be the effect of putting the emphasis on quality of balance instead?

---

*This line of thought was inspired a little by some time spent recently reviewing the Nichomachean Ethics—Aristotle seems to like the idea of middle-ness.

**A later thought: Perhaps an Aristotelian take on learning would put the emphasis on ‘getting to the middle’, as a kind of guiding principle?

Earlier this week I ran a writing seminar with a small class of fourth-year university students who are working on research theses—the focus was on navigating the middle part of a project.

The aim of the seminar was to squarely address the following point: writing projects involve a kind of managerial balancing act, in which it is easy to conflate management of the product (e.g. the students’ research theses) with management of the person authoring that product.

The person is full of thoughts and feelings in a way that the product usually isn’t. Knowing how to put together a text (an essay, a book, a song, a letter, etc.) is not the same as knowing how to be during that process. Part of the challenge is knowing how to improve the work, the other part is knowing how to relate to the work as a creative person.

When we are in the middle of a project, part of the job involves making some sort of judgment about what we have produced so far. Because we can only do this in real time, our capacity to notice relevant details is quite important. The important detail, it seems to me, is this: When we appraise a piece of work, there is not an equal chance of any thought occurring, so at least part of the challenge is stacking the deck* (aka life experience) in advance. This isn’t really something that can be effectively crammed in the short term, but it can certainly be cultivated over time, since our intuition is always looking for things to remember.

Since intuition is an unavoidable conduit for the sorts of judgment we apply when revising work, it seems worthwhile to think through the quality of intuition we bring to the revisionary table. I’m usually mystified when people talk about ‘trying too hard’, but in this case I think it is a useful turn of phrase. Finding a way to achieve a passive focus during revision seems useful for engaging with technical issues without needing to have an exact technical remedy in the moment. I suspect that this explains the circling and underlining and bracketing that seems to happen organically when we work with pen and paper. These markings prime intuition in a very useful way, by flagging relevant details without putting the burden of expectation of an immediate, precise solution.

The last step is to review the marked up document, and the same passive-presence-of-mind trick can work here too. If environmental distractions can be avoided (smart phones, etc.), just sitting with a marked up set of revisionary inklings and blank piece of paper can yield bizarrely effortless results.

*Natalie Goldberg calls this composting (see Writing Down the Bones)