My friend Fred shared a great metaphor with me this morning. The words subject and object get bandied around a bit, but both of these words point to a common premise: in life, we’re very often defining some thing to study.

To make sense of things we use theories—sometimes we choose them, and other times they foist themselves upon us intuitively. It is useful, I think, to see theory as a bit of a choose-your-own adventure. It’s possible (desirable, even) to find different ways to look at the same thing: theories are basically different windows into the same interior scene.

I was talking to some students recently about knowing when to move on from a writing project; when to send something out to readers. I think we all have some sense of self-consciousness when we look back at our own work, especially if we’re deciding to send it into the world somewhere—it can be a bit like that weird feeling you get when you hear a recording of your own voice.

How does one distinguish between healthy self-critique and unhelpful, self-deprecating judgment? I’ve started to think about this in terms of ‘ick’ and investment.

‘Ick’ is that intuitive sense that something just isn’t right—like taking a sip of very mildly off milk: That’s what I feel when I know the work is fine, but just isn’t as good as it could be. My ‘ick’ radar helps me to know when the revisions are finished.

Investment is a bit a different—I think of this as the thing I feel when I say or write something a little too real for comfort, and reveal something about myself in the process. Conflating ‘ick’ with investment makes it much harder to send something out into the world.

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?

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*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?