Last week I led a workshop with a group of PhD and Masters candidates at the University of Queensland—the theme was: How to find your (academic) writing mojo.
Instead of a slide deck, I prepared a double-sided A4 handout with key ideas to anchor the discussion; one side addressed the more philosophical aspect of writing, and the other had a more practical slant.
Both sides are copied below.
The short answer
- Decide to be a writer (the audacity!).
- Understand that ‘pro’ writers also find it hard (see John McPhee’s Draft no. 4), and that they find it easy (see Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song).
- Why writing is ‘hard’: because you are putting words to things that can’t fully be captured, and which might not even exist yet—what is written is not usually reducible to the thing being written about (check out Magritte’s The Treachery of Images).
- Why writing is ‘easy’: because it can be anything (you write probably participate in ‘interstitial writing’ all the time—e.g., emails and feedback and conversation).
- The most important thing is to just write!… Emphasis on the italicised just
- (anything…).
- (badly…).
- (at first…).
Important philosophical stuff
- Why write? What is writing (when does something count; you already write a lot)? What is ‘writing mojo’? Why do you ‘need’ it? What does a good one look like? Here is the same response written four ways:
- Important: writing is a subjective practice; knowing the technicalities of grammar does not a writer make.
- Finding your mojo is largely subjective; it is very different to ‘writing well’.
- Finding mojo is not the same thing as learning to write with perfect technical precision—these two things, at the beginning, may be quite far apart.
- Another spin on this is: what are you trying to do vs who you are (and then where, when, why, and how).
- We always write as ourselves—what does that mean?
- We may choose to see the writer as a research instrument, the equation of choice is: who am I and what do I see?
- What works for others probably won’t work for us (exactly…).
- Some personal theories of mine (test these for yourself):
- The single perfect piece does not exist—standards exist, but levels of quality aren’t the things they describe.
- Writing is always an experiment—this is how we leverage procedural consequentiality (thanks to our colleague Ken Tann for this idea).
- Making and evaluating are distinct modes of productivity—don’t muddle them!
- When we mean something, words inevitably run out somewhere; trying to get it right on the first go is risky.
- Writing is a game of tonnage (thanks Seinfeld) and availability (thanks Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky).
- Motion is lotion—this is an allied health saying; the idea is that movement begets movement.
Some practical ideas
- Understand what the ‘five W’ questions mean for you—these may not be questions that need an answer, so much as truths to be accounted for.
- When does writing happen? Where? As whom (what is my identity as a writer) and with whom? What does it look like? Why am I writing (‘I don’t know’ is still an answer)?
- Put another way, do a personal audit—how do you work? Develop self-theories to test; some of mine are:
- My brain is ‘on’ between 8am and 1pm.
- I have ideas on the footpath; it is in my interest to walk a lot, and to know how to grab stuff when it comes.
- I work well around other people (provided they don’t talk to me too much).
- I like to find interesting conversations and essentially write them down (aka ‘co-writing’).
- Find metaphors for writing, some of mine are:
- Writing songs (nobody really knows how to do this; read How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy)—references are essential in songwriting too, but are about style as much as content; my academic style reference is Royce Sadler’s Futility paper (2014).
- Farming (I grew up on a farm)—what crops am I growing? What is the market price? How do I keep track of operations (farming is intensely visual)? What terroir am I working with?
- Obtain closure (i.e. understand how ‘this thing I’m doing right now’ will finish); some strategies I use are:
- Set a timer (even if you then ignore it)—gym culture is a good metaphor here; unless you love being in the gym, knowing there is an end in sight is helpful (the same way you know this session ends at 3pm).
- Find some personal metrics; two of mine are: i) write 1000 words fast (when generating content), and ii) make a cup of tea when editing content, it’ll usually go cold if I’m in the zone.
- Create tension through waiting.
- This is a classic Neil Gaiman tip; the rules are simple—you can write or you can do nothing (no checking the phone etc.)… you may find things to write appear of their own volition.
- On a larger scale, this becomes the logic of ‘sleeping on it’.
- A variant of this idea is to wait while reading something relevant (with pen-in-hand, so to speak).
- Check out non-academic books about writing—these are full of great personal experiments to run (some ideas: Philip Pullman, Stephen King, Alice LaPlante, G. K. Chesterton, Natalie Goldberg).
- Find a theory of drafting that works for you—this is mine:
- When generating content for ‘draft 0’:
- Do not touch the backspace key (do not!).
- Write in bullet points only.
- Only write declarative statements or questions (this allows for a low-friction conversation with oneself).
- Ensure 1000 words are written within a given day.
- The first draft is found by ordering these points into a logical sequence.
- When smithing subsequent drafts:
- Consciously realise that this is a move from ‘making’ to ‘editing’.
- Remove the bullet point formatting.
- Read the work and make intuitive edits (see the cold tea comment at 3b above).
- Revert to the ‘making’ approach described above as necessary.
- Submit the work to some external entity (a friend, a publisher, etc.)—this step is mandatory.
- When generating content for ‘draft 0’: