strategies to overcome obstacles to writing II

strategies to overcome obstacles to writing II

I am looking things I wrote yesterday and turned a focus on the new project idea of redefining what writing is. The tricky thing is writing all the time. An academic position, particularly a director position requires one to do a whole heck of a lot of writing. Many administrative tasks have to be communicated in writing, whether that's the plan for a project, so advertising copy, communicating with faculty, administration, students, prospects there's a lot of email that has got to be written…

But I don't consider that part of my academic writing. What I do want to consider part of my academic writing are all the things that lead to the publication of the paper. Right now, at least want to separate my "pure" reading time, from my "pure" writing time: The literature review meeting time from the literature review writing time; the discussion analysis time from the discussion writing time.

Regarding strategies to overcome obstacles:
-  What can I do about the fact that my head is clogged up with too many ideas?

•  new rule:
• take two minutes  at the start of the reading  block – actually add two minutes to the total right – and do a brief meditation.  Totally not me of course, but that traded before and it's not completely onerous :-).

•  Another new rule:
• now that the first of the "exercises" have settled in, be sure to spend some portion of the writing time [at least 10 minutes] doing some writing that will actually lead to the production of a paper. ....

strategies to overcome obstacles to writing

What strategies can I developed to overcome obstacles to writing?

[Reflecting back I want to call them: "the enemies of writing" ... maybe that should be in all caps and boldface:  THE ENEMIES OF WRITING!]

okay, so this is a link to what I wrote before.

But I think you have to look at them one at a time and try and develop strategies for them individually, because in some ways they are forces that work in opposition to one another. And in the end, I have to work at them one at a time to readjust my habits, to readjust my psyche. I think I am not going to go with them in order, however.

 New rules:

• no email until after the writing session is done
• coffee before the writing session starts
• if the dirty dishes are in the sink, they can be washed, but no other household chores – so try to wash them before going to bed.

New project: 

• use some of my writing time early on in this process to redefine my writing tasks. Which tasks are part of writing, which tasks are not part of writing? Determining how to allocate the amount of writing time that I have as part of the writing block.

 [Today was 22 minutes]

 

three things that make me write (and not write)

What are three things that make me write (and not write)?

Makes me write:

• Deadline
• Ornrey-ness
• feeling like I owe it to somebody else

Makes me NOT write:

• lack of confidence
• distraction
• other obligations [fires to be put out]

 I will come back to these tomorrow and the next day and see if I can come up with a few ideas for each one. In the meantime I want to get some individual writing projects so for the rest of  the time today I'm going to work on that letter that I promised to write for Oxxxxx.

how have I been treating my writing tools

How have I been treating my writing tools?

In this question, I'm having trouble with the metaphor. Is writing is a single tool, or a group of tools? What's the garden? Is the garden my writing in general? Is the garden my academic life?

Certainly come I feel like I spent a lot of my academic time sharpening the analytical tools, and practices of an academic: logic, precision, rigor, and of course being a curmudgeon.  And I'm actively engaged in conducting research projects However, I still can't integrate those elements completely into the writing process. By that I and saying that I think that conducting the research is still something that precedes the writing of the research. Looking specifically at the grounded theory study that I'm working on right now, I really know that I should be writing alone all along, but I am not doing that. In other words the act of putting words on paper on the other hand is something that I haven't been good at getting to.

Along the same lines, how do I conceptualize the "reading-part-of-research" as part of the writing process.  Intuitively at least in my head, it's something that precedes the writing.  this is the stage where he and many other CALL project.  Yet logically I know that it is actually part of the overall process of writing academic paper. Moreover, that it's possible to be writing while reading -- in the sense that the notes that we take as we read the relevant research on the topic are writing and are an element of that final product.

 So I know what to do … I need to get to it.

aspects of writing I dislike

What aspects of writing do I especially dislike?

My first reaction to this question is that there isn't anything particularly that I dislike about writing… That is to say that I don't find writing to be something that makes me feel bad, but if I had to say the thing that is "egregious" about writing I guess it would be the fact that your brain really has to be engaged when you write. Particularly me, I would guess.

If you will allow my educational psychology geek personality to take over  for a minute …  It would seem that my prefrontal cortex is really working quite hard when I write -- In the sort of sense that Daniel Kahneman is talking about in "Thinking Fast and Slow." The time when I'm writing is one of those times when all of those tendencies toward perfectionism seem to gather up steam and drop themselves in on me.

 Of course, it doesn't help that I can't particularly type, and though I'm currently using voice recognition software – which is not 100% accurate – the process of writing with your fingers and the process of writing with your voice really do seem quite different for me. I'm not sure how other people are, but the flow of thoughts and … and I guess we are back to the idea of perfectionism. When I speak to sentence, it's not the same as composing a sentence and thinking of how each letter must be struck from the keyboard. I suppose a real typist doesn't think that way when they are typing?

Thinking about the question again.

Writing is slow [Kahneman's system 2]. Writing requires patience. Writing requires revision and editing. These are things that can get your prefrontal cortex involved and expend real biological energy.  Ultimately, writing is often tiring. Looking back on your errors and imperfections can be humiliating.

Patricia Goodson's advice to "write fast and edit slow" is not exactly something that I've practiced in the past. It's my intent to make an effort to do just that.

aspects of writing I enjoy

What aspects of writing do I enjoy (most)?

[I wonder how many people going through these questions is the first initial response that I had choose something of the obverse of what E.B. White's character, Mr. Trexler, describes in Second Tree from the Corner when asked, "Have you ever had any bizarre thoughts?" . . .  He's completely scattered, anxious, feeling the pressure of the doctor's by, the doctor's position, the doctor's time . . .  . "Just reach into the bag and pick anything at all."]

•  perhaps it's a hazard of my occupation, but I'm thinking of the reward system in my brain, the idea that what I just did, that is, finding the connection between some previously encountered item (E.B. White's story), and something entirely different (this particular writing task I have at hand), and somehow fitting them together.  I think there are lots of pieces and feeling I was enjoying:
•  the initial reading and understanding of White's story,
• the activation of memory based on
• a new stimulus
• knowing how to retrieve the specific information is required going beyond just the recollection of the story and the paraphrase back down to
• accessing the Internet for the precise quote
• figuring out how to extract the best quote for the purpose
• knowing how to express that in writing in a way that communicates the precision of the quote ethically, fairly, accurately to the reader
•  [that went better than I thought it might have ;) ]
•  Then of course that's the joke we say about how being a professor and writing something down is more often than not about being "big me" versus "little you" . . . there can be a battle that occurs in writing
•  and now that I think, that battle occurs after the paper has been submitted, made of to face the battle with the  editors of the Journal interview process

it keeps me away from writing

What keeps me away from writing?

• Too many things in my head.  sometimes it is really hard to clear them out in order to get started on a project.
• Too many fires to put it in front of me.
• e-mails
• marketing
• student problems arising suddenly
•  drop-ins
•  the phone
• I like doing the other things in life, too. The level of inertia to get started on those sorts of things – going swimming, cooking dinner, playing a videogame – is remarkably less.
• Tasks that are part of writing that don't seem directly related to the goal of the final product can get forgotten (?), Or at least they don't seem like they come as readily, but they block the actual writing that needs to get done.
• Perhaps it's a stupid example, but starting to write an agenda for the faculty meeting required me to go and access the calendar in order to be up to provide faculty the key dates in the calendar that they need to be aware of. 
• Needing to sit down and read the articles as a part of doing the writing
• Needing to sit down and analyze data as part of doing the writing
• Needing to conceptualize a project for writing a proposal
•  needing to write the proposals/abstract for conferences which also doesn't feel like real writing
•  The place where  I do my writing, is also a place where I interact socially, relax as part of some of my leisure time, engage with  entertainment. In part, it makes it easier to click the "play" button rather than the "work" button.
• Lately, I have to admit to suffering from a general malaise. The sort of passion might normally drive me to start and finish a project just isn't there on many occasions.
•  Maybe the truth is, I don't really like many parts of this job.

Still, I think the biggest thing is that I've got too many projects I want to do. I feel like if I could get one or two or three of them out the door and clear off the general played a little bit that I could move forward on some of the others. So perhaps it's good for me to sit down and list out the projects that I have in my head that I wanted to and then train spent some time each week during the writing block working on individual projects.

So here's the list:

• Memrise
•  submit proposal to  FEELTA 
• Second and third
•  submit proposal to  FEELTA 
• Paper with Ms. Yang 
•  submit proposal to  FEELTA
•  Working on my dissertation ideas
•  Blogging kind of things
•  E.G. how not using technology is destroying the brains of adults
•  emotion ELT 
•  the brain and ELT

Lack of confidence? Suffering too much pain in the process of getting the writing done?