This morning I woke up
from a dream in which I was framing one of my papers for a class based on the
writings of Jorge Luis Borges. I haven’t read Borges for about 15 years, yet
for some reason his musings of labyrinths and spiraling towers of a library
swept into my dream world and somehow collided with my thoughts on qualitative
inquiry. This actually happens to me quite a bit but I’ve never taken the time
to reflect on the importance of this part of my writing process.
One thing I have found
when teaching writing is that everyone’s process is individual. But for some
reason, whenever I pick up a book on writing the author outlines specific steps
that are necessary for writing production. Ironically, these steps are very
different depending on the book I pick up. Some advocate for topic selection,
outlining, paragraph development, revising, and editing. For these writers the
process is very linear. For some reason, I’ve never been able to work in this
trajectory. Creating an outline before I’ve put any words on the page is like being
given a mystery bag of ingredients and being told to make lasagna. There are
all these bits and pieces with no idea of how they will connect or meld
together.
Other authors suggest a
consistent time of simply writing. Often this is referred to as “free writing”
in which you keep writing for a set period of time. It doesn’t matter what
subject I write about as long as I keep writing. From these “ramblings,” gems
of topics emerge and begin to take shape that I can later nurture into more
concrete musings or essays. I’ve enjoyed these unstructured sessions yet seem
to lack the discipline to make them happen on a consistent basis. In a recent
attempt to utilize this approach more consistently I joined a web site called
750words.com. It seemed like a great tool in that I write at least 750 words a
day. These writings are logged and I can see my progress each day. I receive an
email each day that I don’t meet my goal as an incentive. It doesn’t work! I
wrote for 3 days and have been getting the emails each day since. I don’t know why I don’t unsubscribe...
This brings me to my
current reflection on how my dream this morning, and many other mornings, fits
into my personal writing process. For some reason, I tend to need a frame or
metaphor to work from when writing. This is different than an outline in that
it is more conceptual than concrete. It is a set of ideas and ways of thinking
about a topic. Sometimes these metaphors are used in an explicit way as the
framework for my writing in that I make them visible for my reader. Other times
they just lurk in the background implicitly, guiding my ideas and thoughts into
words on the paper.
Most importantly, my
current reflection on this element of my process has enlightened me to the fact
that this part of the process is almost always “off the page.” It happens in my
dreams, in the car when I’m driving, when I’m walking, or even in the shower. I’m
reminded of research that I have read in recent years about the importance of
daydreaming. Scientists have found that the “resting brain” makes important
long-distance connections that help us to make “creative connections between
ideas” (Whitfield-Gabrieli & Gabrieli, 2010). Even while I’ve been engaged
in writing this reflection, I’m cognizant of the fact that I’ve stopped
numerous times to stare at the window, wall, or computer screen.
When I consider how
this fits specifically into my academic and scholarly writing experience, I do
know that I have learned to put words on a page soon after an “off-the-page”
experience takes place. I have learned this the hard way when I have had these
connective experiences and then lost them by not writing them down. In this
way, I guess I’m learning the delicate dance between my on- and off-the-page
experiences. I’m learning to find comfort in the idea that I am writing even
when I’m not “writing.”
Reference
Whitfield-Gabrieli, S.,
& Gabrieli, J. (2010, January). Idle minds and what
they
may say about intelligence. Scientific
American. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=idle-minds-intelligence.
