drafting

Image credit: Anna Barker

Recently I partnered with Tina Pepler, another Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow, to deliver a five-day writing retreat for third-year doctoral students. Students were at the writing-up stage of their research and grappling with a large amount of material. As writers, we know all too well the muddle you can sometimes get into when working out the structure of a long piece of writing. There’s a familiar tension between being close to the detail but also needing to be able to zoom out and see the piece as a whole. You can sometimes feel lost in the fog. It’s often difficult to see the connections between ideas, the links that would provide a cohesive structure.

Every morning at the start of our sessions, we asked our students to practise freewriting. Freewriting is the act of writing continuously, not stopping to correct errors, or even really to think that much. It engages the unconscious mind, that place where the mulling over of problems ordinarily takes place. (See Heather Dyer’s blog post https://rlfconsultants.com/creative-insight/). You can write using a prompt such as, ‘What am I trying to achieve with this chapter?’ Alternatively, you can simply begin writing and see what comes out. When you feel you having nothing to write, you just fill in the blanks with ‘blah, blah, blah’ until another thought kicks you off again. It’s a terrific way of engaging the creative side of your brain.

Once you have been writing for 15 minutes, stop, and read through what you have written. You might like to circle or underline things that leap out at you as interesting. And keep the routine going; do it every morning. I’m always surprised by what comes out when I’m freewriting and indeed I’m doing a lot of it just at the moment as ideas for a new novel take shape. Our students at the retreat found it very helpful in making connections in the structure of their thesis. It also allowed them to slip off the cloak of academic writing, to write freely and to explore how they thought and felt about the material they were working with.

Cherise Saywell

Image credit: Brodie Leven

I participated in several intensive writing courses while becoming a writer and I’ve always been a great believer in the benefits of the immersive experience. Apart from the sustained focus on my writing, I loved working closely with the course leaders — novelists, short-story writers, poets and memoirists. Sometimes they showed me things I was doing already. This was reassuring — I’m doing the right thing, I’d think. I just need to keep going. Sometimes they showed me something completely new. Each time, I came away fizzing with purpose. Of course, the creative high couldn’t last, but one of the most beneficial things I took home with me each time was how to achieve an aerial view of my project — an overview of what I am trying to say.

I’m in the process of setting up my first immersive writing workshop. My participants will be fourth-year undergraduates about to embark on their dissertations. I’m going to show them a useful way to achieve that aerial view. It involves taking a break from writing and researching, and producing a synopsis as if you were telling a story — a summary of what will happen. The approach is helpful for other forms of writing too. This is how it works:

Participants take a blank piece of paper. ‘What is your dissertation about?’ I ask. ‘What is the answer to the question you’re asking?’ First, I suggest that they scribble it down on a blank page — roughly 300 words. The first draft is written quickly, and by hand. Then, on a separate page, they summarise what they’ve written in a paragraph of up to 150 words. I emphasise that the important thing is to distil rather than simply extract. So they aren’t just cutting, they are re-thinking, re-working, re-wording. Finally, they produce a summary in a sentence — no more than 25 words. This is the essence of the dissertation.

In each instance, when they finish a draft, they slow down. They edit what they’ve written. Then they read it out loud. The aim is to produce something that is coherent and complete, although brief. This approach helps you to stay on track and remained focused on the topic. I still do this exercise in my own work. I find it boosts my confidence, whatever I’m working on. It puts me back on track if I’m flagging. It’s a way of telling yourself you can do it, and then explaining how it’ll be done.

In my day job as a ghostwriter, I’ve worked with half a dozen SAS men over the years and I soon discovered one of their favourite acronyms: KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. They use it in relation to planning active-service operations, but it’s good advice for undergraduates too. I’m not suggesting that it will enable you to kill silently in 93 different ways or carry a 50-kilogram Bergen military rucksack up and down Welsh mountains at top speed. (If that’s your aim, you’d better drop out of university and join the SAS instead.) But it will help you produce written work that is clear and concise, with an argument that is readily apparent — earning you high marks and the undying gratitude of your tutors.

Many undergraduates – and indeed, some academics – appear to believe that academic writing should consist of complex, convoluted sentences, littered with polysyllabic words and obscure concepts, and so jargon-laden that even the experts struggle to understand it. Even promotional writing can suffer from the same flaws as academic writing, as in this example (rendered anonymous to spare the writer’s blushes): ‘T*** H***** exercises synergies in a multi-platform social media paradigm that creates a new creative cultural space for blue-sky thinking. He leverages best-in-class solutions to communicate key performance metrics in a distributed yet centralised real-time goal-oriented proprietary methodology.’ Can anybody understand this?

Sometimes I’ll challenge undergraduates to tell me what a particular sentence they’ve written means and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know, I thought it sounded impressive.’ It doesn’t. If you don’t understand your own argument, how do you expect anyone else to? The solution is not to sound as if you’ve swallowed a thesaurus, with a dictionary for dessert, but to write in a way that is simple, direct and comprehensible, so that your argument shines through.

Even better, once you’ve acquired the habit of straightforward writing, you’ll find it useful in all sorts of other contexts: writing a CV, a personal statement, a job application or even a love letter. Give it a try — you’ll find that keeping it simple makes sense.