Exhaling

It’s a weird thing–this business of crafting research.  You read loads of stuff — anything remotely connected to your research interest — each author with a different take.   And it isn’t just leisurely reading you do — it’s active eyebrow-knitted reading, your thumbs typing desperate notes into your palm.  Then after all the reading, when you’ve forgotten half of it, you have to revisit the accumulated notes scattered all over your desk and computer desktop.  Then begins the tedious, painstaking task of piecing ideas together, reconfiguring them, hoping they would fit, and better still, grow–and yes, bear fruit, hopefully, some unexpected, strange fruit.  The stranger, the sweeter!

But sometimes you just end up with some weird bonsai, with a fat, twisted trunk that can be described as either monstrous or at best, mutated.  It isn’t the beauty, the poetry, the masterpiece you dreamt of.  But it’s there, standing!  But why, gazing finally at your creation, all you can do is exhale?

Writer’s Block!

Loved the rush as I wrote away today. Typed away, grappling, crystallizing thoughts, forming frameworks, light bulbs flashing…

But towards the late afternoon, after a whole day of thinking and writing, I was stumped.  The words were bland and refused to fall together.

Writer’s block!

Absolutely the last thing I need.

What do you do when you get writer’s block?  When you hit it?  When you crash against it?

You don’t — you can’t — go around it or jump over it.

You just wait it out.   Sleep through it.  You wait till it fades.

Maybe tomorrow…

“Writing It Up”

After the last frantic days of reading and research, I have this one day to “write it up,” as I used to say.

“Used to say” because my professor last July, Dr. Barbara Kamler, dislikes the term.  “We don’t ‘write it up’,” she announced.

And she’s right.  Writing isn’t an activity that you do to whip up a study or report after understanding ideas and thinking up insights.  Writing is the very route scholars take in order to think things through.  As such, it isn’t such an extrinsic instrument, but an essential process in scholarly work.   What is even more interesting, Kamler writes in her book, Helping Doctoral Students Write:  Pedagogies for Supervision, is that writing is not only thinking, but it’s also forming your identity as a scholar.

So today, I’m not just writing up my research proposal.  I’ll be gathering the ideas accumulated from research, processing them and thinking them through.  And more than that, I’ll be teling you who this struggling scholar is.