Day 6 – What’s the point?

Having taken Monday off to attend a memorial I worked sporadically yesterday, still reading and making notes, but using the Silent Zoom Writing Group (which I’ll do another post on shortly) for support.

This morning, I’ve returned to reading… but to reading that’s left me with a question. Given that I’ve now got my head more firmly around the topic I’m writing about, I can see a number of places where the previous literature leaves a gap.

But which am I going to write about?

I discussed this with a friend, who came with me to the memorial. On the way to the service, we stopped for coffee, and talked around the subject for an hour or so. At that point, I think my approach was going to be more descriptive… but I’m reaching the conclusion that, for the work to achieve anything that merely update the field, I need find and answer a ‘so what?’.

So… what is my ‘so what?’?

There are several that I could tackle, and there’s a big one that I think I can do justice to… but to get to it, I need to take the reader on a journey until they see that it’s a problem. And to do that, I need to set up the argument well.

But, as is typical for me, when I get to know something reasonably well, rather than see the lines of a clean argument, I’m tending to see everything as a big ball of string. And (for fear of tightening the whole tangle) I can’t quite work out which bit of string to tug on first.

At this point, usually, I’d go out and walk… or cycle… or cut hedges… or do anything that would activate a different kind of thinking, and so give me space to stew on the question without directly thinking about it.

But I can’t do that today as I’m waiting for a delivery, and can’t leave the house.

Maybe there’s a domestic task I can do that will give me the same mental space.

Addendum: 12:46 p.m…

I went and unloaded the dishwasher, and filled it again… and watched the birds in the garden. It was just enough to get me out of the space of too many ideas, and to give me a way in. The key question to ask myself was “What would a reader of this article be open to hearing? What would they already think, and what about that do I want to change?”. I’ve now got a route in, which I’ve written out, and I’ll test tomorrow morning to see if it still holds after a night’s sleep!