in 1997, OUP published a book by Phyllis Creme and Mary Lea entitled “Writing at University”. It was a book aimed at students, but the content is just as useful for more established academics.
After all, when we consider that how we write is a lot to do with how we’re wired as people, we academics are no different inside than the students that we teach. We’ve just been knocking around for a few more years.
One of the useful things explored by Creme and Lea is what they call ‘four different types of writer’. These are, with brief descriptions:
- The diver – who can’t often work with a plan, but prefers to just dive in, and sees where things take them.
- The grand plan writer – who spends a lot of time reading/thinking, and then writes pretty much the whole project in one go straight out of their head.
- The architect – who outlines, and structures and plans… and then fills in the sections.
- The patchwork writer – who writes chunks, and then stitches them together.
I’ve never been much of a patchwork writer. My writing has tended to always be linear – starting at the beginning and progressing through. And I’ve not been a grand plan writer… if I approached things like that, I’d never stop thinking and nothing would be done. Consequently, I’ve always been more of an architect.
But I feel like that approach has been less about natural instinct, and more about closure and completion. I am, after all, the kind of person who sets out to walk down a clean, clear path from A to B… and ends up, several hours later, being pulled out of river, covered in mud and insect bites, somewhere in the middle of a forest where I’d gone to ‘follow the pretty butterflies’.
Structure is, then, more about needing to lock things down before I write to give myself boundaries and a clear finishing post, and prevent myself from just spooling out strings and strings of fascinating (but entirely distracting) thoughts.
But with this particular article, I’m finding myself doing something a bit more instinctive. This morning I sat down and after reading for about 30 minutes, I just started typing. Somewhere in me, the introduction had more or less formed, and wanted to get out.
I have done something like this before… when I’ve written a presentation abstract, and then used it as a structure to hang the rest of the script from. So perhaps this is my way of framing the ‘whole thing’, before I then turn to detail. But it’s a new evolution for something more ‘official’ and written.
It’s not fully baked, so I’ll need to redraft. But it does mean that when it comes to starting the actual ‘writing’ phase, I’m not now dealing with an empty page. And that’s a good feeling.
The Garage of Books 