Unlike writer’s block, unblocking a drain can be done easily. Photo: Mark Diamond
Today, I have decided to focus on what might be termed “investment free” writing. Far too many people, and especially, though not exclusively, those who are early in their writing career, confuse evaluations of their writing with evaluations of themselves. For example, you struggle hard to produce a piece of writing with which you are not entirely satisfied, and then reach conclusions like “I’m hopeless”, “I knew I was no good”, and so on. Or your supervisor criticizes your punctuation and you think, “I’m not smart enough to get a PhD”. Not only are conclusions like this self-defeating, in that they lead you to feel miserable and demotivated (instead of more energized as you would want), but they are focussed on you as a person, rather than on your writing.
One way that some people have found of disengaging themselves from their writing product, is to practice writing something that is deliberately “wrong”. It might be wrong in any number of ways, and the particular way is entirely up to you, but you might consider the following —
Write as if English (if that is the language of your thesis) is not your first language. Of course, it might actually be true that English isn’t your first language, but that is not the point. The purpose is to write in a way that makes it show in an exaggerated way that writing in English doesn’t come easily to you. That much will be true, otherwise you wouldn’t have writer’s block. Here is example. I copy from Tom Lehrer song called “Lobachevsky”. If you not hear this song before, you must listen. Tom Lehrer he is very good. I am remember the time I first hear him. He make big impression to me. I am thinking, “If this man, he can make money with voice like that, then I can be millionaire.” But first, I am giving supervisor new song draft!
Another approach is to take a viewpoint with which you disagree entirely, and write a spoof or a parody. Put in jokes. Sure, whatever you write might not end up in the final version of your thesis, but (a) it might just succeed in unblocking the writing flow, (b) I’d be surprised if writing a spoof did not help you clarify what you really do think, and (c) there might be parts that you can use just as you have written them.
A third, related way, is just to write badly. Deliberately badly, like, you know, with no punctuation and ummm no kind of structure thing (Gee this sounds really bad doesn’t it) where you kinda dont even check your speling of stick in your own stuff about what it all sounds like. You might even start … You could try starting your sentence … You can just experiments with different beginnings and false starts and finally discover that in doing so you have managed to get on a roll and express, at least to some degree, the concepts that you are trying to convey. Get it? Sentences that go nowhere. False starts to a paragraph written one after the other, no back editing. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Lots of critical comments in the text like, “This is really crap”, “I really haven’t a clue about this stuff”, “I guess it must be pretty obvious that I can’t even write two sentences together.”
The critical thing about all these suggestions is that they are aimed at separating your evaluation of yourself from your evaluation of your writing. If you are trying to write like a non-native speaker, then when your writing looks as if you can’t write English, that’s good! And if you accidentally make it look as if you can write English, then you will be able to use a part of it in your thesis. If you write a viewpoint with which you disagree, sounds like you haven’t a clue about your thesis topic, or looks as if you are poking fun at the material, again, that’s good.
The main thing is to produce words. When you feel as if you can’t write, then writing anything at all is great. Later on, you can focus on producing some writing that says what you want to say in the way that you want to say it. But first off, just write.
Contributors: Mark R. Diamond