[LINK] "Ethnographers as Writers: Write First Drafts in One Go"

[rfmcdonald]

Savage Minds' Kristen Ghodsee has some interesting advice for writers.

Many doctoral students fail to earn their PhDs because they never finish their dissertations. They complete their coursework, pass their qualifying exams, and do all of their research, but writing the thesis proves an insurmountable barrier. Why does the dissertation present such a challenge? Because students can’t push past the first chapter. Too many dissertators start with their introduction and find that they have nothing to say. Or they realize they have no idea what they are trying to introduce.

In Anne Lamott’s brilliant book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, the author advises all would be writers to embrace what she calls the “sh*tty first draft” (SFD). Decide what you’re going to write, and then write it straight through without stopping. If you need an article, spend some time thinking of an abstract that captures the essence of your argument and the data you have to substantiate it. You can take a few days to put together a really good abstract. Once you have it, use it as you introductory paragraph and start writing.

Keep putting words on the page until you reach what you think will be the end. Never go back and read what you have already written. This may seem difficult, but you can learn to let your thoughts flow. If you find yourself stuck at a section or in need of a particular fact or reference not at hand, leave placeholders in your text. Phrases like “insert quote here” or “discuss relevant studies here” litter my first drafts. If I need to stop working for the day, I always type the letters “XXX” in my electronic document. When I come back to the file, I open the document and search for the “XXX,” thus bypassing the text I’ve previously written.

Writing straight through presents bigger obstacles when working on a dissertation or book. My colleague Doug Rogers understands these challenges and still insists on writing as much as he can without revising:

Given all of the revising and reclassifying that I practice and recommend, it’s imperative for me to keep going, to put off the urge to re-write and re-classify until it will be most useful. I could revise some paragraph or section forever, but I won’t know if it’s right until I see it in the larger chapter context. So I try to push through a whole chapter before I dismantle it. At some point, even if I’m a bit dissatisfied with it, I leave the chapter and move onto the next, so that I can revise at a higher level (two chapters together [and] eventually the whole book) later on.

More at the site.