Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Playful Prewriting: 9 Suggestions

When writing about literature, there is a crucial creative period that occurs in that time after one has finished reading a literary work and before serious drafting takes place. I like to think of it as a time for "purposeful play."

This is when one has not committed oneself to a specific claim, and before systematic analysis and research take place. I suppose I'm discussing "prewriting," but that doesn't sound nearly as fun, and I think that this part of the process really should be.

Here are my suggestions for proceeding during this part of the writing process. My first and last suggestions are more seriously procedural, with all the middle ones being various options to try out.



  1. Review the text and any discussion notes
    Hopefully one has been marking passages of note while reading. This is the time to go back through and reread those passages and whatever margin notes made. Why did a given passage stand out?  And if the literary work is one that has been discussed in a class, this is the time to review discussion notes or online discussion forums one has participated in. What animated me, or others, or the instructor, when going through this text? I also think it helpful to extract notable passages, writing them out in order to savor and assess them. 
  2. Discuss the text
    Now that the text, certain passages, and past discussion points are in mind, it's a good idea to have a new conversation about it -- especially with someone who does not know the work or hasn't read it for a long time. As we articulate to others what a given literary work is about, our oral explanations can help us gravitate toward key themes, or toward matters in the work about which we care personally.
  3. Use drawing
    Try to literally picture aspects of the literary work. The goal is not to create great illustrations or even to share these necessarily. The goal is to use visual thinking -- something that can help to simplify and crystallize ideas. Can you sum up A Tale of Two Cities in three images?
  4. Use post-it notes
    Writing out the names of characters and events, or short excerpts from a text, can be helpful to review main ideas. If you use sticky notes, it gives you the chance to rearrange ideas, to cluster key characters or events, or to suggest a chain of causes and effects. Such notes can be easily created or discarded
  5. Record yourself talking
    Try speaking aloud, alone, to a voice recorder of some kind (for which there are many apps for smart phones). Give yourself a specific time limit (say, 3-5 minutes) in which you try to crystallize ideas from the work you've reviewed. Listen to this recording, take note of where you got interested in your own topic -- or where you realize you need to go back and look closer at the text.
  6. Try a dictation program.
    There are many ways to get one's voice transcribed nowadays, including Google Docs, which now has the feature by which one can write by speaking. The purpose of this is NOT to draft a paper, but to externalize your thoughts. Dictation bridges the world of oral and written, and brings in a kind of performance component. When we write, we do a lot of pausing and reviewing and revising. We don't do that as much with speech, and that flow can work in our favor. Don't be too critical of (or distracted by) the transcribing process or the transcription. You're not writing a paper; you're feeling out ideas. This is play more than work.
  7. Sketch idea clusters
    This loose kind of outlining can be a powerful way of finding one's own interests and then developing these in more detail. Start by putting the name of your text in the middle of a piece of paper, then circle it. Create spokes and other circles extending from this, in no particular logical order, just connecting that work to other things -- its author, its historical context, texts to which it compares, main characters, events in the narrative, matters of genre, etc. Pull back, look at those secondary circles, and choose one or more of these and repeat the process with a tertiary level of circles clustering around one of the secondary circles. This will draw you into a loose but productive kind of noncommittal analysis.
  8. Freewrite by hand
    Beginning in a very personal sort of way (rather than a formal or analytical one), sit down and write by longhand for a set amount of time (say, 10-15 minutes). Be at ease with having digressions. You're not writing a paper; you're just allowing writing to be a way to tease out your own thoughts and feelings on things. Talk about why you like something, or dislike it, and you will feel yourself making your way towards opinions that could be the first stab at a more firm claim later on. Doing this by hand prevents you from getting too much into revision and can preserve flow. Just give yourself permission not to make sense, while pushing yourself to fill every minute of the time you've allotted yourself with writing. See where it takes you, and trust it will take you somewhere.
  9. Review these experiments and record your thoughts
    This is when we begin to emerge from the play mode to the work mode. Now that you've allowed yourself to jump about and to experiment, teasing out some ideas, it's time to go back, do some winnowing, and to focus on promising directions. Sometimes, this can be done through a kind of diary-type writing. Consider talking about yourself in the third person to bring in some objectivity: "It appears Gideon keeps coming back to the idea of progression and digression within the characters of Paradise Lost, and he also seems to like conceptualizing Milton's cosmos."
In this part of the process, avoid outlining (which can get you lost in subordination, or distracted by detail, or overly committed to ideas you need not be committed to yet). Avoid formal research of scholarship. And it's probably best to avoid online forums or blogs about your text, as it might predispose you to certain common ways of framing ideas about the text. Allow yourself to have direct experience with the primary text before getting into secondary discussions, whether informal or scholarly.

At the end of this process you will at least have a small set of ideas which you can pursue further. You might even have some inklings about a working claim to help you through the next phase, which will involve more careful analysis and research.

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