How to Start Writing (Your Next Paper)
I‘ve never found writing easy (much though I enjoy the freedom of it) and least of all trying to nail the essence of a paper in the first couple of paragraphs. What helps me is an approach based (very roughly) on Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method. I modified it to suit our academic pursuits and figured it worth a punt.
Here goes:
Step 1
Take one hour and write a one-sentence Q(uestion) to which your paper is the answer. Use 21 words or less. Do not use citations.
Step 2
Take another hour and write a one-sentence A(nswer) to this Q. Do so without using citations.
Step 3
Take a full day to expand what you’ve just written into a full paragraph that incorporates both the Q and the Aand the flow of your argument. Avoid citations where you can.
You now have (more or less) the first full paragraph of your paper. All that’s missing is an opening to ‘hook’ your reader and make them want to read on. So here is Step 4:
Step 4
Take one hour to write a new opening to your paper. Avoid citations like the plague.
Here are some examples of unique openings from academic articles. I’ll leave it to you to guess who wrote what opening:
The battle for the living room is in full swing. After being used for decades as purely passive terminals, our television sets have become the subject of intense, competitive attention. Technology companies wish to use the Internet to create a viewing experience which is more engaging, interactive, and personalized, and in turn maximize their ad revenue by offering advertising content which is better targeted at the user.
Our phones are always within reach and their location is mostly the same as our location. In effect, tracking the location of a phone is practically the same as tracking the location of its owner.
The dismissal of human memory by the security community reached the point of parody long ago. While assigning random passwords to users was considered standard as recently in the mid-1980s, the practice died out in the 90s and NIST guidelines now presume all passwords are user-chosen.
The asshole-creep, bigmouth, bastard, animal, mope, rough, jerkoff, clown, scumbag, wiseguy, phony, idiot, shithead, bum, fool, or any of a number of anatomical, oral, or incestuous terms—is a part of every policeman’s world.
How We Can Help Each Other
Some of you will already be familiar with George Saunders’ online Story Club. Occasionally, he offers advice on workshopping (something that wouldn’t go amiss in scholarly writing). Here is what he recommends on his writing course at Syracuse:
In a perfect world, in my view, what the writer would receive from the workshop would be a real-time record of the reviewer’s reactions: a color-coded band along one margin, with (say) “Green” meaning, “Loving this, right with you,” “Yellow” meaning, “Still in, but with some reservations,” and “Red” meaning, “Sorry, you’ve lost me, I feel like putting this aside.”
The theory is that, provided with this sort of feedback by the workshop, the writer would gain an idea of what was working and what wasn’t. Often, the writer, at some level, already knows about the iffy zones in her story and (importantly) also already has some idea of what to do about them.
I’ve had this experience: someone reads my work, reacts with a “meh” to one part or another, and I suddenly realize I’ve know that part was “meh” all along – and the person doesn’t have to say another word.
But, since this color-coding technology doesn’t exist (yet), I encourage my students to come as close as possible to mimicking it, by: reading the story once, for pleasure, then going back through it a second time, line editing and annotating, as precisely as they can, where the inflections in their reading energy occurred.
The goal here is to provide a report of how engaged they were in the text – where the text pulled them in and when it pushed them out.
We don’t have to prescribe any fixes.
The writer’s subconscious has been hard at work on this story for many months and still is at work on it. So, any advice we give is likely not as good as the solution the writer will eventually find on his or her own, through revising.
During workshop, the main goal, always, is specificity.
As much as possible, one’s notes should be grounded in a particular place in the text. To say, “This story is slow,” is one thing; to say: “Just at this point (page 5, paragraph 3) my reading energy dropped slightly,” is much more valuable.
And specificity should be the goal whether we’re praising or criticizing. A vague bit of praise is no more useful than a vague critique. To say, “Loved this!” or “Really admired the overall flow!” helps exactly no one.
Whereas, if the reviewer can identify a positive thing about the story and articulate that praise precisely, this is a real gift for the writer, because it tells her what she should feel good about/protect/nurture in her work. It tells her what she should do more of. Rendered precisely, praise can tell her which writer, at her best, she is.
Imagine getting a comment like this: “I love the way the voice changes subtly on page 2-3 to indicate the character’s increasing agitation. This really told me something about who she is. This is exactly where I get the sense that you are ultimately writing about this character’s better nature coming to the fore.”
A writer getting a note like that is not only being told that she’s good, she’s being told how and where she’s good.
Genuinely Helpful Books
Beautiful Short Stories
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Stephen King)
The Situation and the Story (Vivian Gornick)
Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction (Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd)
Draft No 4: On the Writing Process (John McPhee)
Letters to a Young Writer (Colum McCann)
Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)
Storycraft (Jack Hart)
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (George Saunders)
Alive in the Writing (Kirin Nayaran)
Writing Past Dark (Bonnie Friedman)
How to Become a Writer (Lorrie Moore)
The School (Donald Barthelme)
Hills like White Elephants (Ernest Hemingway)
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O’Connor)
Reunion (John Cheever)
The Doll’s House (Katherine Mansfield)
“Matthew Wong, Dialogue, 2018”
Fuel to Keep You Going
You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers. (William S Burroughs)
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. (E.L. Doctorow)
In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! (Anton Chekhov)
The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang. (Annie Dillard)
A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader’s eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things. (Bill Barich)
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened. (George Orwell)
I can’t blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I’ve spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I’ll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children. (Colson Whitehead)
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write. (Annie Proulx)
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. (George Orwell)
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. (Elmore Leonard)
If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes! (Fred East)
When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done. (Stephen King)
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. (Virginia Woolf)
Online Resources for Ethnographers
The Ethnography Atelier (by Ruthanne & colleagues)
The Ethnographic Cafe (by Loic, Ashley & Ekedi)
ProjectScrib (by Charlotte & Viviane)
