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Last year I wrote a post called\u00a0How do I write the discussion section?\u00a0<\/a><\/em>This post was in response to an analysis of blog traffic which showed that 75% of the writing related searches that led people to the Thesis Whisperer wanted to know about this section of the thesis. The discussion section is the\u00a0\u2018problem child\u2019 of the thesis<\/a>\u00a0because it asks you to be creative. In\u00a0How do I write the discussion section?\u00a0<\/a><\/em>I covered what could go in the discussion section and in what order, but I did not address the creativity problem.<\/p>\n People have spent lifetimes studying creativity. There are reams of books on the subject. However, as yet, no one has invented a magic creativity elixir.<\/p>\n Which is a bit of a shit really.<\/p>\n So \u2013 how can you become a more creative researcher? I think the secret lies in thinking about creativity as a process, not an accident, inspiration or something that just \u2018happens\u2019. Becoming creative on demand is possible and a key skill for all researchers to cultivate.<\/p>\n One of my favourite books on creativity is\u00a0Daily Rituals: how great minds make time, find inspiration<\/a><\/em>. In it, Mason Curry shares the daily schedules of famous writers, musicians, engineers, architects and philosophers. Each person\u2019s creative routine is explained in just a few pages. Reading all these snippets together is a fascinating insight into how different people, in different places, and with different pressures, carried on with the work of being creative.<\/p>\n Some people were more free to explore their creativity than others. Jane Austen, like many women of her time and culture, was not expected to have an occupation. She did not have a dedicated place to write or think and had to do it in the family spaces (many PhD parents can relate to I\u2019m sure). According to her nephew, Austen wrote on \u201c\u2026 small sheets of paper which could be easily put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper\u201d. She \u00a0was protective of her work in progress and deliberately sat by a creaking door so that she would have early warning of anyone coming, enabling her to put away her writing and pick up her sewing.<\/p>\n Austen is a decided contrast to Patricia Highsmith, writing some 120 years later. Highsmith \u00a0wrote great thrillers, including\u00a0Strangers on a Train<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Talented Mr Ripley<\/em>. What I like about Highsmith is it seems she was simultaneously totally organised (she always wrote for 3 \u2013 4 hours a day and could get a good 2000 words down in that time) and a complete slob, as her biographer Andrew Wilson recounts: I trained as an architect and was taught not to wait for creativity to come knocking at your door. One thing I learned in architecture school is that when you are stuck, it can help to switch tools. Stop trying to draw the building: make a 3D model in cardboard. If that doesn\u2019t work, make the model in clay or plastic instead. Draw in pen instead of pencil. Stop drawing with a ruler and go freehand. Colour it in with crayons; wash the drawing over with gauche. \u00a0Make a collage. Drag your plan around as you photocopy it. The options are endless: half of the fun of being at architecture school was dreaming up new creative processes.<\/p>\n I left the profession some 20 years ago for lots of reasons, and don\u2019t miss it, but the down to earth attitude to creativity stayed with me. The reality of work in an architects\u2019 practise runs somewhat counter to what you see in the movies, where architects are often portrayed as tortured geniuses. Architects don\u2019t have time to romanticise the creative process: they just roll their sleeves up and get on with it.\u00a0 In real life, they just grab a pen and try to get the building done by lunchtime.<\/p>\n Once you learn to be creative on demand, you lose your fear of not having enough ideas. Generating ideas for buildings becomes almost effortless but you are not out of the woods because most edesign ideas are crap.<\/p>\n In architecture school you are taught to assume most of what you make is shitty. This teaches you to hold on to ideas lightly and not invest a lot of effort until you are sure they are not crap. This is why architecture teachers are obsessed with \u2018process\u2019. If you bring a set of plans complete to the toilet tile layout to class, you will be sent back to the drawing board, literally. Design teachers want to see messy sketches and lots of \u2018iterations\u2019; showing you have thought through a lot of alternatives before settling on your final design scheme. You only get to finalising the toilet details after months of work testing the design idea out. They call this process \u2018working through the ideas\u2019.<\/p>\n The sketch books that architects sometimes publish are usually carefully composed fictions \u2013 most of the \u2018working through the ideas\u2019 drawings are very ugly and end up in the trash. I\u2019ve always approached the creative act of writing up my research results in the way I was taught to design buildings and found it works well. By anyone\u2019s measure I am a productive person. I\u2019ve written, co-written or edited seven books in the last six years as well as running a weekly blog for 10 years. And yet I throw out at least half of my writing \u2013 maybe more.<\/p>\n This way of working, where you try to have lots of ideas, but hold on to them lightly, is very freeing. My best advice for the discussion section is not to agonise about what to write. Commit every idea \u2013 especially the stupid ones \u2013 to \u2018paper\u2019, test them out first, and then decide what to throw out. When I say \u2018commit it to paper\u2019 I don\u2019t mean write it down formally, in polished prose, but in quick, unfinished \u2018chunks\u2019 \u2013 a term I stole off Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamlers\u2019 book \u2018Helping Doctoral Students write\u2019 where they recommend \u2018chunks and not chapters.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A post shared by Thesiswhisperer (@thesiswhisperer)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nHer favourite technique to ease herself into the right frame of mind for work was to sit on her bed surrounded by cigarettes, ashtray, matches, a mug of coffee, a doughnut and an accompanying saucer of sugar. She had to avoid any sense of discipline and make the act of writing as pleasurable as possible. Her position, she noted, would be almost foetal and, indeed, her intention was to create, she said, \u201ca womb of her own.\u201d<\/em>
\n(God, how I love her. I want to\u00a0be<\/em>\u00a0her.)<\/p>\n\n
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