Hello, fellow writers!
How many of you were taught to write five-paragraph essays in school?
I learned to write with that controversial classic, and I even diagrammed sentences. I think I got an A on my first research paper for a high school history class, but I know I earned only a middling grade on my first bibliography project in AP English, on an assignment designed to support our reading of Ted Hughes’s darkly brilliant Crow.
I have since thanked my lucky stars that I had such a good public school education.
When I started attending a private university, I found that many of my peers were coming from more sophisticated educational backgrounds than mine.
But I felt like I could hold my own, a feeling that gave me a sense of freedom to explore all of the new worlds then opening up to me.
I think the key was that I had learned tried-and-true methods for writing and critical thinking while being exposed to writers who ranged beyond such conventions. And from time to time, I was encouraged to test the boundaries of the formulas myself.
As the saying goes, you need to learn the rules so you can break them. I have found this to be true at each stage of my writing life.
Most recently, that experience reinvigorated me when I was doing the post-peer review revisions for my book, which was based on another big, learning-curve type of writing: my dissertation.
Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash
Dissertating creatively
Certainly, writing my dissertation was one of those moments when I realized I was growing as a writer by learning to embrace and work around constraints.
For me, the challenges had everything to do with clunky, if necessary formulas designed to demonstrate disciplinary mastery, such as the literature review. As an ethnomusicologist, I also had to learn strategies for integrating ethnographic, historical, and theoretical content while doing a bit of music analysis.
Fortunately, I again worked with wonderful mentors, who encouraged me to write creatively even while navigating the dissertation’s strictures.
I started by drafting stories gathered from my field notes to engage my imagination, igniting my early writing process. The structure and organization of my arguments followed, when I grouped the stories together in themes.
My open-minded committee members weren’t bothered that I prefaced each chapter with a section titled “Encounters,” which contained flurries of stories. In the succeeding chapters, I drew conclusions about their significance. And I had all the formulaic necessaries in there, too.
Honestly, it was a bit of a mess! But it got the job done.
From dissertation to book
I knew that a dissertation often needs a good rewrite to become a publishable book. But one thing I wanted to keep was the emphasis on the stories that did so much to shape my understanding.
This time, I framed them as an integral part of my learning process among other lifelong learners, formalizing their telling as an ethnographic writing strategy that I threaded throughout the book. That approach better integrated them with everything else, smoothing the uneven structure of the dissertation.
But it created a new problem.
Suddenly, I had a whole lot of meta-level material right at the start: setting the scene, explaining the storytelling strategy, laying out key theoretical ideas, and providing historical background.
How could I front-load so much without testing readers’ patience? Slowly, and with a lot of help from writing-exchange buddies, I began to find ways.
I sliced up my too-long introduction, putting some of its material into a prologue that I hoped would pique readers’ interest by providing descriptive material while framing my storytelling approach.
After clearing that hurdle, something major still felt off.
If you look at the visualization I had created, you’ll see that I was being held hostage by another formula: the “history chapter” placed directly after the introduction.
My former dissertation advisor, the inspiring writer Louise Meintjes, asked a great question. Why not put the history chapter smack in the middle of the book?
With that suggestion, the whole structure began to fall into place.
My revised table of contents contained a core of four chapters that I reimagined as two contrasting thematic pairs, preceded by the descriptive, theoretical grounding of the prologue and introduction.
Liberation!
Writers as editors
Shaking structures up at the small- and large-scale level is now a conscious strategy I call upon as both a writer and as an editor. I’ve discovered that it shakes things loose in my thinking, even if I ultimately decide to revert to a more conventional form.
And so, when doing developmental editing, I especially enjoy encouraging fellow writers to rethink their assumptions about how best to organize their work.
As for my book, I’ve had some heartening feedback on that last restructuring move from another writer-editor friend.
When she reported via email that she was halfway through reading, I replied with an anxious question. Did she feel bogged down by the chapter called “Dissent”?
No, came the response. It was her favorite chapter so far.
You can imagine my surprise.
Fiction report! You may already know that I advise people to read fiction for inspiration with creative problem-solving in their writing. Here’s my newest recommendation: for an author experimenting with both structure and voice, check out Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19.