A process for moving from notes to draft is outlined in this section:
1 Warm-up 2 Prompt 3 Distil
4 Notes-to-draft writing 5 Theme
6 Framework.
The idea is to use writing to move from the stage of having piles of notes to pulling them together in a piece of continuous writing. The outcome of this process may not be – some would argue should not be – a catalogue but a selection of your notes.
There is no secret to this transformation: write a few sentences. Do some freewriting or generative writing to pull ideas together. It might help – para- doxically – not to have all your ‘materials’, such as papers, chapters, books, notes, photocopies, etc., around you. Clear a space to write about what you have in your notes. The purpose is to distil your notes rather than summarize them comprehensively. This step will also help you to write down your own thoughts, and prevent you from reproducing others’.
1 Warm-up
As a warm-up for writing, do five minutes’ freewriting on how you feel about writing about others’ work or about consolidating your work in a chapter.
Clarify the nature of your writing task:
• What is the purpose of this writing task?
• Are you writing to process your thoughts?
• Are you writing to integrate new ideas with your project?
• Are you writing part of the thesis?
At some point in your doctorate, the last item in this list will be the case, as you will be starting to write drafts of chapters. There is no need to put this off.
You know what chapters look like, what they contain, how long they are, what you are likely to say in a chapter, and so on. What you do not know – yet – is the framework for each chapter.
Clarify the task by writing a prompt or question that identifies the focus for the writing: what is your prompt for writing? Then there is the question of scope: how long will you write for? You can write a list of headings, prompts or questions first, as a framework for your writing, again, before you start to write many sentences or paragraphs.
This produces a focus or starting point for more sustained writing. It helps you grasp the totality of the topic, see the overview, and hold the details together. If you start with the detail you may not see – or may take longer to find – the ‘big picture’. Trust your brain to do the work of remembering and synthesizing – if only for five minutes – and then you can build on that.
The questions and prompts in this section are intended not only to give you something to write about but also to help you structure your writing sessions.
The questions force you to define the writing moment before you start to write. For example, a twenty-minute notes-to-draft session could include four steps:
2 Prompt
Which chapter are you writing?
I am starting to write chapter . . .
3 Distil
Without looking at your notes, write for five minutes on the topic that your notes cover, the topic for the chapter you are drafting.
FROM NOTES TO DRAFT 133
These prompts are a mixture of two types of writing: overview and more detailed. The intention is to enable you to do both, as both are important for sketching the framework for your chapter. It is all too easy to get bogged down in detail and lose sight of the theme of the chapter. On the other hand, you want to develop a relationship between your theme and your notes, so you cannot ignore the detail.
Do not cut-and-paste all your notes into the file for this chapter. That will only make it more difficult to find a theme. If you cut-and-paste all your notes – including notes about others’ writings – into your chapters, you risk shaping your thesis to incorporate these pieces. The process of moving from notes to draft is important for making you think through what might be a quite differ- ent story: your own. Your story should shape your use of your notes, rather than vice versa.
This may seem to oversimplify what is an interaction of your notes and your present moment of thinking and writing, but at this stage you have to take on a more ‘shaping’ role, sketching your own structure for the chapter. In sketching a chapter, you are somehow moving beyond your notes. The chapter will be more than the sum of these parts. There may also be some notes that you will not use, if your emerging argument moves beyond them. Alternatively, you could use them to outline the development of your argument, creating a narrative of the development of your thesis or argument for this chapter. Do not worry about grammar, punctuation, spelling or style as you work through this stage.
Of course, if you have an idea of how they will all hold together, then by all means start importing them from other files. However, it might be a good idea to write down that ‘idea’ in a sentence. You can then use it as a ‘touchstone’ for your selection and for your writing.
The short bursts of writing may help you refine your theme and framework and endure the lack of closure at this stage, as you gradually become more and more sure of what the chapter is about.
4 Notes-to-draft writing
1 Freewriting on your chapter for five minutes: content/‘story’.
2 Write three or four prompts for this chapter (five minutes).
3 Outline the chapter you are drafting for five minutes.
4 Write about a prompt you wrote in Question 2 above (five minutes).
From freewriting to formal writing
• Create an outline.
• Rehearse the point you want to make ‘formally’ orally.
• Write for fifteen minutes on one of your outline headings.
You may, of course, change your mind later, when you revise it further. At a later stage you will want to connect the chapter you are writing now to the others, but, although you may be wondering about this aspect of continuity now, just jot down your ideas, put them to one side and refocus on the task in hand: writing this chapter.
What are the key – the most important – quotations from secondary sources that you feel you want to use? You can add others later. To try to include them all will only make you get bogged down in other people’s ideas and will distract you from your own.