Developing a Sustainable Summer Writing Practice
On June 2nd I’ll be giving a workshop for the PHD+ program here on how to develop a sustainable summer writing practice. This session will be one of the opening discussions for a daylong event that asks PhD students to take their research topic and transform it across a range of different formats: podcasts, websites, and zines. The goal for my part is to collect a number of different writing activities to show examples for how one might experiment with writing practice. For me, sustainable writing can be found through regular work, joy, and playing with constraints. To get there, I suggest students do the following:
- Experiment with different formats for writing. For this I discuss otter.ai.
- Distinguish between the different phases of the writing process and sit down with a clear goal in mind.
- Scale up to a daily practice rather than experimenting to start with tons of words each day.
- Incorporate free writing (hat tip to Sean Michael Morris here for his beautiful approach to the craft).
- Incorporate stochastic practice as a means to jolt your creativity. I’ll use Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck here.
I then close with a short activity that asks students to brainstorm the different components for a practice of their own: format, location, frequency, amount, and method. After jotting a few ideas each for each category, I’ll guide them through a discussion of how to remix these components into something that works for them. Slides follow below. The particular deck theme I used was food themed, which felt appropriate.
