What goes on in a writing workshop or training session?

Picture the scene...
You're feeling nervous, unsure, even a little apprehensive. You've driven to unfamiliar territory, parked your car in an unfamiliar location (will you get clamped? are you sure??) and found your way to the venue of the training session. You look for Reception; thankfully it's located by the door, where you would expect. "Excuse me, can you tell me where Room B304 is please?" you ask. "Of course," the receptionist replies, "you just go along this corridor, through the second set of double doors on your left, up the stairs, then turn right, along the corridor, and it's there on your left opposite the lifts." You say thanks and set off along the corridor she pointed at, having almost instantly forgotten her instructions, looking for some stairs or lifts... finally you find B304. You're 5 minutes late - people are already sat in there looking at a speaker at the front - what will happen when you enter? You push the door open...

Well, I've had this experience twice in the last couple of weeks (one time the lateness was my fault; the other it was not). I went to a half-day session teaching one thing, and a separate unrelated full-day session teaching something else. Both sessions were good, engaging and useful, although neither gave me exactly what I was hoping for.

The first (half-day) session was not what I expected at all; to be honest it was really good, but its description did not match what it delivered, which was a shame as I imagine that the people there - myself included I suppose - didn't get out of it what we were hoping for. I went along wanting and expecting to learn X, but came away having practiced and learnt how to do Y. It's useful being able to do Y, but I was hoping to learn to do X that day, and I've come away still not knowing how to X. If the session was relabelled "How to do Y" instead of "How to do X" then I think more people would get more out of it. I'm talking in vague, general terms here because I don't think it would be fair to criticise an individual or a workshop in the public sphere. Especially since it was useful and enjoyable but just mis-described.

The second session was a one-day writing workshop. I like writing, and I write prolifically: diaries (I've written a diary almost every day since I was 12, and I still do) along with all manner of other stuff like ideas, rants, stories, letters, poems.... and as I'm a hoarder too I've still got just about all of these things. I had a quick look through my box of books a year or so ago and I estimate that I've got about 10 million words in those diaries, poem books and thoughts/rants. That's not including my work from school / college / uni, and my work stuff (teaching materials), books I've written, emails and other digital stuff. That's probably another 5-10 million words. Quite a lot, huh? As a child/teen I wanted to be an author, and I heard someone say "If you want to be a writer, then write - diaries, poems, thoughts, anything - just write, and you will become a writer." So yes in one sense I already am a writer (I've published a few books already which I guess most people haven't accomplished before they start their PhD). 

Amount of stuff I've written

...But in another very real sense, I am not a writer, because the majority of what I write is rubbish. I can write about what happened at the weekend when we went to the park, and I can make up witty poems by replacing the words of songs with other words, and I can write down thoughts I'm wondering about, but is this really a useful PhD skill? I'm not sure that it is. I don't think this is impostor syndrome - it seems genuinely true that my diaries etc are 99% drivel.

Amount of good stuff I've written

Of course, some people - most people, it seems - struggle to write their own stuff; they read and read  and read and make notes, but then putting forward their own argument is a battle for them, and it must be a very real battle; I'm not saying it's not, because writing 100,000 words is no mean feat when you sit and stare at a blank page / screen and don't know what to write.

But my problem is sort of the opposite. I write so much, and then I have to sift through it to find the gems. There are some gems in there, but I have to get my metaphorical hands dirty sifting through seven tons of shit in order to find them; that's bad enough, but knowing that I'm the one who piled all the shit on there in the first place can make it doubly irritating!
  
I think the writing workshop was geared more towards people who struggle to find their 'voice' or to put something of themselves into their research, but as with the other half-day session, I  got something useful out of it. it was suggested that we write out our thesis onto big paper (A0) with coloured sticky notes. I've mapped out my thesis with pen and paper before, but I did it anyway, and suddenly realised that the order of my thesis is back-to-front: the order would work better - and as a narrative - with harm at the front (the 'problem') and consent as the latter chapters (the 'solution'). the sticky notes or the environment or the course leader or something or other helped me realise this.

We also practiced freewriting, which is writing continuously for a set time like 5 minutes, and not stopping. Even if you don't know what to write, write anything at all which comes to mind, and if nothing comes to mind then write that nothing is coming to mind! Since I'm an over-writer I thought freewriting would be my worst enemy, adding more shit onto the already massive shit pile that is my writing - but I think it worked well actually. One of the freewriting briefs was to think of my thesis as a movie and what would be the opening scene (my freewriting on this is shown below - not bad for 5 minutes of braindumping!) Another freewriting brief was to only write questions - again really useful. 

How to write: Put your pen on the paper and move it around, 

making circles and lines which people recognise. Easy, huh?

Both sessions were useful actually, but for different reasons, and although neither gave me the magical thesis-writing epiphany that I was (perhaps unrealistically) hoping for, they will push me forwards to do better. Both sessions have made me think of the thesis as a creative piece as much as it is a work of fact. I can tick all the boxes while still producing something which is fairly dull, or I can still tick the boxes but make it more engaging - the latter may be more difficult but probably more rewarding and more appealing.

One thing I took away from the sessions (besides a couple of biscuits and an apple) was to have a dramatic opening - I tried to recreate one at the start of this blog post. Did it draw you in and make you excited to learn more? (In case you're wondering, I didn't get clamped at either place, thankfully, but the £12 car parking fee which I forked out to park at one of the sessions wasn't far off the price of a parking ticket!)

These training sessions for uni have shown me (or re-shown me, as I think I've thought this before) that sometimes, you get out of it what you put into it. I don't just mean that because I spent £12 on car parking, I got £12 worth of food out of the day, although that may well be true - mmm, biscuits! I mean that even when I didn't get what I expected or hoped for, I got something which I can use to move forwards. 

Freewriting: If my thesis were a film, what would the opening scene look like?

(I corrected the spelling mistakes but left the content intact).

Robots, their red eyes glowing, emerging from the blackened and bloodied bodies piled high, dismembered body parts everywhere, screams and groans from behind them. The robots trampling with their metallic feet onto the dead faces of humans - children, the elderly, disabled people, all being cut to pieces and walked on by robots, the robots destroying people, shooting laser beams in the distance, onto people, into the bloodied eye sockets of dead people, their faces with horror expressions, the way they looked when they died. Then the camera pans out, and we see that it is faded, unreal, in a memory cloud or imagination of an old person, smiling to herself, laughing even, telling her daughter that that’s what she’d imagined when she’d heard that she was going to be looked after by a robot in her old age. The horror of it. The Terminator, I Robot, killer robots, all these fears that the robots would go crazy and hurt people and trample on their bodies and their feelings, couldn’t have been more wrong, because here she is surrounded by human carers working alongside care robots, who are courteous, diligent, and yes even caring. They bring her her food, they take her for a bath, they are polite in their conversations and they are always punctual, never angry, they can play games and have a joke, they always remember the things she says and the way she prefers things to be done, and so in many ways they are far better than human carers, who have their own lives, who can be forgetful, annoyed, or irritable or just having a bad day. The robots aren’t like that.