How to get over writer's block related to revising?
I'm a PhD Student in the social sciences. When I do focused free-writing on a topic, my thoughts just fly out and I can easily generate 600-800 words an hour of relatively high quality text. However, whenever I think of starting to revise, I freeze up.
EDIT: I love free-writing, it is often very liberating to just let my thoughts out, and I'm often astonished and pleased with the thoughts that I generate. I'm not very picky about grammar/punctuation/word choice, and I'm not particularly afraid of being judged. However, when I start to revise, and the changes are bigger than correcting grammar or clarifying sentences, things get difficult. When I think of restructuring a text (deleting/adding major constructs, changing the flow of the argument) I feel stuck. It feels as if the task is too great to take on.
Am I perhaps making a mistake in thinking that I can "revise", when actually what I should be doing is to delete my text (or at least certain paragraphs) outline it again and rewrite it completely?
Does anyone have any advice/recommended literature/techniques for revising (or perhaps reconstructing) academic texts effectively?
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I hope this is helpful. It's something that I discovered during the process of writing my first book. Like you, I love the process of initial creation, and I did that for a while, just setting aside editing for content-generation. When it came time to prepare the book proposal (non-fiction), I had to go back and do some editing to get the sample writing solid.
What I discovered was that editing is a completely separate process from writing, and if I held them in comparison, I was screwing myself. So I started to just treat editing as a fun thing to do, and instead of focusing on creating, I focused on finding rhythm and polish. I imagined reading it out loud to a group, and feeling how it flowed. Did it trip up my tongue? Was there a sentence or a paragraph that just didn't flow? Was there a section where I felt like I was losing the audience? How could I make it flow so that it would be fun for me to stand up and read it out loud?
Just as I used imagination to generate content in the first place, I used imagination differently during editing, and found that I was having just as much fun that way. Starting a session feeling what I would feel reading the early draft to a group, and then noticing how much better I felt imagining reading my polished work out loud, was all the motivation I needed. Now I actually look forward to editing just as much as I look forward to writing, sometimes even more, depending on the day.
It's all art, it's all craft, and it all comes from imagination....
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/6501. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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You've got the seeds of your answer in your edit. When you write, you're just dumping. Whatever comes to mind, without structure or discipline, and who among us doesn't love the sound of your own voice?
But when you're done, now you have to shape your thoughts into a coherent argument. And for some people, that's not particularly fun. (In fiction, this is called "discovery writing" or "pantsing," as in "writing by the seat of your pants.")
Reverse-engineering an outline from your logorrhea sounds like the simplest plan. Take each sentence or thought of your dump and figure out what topic it belongs to: psychology, talk therapy, pathology, chemical treatment (or whatever your topics are). Make one document for each topic idea. Copy each sentence or thought into the relevant document. (Scrivener is fantastic for this.)
Now you have four or five separate documents with a paragraph each. Move the individual sentences around until you have something coherent, and add transitions as needed. Thread the paragraphs back together and you have a more structured essay.
This is essentially the reverse of the technique I described in my answer to this question. See if that's useful to you.
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