The Creative Process 47
you must alter it, or your creative thinking has taken you on a wild-goose chase, in
which case you must cut the irrelevant material out. But you now have both creative
and logical inputs, and can sit in judgment on the outcome.
A common form of writer’s block is the tendency to attempt to write a sentence
but to endlessly be critical of the word choices and sentence structure, and to edit
it over and over without moving on; and the longer you spend on one sentence, the
more completely you lose the thread of what you were trying to say. This is a direct
example of the creative–critical tension. That is, writer’s block is a particular kind
of failure of the creative process.
My student Theo had a severe case of writer’s block. He would sit at his desk and
type a single word, stare at it for a while, then type another, and then maybe delete
the whole sentence and begin again. We tried several strategies, including writing
first drafts on paper and writing in tiny sentences: ‘We first examined tokens. The
set of tokens is determined by the text being examined. Parsing identifies the tokens
in the text. A minimal structure can then be constructed.’ Yes, this was terrible writ-
ing—but at least it gave him words on the page that he could edit into more mature
text later on. However, the core problem turned out to be deeper. He had been a
part-time student and had lived with his topic for over 6 years, and the ideas had
become so obvious to him that he felt his work was trivial (it wasn’t) and that he
nothing to say. Theo eventually hit on a strategy that worked: he found a colleague,
a PhD student who was unfamiliar with his area, who agreed to meet every day for
a couple of weeks to listen to Theo explain his work. This process showed to Theo
just how interesting and complex his contributions were. Theo wrote down these
explanations, giving him the basis of a couple of chapters, and he gradually gained
confidence in writing.
Joanne had another form of block. She simply couldn’t leave a topic until she
felt that she had completed understood it, even when it was only of marginal impor-
tance—in some cases, this was rather like refusing to ride in a car because of a lack
of understanding of engine mechanics and tyre chemistry. A particularly frustrating
instance was her desire to learn advanced statistics (an area she knew nothing about)
because of the analysis in a paper she cited. As a result her thesis stalled while she
tried to grasp difficult concepts that were well beyond her expertise, and mine too,
for no obvious gain—in this case, she could reasonably take the analysis on trust.
However, I gradually realized that to some extent this behaviour was because she
didn’t like writing, and her exploration of side topics gave her a reason to avoid it.
When I confronted her, she managed to return to a more focused style of working.
In my own PhD, for many months I agonized over every sentence, struggling
to produce even a single brief paragraph in a 2 or 3 hour session. (At that time I
worked with pen and paper.) I then found one day, almost by chance, that I had
suddenly been inspired and had written several pages in less than an hour (in fact
this had happened several times, but I hadn’t reflected on it). I realized that the dif-
ference had been that I had been keen to write about a particular observation, and
had simply jotted down the preliminary material as quickly as I could get my hand
to move across the page. But this preliminary jotting ended up in my thesis with
almost no edits at all—and it flowed much better than my usual ‘agony’ text. From