310 Part V: Integrating Your Learning
Our ways of getting a book to completion are quite different, though. Kate’s
more likely to outline her ideas and illustrate them with stories. Romilla
drops her ideas into her visual maps on the computer, using the same software
as Kate, yet with the facility to see ideas as floating topics rather than
connected to a central idea, because this approach gives her the flexibility
to slot headings together as she expands on them. She uses a voice-capture
program to ‘engage with and talk to’ her imaginary audience. She learnt this
process from her good friend, Rintu. When she started by typing, completing
her work took ages because she felt compelled to edit as she went along.
Now she is a much faster ‘writer’ and her language is more natural.
From our two exemplars, you could create a model that would include some
core stages for how to write a book chapter, although differences do exist
between the exemplars. A description of the core model (in other words, the
bits that are the same) that you might get when modelling Kate and Romilla
would look like this:
- Gather background information – surf the net, meet people, read, or
listen to CDs.
- Create a visual map of ideas.
- Draft text in Microsoft Word.
- Revise text.
- Deliver computer files to editorial deadline (90 per cent of the time!).
As you spend more time with the exemplars, you’re likely to need to take one
specific aspect of their process and break that into sub-processes, and dwell
on the details for a while. You might also begin to notice things not made
explicit, such as strategies for mulling over ideas and the part that less
obvious activities such as walking and meditation play in working to get
clarity of thought. You might also notice the fact that one writer also scribbles
lots of long hand-written notes in a café while another records ideas into a
tape recorder as part of their drafting process. If you were to model a third
writer, you may notice their habit of spending a whole morning rearranging
one page of text with infinite patience at the editing stage. Each writer works
in their own way; the test is whether the model takes you to the desired end
result of delivering an acceptable manuscript on time.
A book may be in an author’s head for many years before it reaches
publication. As an expert in modelling who’s currently refining her own
work for publication, Fran suggests that modellers need incredible patience.
She has been working with modellers for over ten years and only now feels
she has identified the many structures behind the process of modelling.
Incidentally, she also recognises that every modeller she has met finds being
modelled themselves in any modelling methodology other than their own
very difficult. ‘They don’t respond to it. Modellers tend to live their model
and they are wedded to it,’ she says. Your mental models are central to your
identity.
