Some years ago in another life, I co-authored a booklet for the Open University with my esteemed colleague, the late Dr Jim Lane. We wanted to help students develop critical thinking skills which would enable them to progress in their academic writing.
Here, I'm presenting some of the more general pertinences from our work. Some of it is applicable to creative writing.
As you progress, studying becomes harder, because having completed work/study already, you are no longer the person you once were. That's important. Do you remember when you'd write and any old writing would do? Once you start developing critical faculties through wide reading, studying or a writing group, you realise that you are capable of so much more so writing becomes harder as you make greater skills demands upon yourself. However, like studying for a degree, you develop skills as you go, making you more competent to tackle the task in hand. Writing is harder but you become better at it!
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher born in 544 BC, said “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Basically, it means that people change all the time, and situations change around them all the time too. That applies to writing.
Usually, the more we know, the more we narrow our interests, similarly to going through school and working with a curriculum. What you lose in breadth, you compensate for in depth. We move through levels of understanding and ability to communicate ...
In academic writing, they are as follows:
Level 1 - describe, analyse and interpret defined aspects of your subject
Level 2 - apply your knowledge and understanding to a range of issues, questions and relevant problems. Critically evaluate and interpret.
Level 3 - jackpot! Select and use established techniques of analysis and enquiry outside the context in which they were first studied, yet be aware of their limitations. Synthesise (key word), critically evaluate and challenge information, arguments and assumptions from different sources. Recognise the potential uncertainty, ambiguity and limits of knowledge.
You can see how academic writing becomes much more complex but simultaneously much more rewarding. The skills in level 3 are summed up in the phrase "critical thinking". Think how you might apply these levels to creative writing.
It is not enough to keep these skills to yourself, for you need to be able to communicate them. For those who are overawed by the idea of writing a factual article or book, this probably applies.
Behold the blank screen! You may feel overwhelmed by the writing task ahead. Often, there is no one right way, no one right answer. However, answering a question is invariably more interesting that reading mere description. A description of a striptease is less interesting than an understanding of why the person does it in the first place.
Writing involves accessing your own creative imagination (yes, even academic writing).
What's that then? All of us, not just great poets or writers, have a creative imagination, which includes interpreting our life experiences, combining ideas to make sense of events, and using words to communicate. Much of the time, we don't realise how powerful this is. We don't trust our own abilities but to have critical thinking requires exactly this.
What creative thinkers do is 'nag' at a problem before finding a solution.
Often ideas pop into your head at the strangest of times, when in the bath, washing up, walking or waiting for a train. Most assignments, be they academic or creative involve you doing some research. If you are writing factual material you need a systematic record of your references as it is very time-consuming to do retrospectively.
The next post will be on essay writing ...
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