By Riyad A. Shahjahan
I love writing conceptual pieces. Such pieces help surface the questions or disconnections I feel as I am impacted by real events in the world. It’s like cooking my favorite dishes and tasting the distillation of flavors after a long arduous process. Yet, the process is always messy and tends to be a journey plagued with inadequacy.
“Persuading an octopus in a jar” (p. 181) emerged as one powerful image in a recent study on Phd students identifying metaphors that encapsulated their literature review writing process. I encountered this metaphor in Helen Sword’s (2017) book “Air & Light & Time & Space”. This metaphor really spoke to me and helped me make sense of my own struggles, frustrations and triumphs of writing conceptual pieces, which I will share here. But, unlike those PhD students, I feel my process entailed squeezing two or three octopuses into one jar!
While my emphasis is on conceptual pieces, I hope my reflections inspire you the reader to make sense or affirm your own processes of writing, whether it’s writing a dissertation, empirical article, or a book.
What sparks the conceptual pieces in the first place?
A conceptual piece begins with a feeling or question about something not being right. Or it stems from a “what if” question such as: “if I am to center this particular theory: what would the world look like?; what new questions would we ask?; or what new interpretations would surface?”
Conceptual pieces thus begin with the quest to bridge two or three amorphous things (a phenomenon or ideas). This could range from a particular theorist, to theory, to a school of thought, to a desire to center a body of thought in my field.
For instance, as I dive and sink in affect theory by reading Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Brian Massumi, or Nigel Thrift, a little voice inside me keeps nagging. “How do their ideas apply to the object of my current analysis like global university rankings, globalization, faculty work, and/or teaching and learning?” Such questions like seeds stay dormant until suddenly I start to pay attention to these particular seeds and start to water them. And then the real hard work begins.
Embracing a journey with uncertainty and internal gremlins
I usually start free writing. Writing is my road trip to search for and discover the interconnections. Sometimes, the journeys are smooth, but mostly are uncertain. Precarity comes with the territory. It entails not knowing if the connection even exists, or if the connection is just another figment of my imagination. Or where is the evidence that they are indeed connected? As I write, I seek to understand the concept itself, and also search for evidence to evaluate whether there is a connection. The process feels like trying to take two octopuses that don’t look the same, but somehow squeeze them into one jar.
While I embrace and enjoy the thrills of living in the spirit of discovery and intellectual curiosity, I simultaneously battle to pull through with my inner doubts, inadequacies, impostor feelings, and lack of confidence. Pride also takes a hit. My inner gremlins amplify my lack of understanding or competency in the theory itself. They question my ability to apply it or wonder if I will ever find relevant evidence. There is always a rush of mixed emotions.
How do I manage my inner gremlins and embrace uncertainty in the process?
Faith in my process is what keeps me going. It is the firm belief that, at the end of this road trip, a connection will emerge. My intuition (or inner knowing) nurtures me with the idea that indeed there are connections and writing will help me one day “taste” or “find” it. Writing for me is an act of hope holding some form of promise that indeed I will one day discover and reach or build the bridge, and I will see it in print.
Meditation helps a lot to let go of the inner gremlins. I also go through several drafts to discover the interconnections. Reading other articles that come closer to what my article could look like also helps.
Once a rough draft is done, a glimmer of hope surfaces. Now I know I can at least share the rough sketches of my inklings with others and get some feedback. Getting feedback helps to verify if indeed my ideas make sense to others. However, the revision process is still tedious. It still feels like squeezing an octopus into a jar with all of its tentacles. Once I try to insert one tentacle, the others rush out, and it’s hard to manage all those tentacles. Writing continues to be my saviour. The very act of writing helps: alleviate the tensions in my mind and body; keep those tentacles in check; and bring the octopuses together.
Letting go of pride and perfectionism also helps. Joseph Moxley’s notion of playing the “believing game” rather than “doubting game” anchors me in my path. Reminding myself of my past record with previous publications helps too.
Producing such conceptual pieces takes a long time. Usually a year on average. Nevertheless, the process is getting faster now because I now work with others more. The journey is less lonely and my collaborators give me hope. I have also started to accept my messy process.
In short, the following ingredients helped in keeping hope and momentum alive: Writing drafts; free writing; playing the believing game; meditation; sharing drafts with colleagues and students; journaling the doubts; being disciplined and working on it constantly with hope that it will resolve itself; working with other people’s feedback; revising my ideas tied to a larger argument; reading a lot; maintaining hope and excitement that I can’t wait to see the final product, and I won’t see the latter if I don’t do anything about it now.
Finally, I manage to squeeze the octopuses into the jar. It feels so good to see those octopuses finally swimming together.
Yet, I am left ruminating. Was the hard work worth it? Did my strategies help make the process more enjoyable or less troublesome? Are there better ways of doing this? Do the two octopuses get along in the jar? Reflections on the process helps resolve some of these questions.
Overall, it’s this ambivalent writing process and the underlying ‘cruel optimism’ that keeps me coming back for more (Berlant, 2011). I have started to accept that it’s being at the edges of not knowing and building faith in the process that inspires me to come back for more and find more octopuses to fit into jars!
So, what feelings and metaphors drive your writing? What inner gremlins surface as you write? What metaphors would best describe your challenges, frustrations, and/or triumphs in writing? What strategies help you in taming such challenges? I hope my reflections open up your own metaphoric reflections in the writing process.
Photo by Serena Repice Lentini on Unsplash