The three R's of writing: reading, "riting," and risking.

In my last Career Management column (April 1997, Volume 23, Issue #4), I talked about the value of becoming a Fellow of ACPE. One of the ways of attaining Fellowship is by making contributions to the field of medical management through writing. I suspect many of you have thought about writing articles and, yet, put it off. Here are some processes that can help you produce satisfying written documents: reading, "riting," risking.

Reading

Step one, reading, is usually easy for physicians. You are accustomed to reading constantly to keep up-to-date in your field and when your interests shift to the management arena, you easily transfer that discipline to management literature.

Read the kind of literature you want to write, The Physician Executive Journal, Modern Healthcare, Group Practice Journal. Read to expand your horizons: Forbes, The Economist. Read for pleasure: novels, short stories, poems. Read it all. You can't write in a vacuum. You have to put in new ideas to mix around with your own. You never know what will spark the original, creative thought.

Writing regularly and risking may be new behavior for you. (Bear with me, reader, I'll explain what you are risking in the third part of the article.)

"Riting"

Writing without the "W," without the why, without the judgment. Many of us have ideas for articles, but as soon as a thought occurs to us, we judge it in some way: No one will be interested. I don't have enough research to support the idea. I don't have the time. I just don't want to expend the effort it will take to organize my thoughts. If we could just start writing and suspend the judgment, we could get the basic ideas for the article on paper and then have something to work with.

"The secret of success in getting words down on paper is learning to adopt a crucial attitude that is new for most people: a sense of trust that when you have the germ of an idea or even just the hankering for one, you will be led sooner or later to the words you are looking for if you just start in writing." (1) "... You discover that by just starting to write and forcing yourself to keep on, you eventually find what you are looking for. And you didn't even know what you were looking for." (2)

"Writing calls on two skills that are so different that they usually conflict with each other: creating and criticizing." (1) Writing is the most difficult when we try to do these things at the same time. If you could do first one and then the other, you would find the writing process much easier.

You can create and get words on the page by using a process called freewriting. "To do a freewriting exercise, simply force yourself to write without stopping for 10 minutes," (1) without worrying about spelling, punctuation, or grammar. If you can't think of anything to write, just keep writing over and over--I can't think of anything. I can't think of anything. Eventually you will think of something. More ideas will occur to you if you keep writing than if you just sit and think.

Freewriting is a way of brainstorming. "... The power of brainstorming [is that] no one is allowed to criticize any idea or suggestion that is offered--no matter how stupid, impractical, or useless it seems. You can't get the good ones and the fruitful interaction among the odd ones unless you welcome the terrible ones. Besides, you don't really know which ideas are good or terrible until later." (1) Freewriting allows you to brainstorm by yourself. The fast, non-stop writing doesn't allow for the usual type of judgment of each idea. "Freewriting exercises are push-ups in withholding judgment as you produce, so that afterwards you can judge better." (1) As you brainstorm, let out drivel, plan your day, set goals, get organized in a very disorganized way. This process gives you access to information you don't get any other way. Creativity is messy, involves chaos, is a breaking down of structure to build something new.

Sometimes, listening to music while you freewrite helps produce words. It doesn't matter what kind. I have found all of these inspiring: Beethoven's "Piano Concerto # 5," the theme song from "Chariots of Fire," and Vince Gil's "Go Rest High On That Mountain."

As you freewrite, try to keep judgment out of the process as much as possible. If you can't decide which of three words you like, write them all down without taking time to decide which one fits best. "You'll write more quickly and naturally if you are not always struggling for the exact word or phrase." Don't look up how to spell a word. Just put "sp" above it and keep writing. If you can't decide whether to use who or whom, he/him or she/her, put both down and keep writing. It is important not to trigger the editing impulse when you are generating ideas. "What prevents most people from being inventive and creative is fear of looking foolish. After all, if you just let words and ideas come out without checking them first, some may indeed be stupid. But when you know that this is just the first of two stages, and that you are getting more and more critical in the second stage, you feel safer writing freely, tapping intuition, and going out on limbs. You will be more creative." (1)

Here's an example of freewriting that is absolute nonsense, but the sentences that came right after it were coherent, and I used them in this article:

So I wake up at 5:30 or 6:00. Can't remember which. One of those times each morning. It's 7:00 and I have 2 pages that are pretty decent. It's 7:00am. Walk, take Rusty to the vet, pack, curl hair. Continue to clean up office. Read paper maybe. Call man about pine needles. I have 7 bails left over. Tell them to come next Wed. So I planted the roses. I feel good. A lot has happened this week. So keep writing. Talk about the reading part. Read the kind of literature you want to write. Think of the titles later. They already know everything about reading....

Freewriting can help you empty out interfering feelings when you need to get a writing project done. "Freewriting is a useful outlet. We have lots in our heads that makes it hard to think straight and write clearly: We are mad at someone, sad about something, depressed about everything. Perhaps even inconveniently happy: 'How can I think about this report when I'm so in love?' Freewriting is a quick outlet for these feelings, so they don't get so much in your way when you are trying to write about something else. Sometimes your mind is marvelously clear after 10 minutes of telling someone on paper everything you need to tell him." (1)

Editing requires a different state of mind and should be done later in the writing process. "To be critical, you have to be doubting, detached, uninvested in the idea to be criticized ... If you separate the writing process into two stages, you can exploit these opposing muscles one at a time: first be loose and accepting as you do fast early, writing; then be critically tough-minded as you revise what you have produced. What you'll discover is that these two skills used alternately don't undermine each other at all, they enhance each other." (1) Later, when you edit, you can get rid of as much repetition as possible, put the objective or subjective form of pronouns in their proper places, spell everything correctly, and correct the grammar.

Risking

A third technique for producing words that may be new to you is to read aloud what you have written to some other people. If you can find two or three people who are interested in doing some writing, get together once a month and read something to them. Two or three sessions of group reading will help you produce enough material for an article. You don't all have to do the same kind of writing--part of a scientific piece, a management article, or a poem are all acceptable. It doesn't matter.

Run the group in a very specific way. Meet once a month. Ask each person to bring one page of writing. It can be a handwritten page on notebook paper or a typed page, but no more than one page. Read it aloud to the group and ask for answers to these three questions: What did you hear the loudest? Where did you want to know more? Where were you confused? You don't have to answer the last question if there was no place you were confused. If a listener doesn't hear something loudest, then the writer probably hasn't been clear enough or hasn't gotten to the truth of an issue yet.

Here are some things not to do in the writing group: Don't allow the session to become a judgment fest. Don't correct grammar. Don't tell the writer how to fix something. This group activity is a place to draw forth creativity from all the participants. Creativity does not just refer to producing poems or short stories. Creativity can be producing clear, interesting sentences on a management topic that has been sifted through your own experience as a physician executive. If you start judging and fixing, the flow of creativity will dry up. If you can keep harsh judgment out of the writing group, you will have an environment where more words will come to everyone in between sessions. If one of the participants is a friend who will help you edit later, wonderful, but don't do it when the group meets.

You might convene one more time for the purpose of editing, but it is generally better to ruthlessly edit yourself or get a trained editor to go over your document. If you are editing yourself, try reading the document first thing every morning for a week. You will notice spelling and grammatical errors, as well as transitions that need to be added and what information needs to be filled in. When you write about a subject that you have read much about, sometimes you leave out information that is so familiar to you that you think everyone must already know it, but the reader new to the topic needs it. "Most people ... save time by waiting to the very end before worrying about mistakes in grammar and usage." (1)

Editing is extremely important at the end of the process. Judgment is necessary. No one wants to read all the convoluted rambling of your thinking. As Mary Munter of the Amos Tuck Business School at Dartmouth says, "Don't do a data dump on your reader. Ineffective communicators present information the way they thought of it. Thinking is very different from communication." The reader doesn't want to see every idea you had. They want to read the best part in a logical order with no spelling or grammatical errors. Elbow says, "Every word omitted keeps another reader with you." (2)

To edit, a lot of people swear by Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Truthfully, I still use my Harbrace College Handbook that I had to practically memorize when I took advanced grammar in undergraduate school. When I need to know something, I visually know where to flip through and find it. Get some kind of reference book, flip through it, and become comfortable with the way it looks. "Even if you are writing informally for friends, you must take care to get rid of these mistakes. Your friends may say, "Oh, who cares about trivial details of correctness, but, in fact, most people are prejudiced, even if unconsciously, against writing flawed in this way. They are more apt to ... take [your writing] less seriously or hold back from experiencing what you are saying if there are mistakes in mechanics." (3)

My having said that, you will expect to never see or hear a grammatical error from me again. It's not true. I value correctness. I give it my best shot. I have editors to help me, and still I may make what some would consider a mechanical mistake. I care more about the content, the heart of the message, than I do about every word being exactly correct. I thought the rule of never ending with a preposition was ridiculous, and I occasionally ignore it. Wes Curry, ACPE's book editor, often quotes a book called Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblin's--she says even an infinitive can occasionally be split. (4)

These three processes--reading, riting, and risking--can help you produce written documents--articles, book chapters, books. It's possible to use the first two and get the job done. Bringing in the third process, risking, makes you vulnerable, but whenever I've done it, I've produced quickly more words that others have responded well to and that I've been proud of.

References

(1.) Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

(2.) Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

(3.) Munter, Mary. Test Tutorial, Tampa, Florida, May 10, 1997. (She is also author of an excellent book, Guide to Managerial Communication, 4th edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997).

(4.) Bernstein, T. Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblin's. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1971.

Barbara J. Linney, MA, is the Director of Career Development at the American College of Physician Executives in Tampa, Florida and a member of its faculty. She can be reached at 800/562-8088.