I am a scribbler. I have piles of notebooks and notepads and bits of paper in folders and scraps of files on my PC full of notes and scribbles and ideas (in various stages of being worked through). This is not really a super-efficient system, because I have too many ideas and notes in too many places, but they are somewhat thematised and organised – it’s a work in progress. The point I want to make in this post has to do with the value of the scribbles, not the filing of these (although we’ll get to that).

When you undertake something like a PhD, you envision from the beginning that final, formal, written meisterwerk you will toil and toil and toil over for at least three years of your life. You think a lot about producing all those words, and this produces a lot of anxiety and also a real feeling of anticipation. A LOT of different kinds of thinking, reading and writing have to go into producing that meisterwerk. It follows that you need different places to do these kinds of reading, thinking and writing. I keep reading and research journals, and I read and write at my desk, on the couch (often results in naps, though), and also in the car on the way to work (often on my phone), or in the garden on a sunny day. I try to make it less like a chore, although this is not always possible. I think you need to see value in doing small, informal, scribbly writing as well as more formal, ‘this goes into the thesis’ forms of writing. You need to see all of the small bits of thinking and ‘percolating’ (my friend Deb’s very apt term) that you do as moving you forward, but it can be hard to do this if you don’t keep track of all of this steady progress.

I think that PhD students put a lot of pressure on themselves to produce pages of formal writing that they can send to their supervisor, to indicate progress and on which to receive feedback and often tend to feel like unless the writing or reading they are doing is ending up in The Thesis, it’s not all that valuable. I’d like to challenge this. I did this to myself, especially in the beginning of my PhD. I made loads of notes, very formally, and kept trying to write chapters way before I was ready to. After I learnt to keep a research journal, I relaxed a little, and started to enjoy scribbling bits and pieces of ideas and thinking, connecting dots or creating new dots to think about. I still worried a lot about producing the formal words, but I could see that the scribbling was slowly but surely moving me forward, especially in weeks where an hour of scribbling the whole week was all I could manage. There were a lot of weeks like this, and if I had not been scribbling I would not have been doing much of anything except searching databases and saving new papers I was not getting around to reading (I’m not sure this counts as PhD work, really).

There has to be a balance between formal and informal academic work – I don’t think you can write a whole thesis in scribbles (sadly). You need to move between informal and formal forms of writing and thinking – the PhD dissertation is a very sophisticated form of academic writing and thinking, and requires a lot of its writer. But, I suppose I am arguing for more value to be placed on the informal kinds of thinking, reading and writing that you can do rather than seeing these as silly, or less worthy of your time. Without these initial and ongoing forays into the scribbles, drawings and informal ramblings, you may try to rush towards doing the formal, academic, this-goes-into-the-thesis writing before you are ready. If you do, this may well reflect in the feedback you receive, and this could end up being demotivating or really hurtful and difficult to deal with.

I think the bottom line, annoying and trite as this may well sound, is that writing and everything that goes into making writing possible is a process, and it unfolds in pieces over time, sometimes smoothly and sometimes in a very bumpy fashion. If we can try to hold onto the process and trust that the product in the form of the meisterwerk will come, we can probably find it easier to indulge the scribbling and drawing and less formal work that can push our thinking forward, can provide more creative outlets for us to do our academic work, and can make for very interesting reading when the process is at an end. So, scribble, scribble, scribble – the toil will be worth the trouble ;).