It might be that when you would do a smaller project, say for a course, you could read or engage with visual pieces and then write or create your own piece in a number of hours over a few days – you might have remembered much of what you read or thought when you viewed a piece of work and could incorporate those ideas in your writing. DON’T TRY THIS IN DIV III.
You are doing a sustained project and your thinking will change as you engage with new sources. Yet, your most powerful writing and thinking will be right as you read a new piece or see a new piece of art for the first time. WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU READ AND SEE WHEN YOUR IDEAS ARE UNFOLDING. That is how you can get power into your writing.
So, read and then write about that piece – read and write, read and write. Even stop and write as you read – what is this author/artist saying? How does it connect to what I already know and believe? What questions does this raise? How is it similar or different from what another author/artist said or did?
You are not writing a Div III at this moment. You are writing about ideas in order to get at what you will ultimately want to say. Eventually, you will be ready to write across the pieces you are producing and you can use some of what you wrote in these small pieces. They will have more power and detail than what you would have been able to recollect later – and you won’t have to go back and find the article, chapter, book, where you found that idea (go to the October 17th workshop in the library on managing your research). Even if you have a Div III that is an artistic production of some sort, you want to track your ideas as you have them.
Besides writing when ideas are fresh and capturing the appropriate detail, reading and writing right away means you will never suffer from having a blank page! Plus, you can set a goal for yourself about how many pieces you can read and write about in a week. You can share that writing with your committee and they can engage with the ideas with you – helping you think about what else to read and how to focus your thinking.
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