Creativity on a Deadline: An Experiment
A. R. Bledsoe
[Reading time: 6 minutes]
Today I’ll give the promised results from my writing efficiency experiment and I’m also going to tweak my plan a little bit. I will also share encouragement and insight for writers who have yet to develop their writing process (as I am).
What do you do when your plan doesn’t come through? Well, you get out your plan and cross out all the wrong parts, of course, and then you try again. When I was studying to go to medical school, I learned A LOT about experiments, research, and crunching all the fun numbers and letters and Greek symbols and computer algorithms (thanks, Physics II lab). No matter how complex the experiment was, there was one step-by-step course of action called the Scientific Method.:
- Observe (this is done the whole time, not just at the beginning)
- Hypothesize,
- Plan (a step I don’t think they teach in high school)
- Experiment
- Fail (my added step)
- Re-Plan
- Experiment
- Fail
- Re-Plan
- Experiment
- Fail
- Probably Re-Hypothesize at this point
- Experiment. Experiment. Experiment.
- Then maybe your work will be accepted as Scientific Law, but more than likely will be published in a science/medical journal
Honest to goodness, many of these things I put on the list were words I heard from my professors’ mouths, and I found that they were right.
So how do you get a plan that works?
For one, you need to be a good observer and you need a solid hypothesis. One class I remember vividly was Organic Chemistry Class I & II (I took the second one cause I loved the class and the professor that much). The lab portion of this class was the most detailed and structured lab I’ve ever taken--especially in chemistry. We had to come to lab with a plan and a list of all the substances we would be using and which ones would burn our skin off. If we didn’t have the plan, we couldn’t be in lab. (I might have missed a lab or two because of this). When we made it into lab, we had to write detailed observations of how the experiment was going and what we were doing. I was terrible at this.
Observe.
The reason I was bad at putting my plan into action was that I had no idea what I was doing. I had simply copied my plan out of my lab book and spent no time trying to understand it- or observe it.
Don’t do that. Don’t copy my plan and put it in your lab book unless you have truly observed the process and understand how it applies to you. For example, if you are just starting a book, you might need weeks of planning and building up content before you even begin to write. Plan and re-plan until you get a plan that works! Use other plans as suggestions, but don’t hold to them if it doesn’t work for you! Luckily, if your writing plan doesn’t work out, you won’t get burned, go blind, or be unintentionally poisoned. You’ll just say, “That sucks.” And try again.
Luckily, if your writing plan doesn’t work out, you won’t get burned, go blind, or be unintentionally poisoned. You’ll just say, “That sucks.” And try again.
Hypothesize.
An experiment is only a plan if it doesn’t have a hypothesis behind it. Re-read that sentence- actually, I’ll write it again: An experiment is only a plan if it doesn’t have a hypothesis behind it.
That’s my own thought and it might be crazy, but to me, it isn’t. A hypothesis defines the experiment. It is what you hope will happen, it’s the goal you want to achieve. You can’t conduct an experiment or complete a story if you don’t have a goal, all you will have is an aimless plan which leads you around and around in circles for forty-odd years.
You can’t conduct an experiment or complete a story if you don’t have a goal, all you will have is an aimless plan which leads you around and around in circles for forty-odd years.
If you have a what but no why you’re going to be lost! You can plan and plan and do experiments, but you’ll never reach your goal because you didn’t have one to begin with, or maybe it wasn’t obtainable. Now when I say “it wasn’t obtainable”, I don’t mean “you are not good enough”. I mean that goals have to accept some parts of reality. For example, I can make a goal to write a book in one day. I can write a book that’s 3,000 words for that’s my average number of words written per day. My book might not be great nor will it have a great book cover- but it’s a book and I fulfilled my hypothesis/goal. However, if I have too much coffee and feel the world is at my feet so much so that I make a goal of writing a top-selling three-hundred page novel in one day, I’m probably going to have to re-hypothesize.
...if I have too much coffee and feel the world is at my feet so much so that I make a goal of writing a top-seller three-hundred page novel in one day, I’m probably going to have to re-hypothesize.
A big part of lab was just learning how to make a good goal/hypothesis. If you have a story or are in the middle of one, stop everything and write down your goal of what you want to accomplish. A wise quote from the book of Habakkuk says, “Write down the vision and make it plain so that whoever reads it may run with it.” This so reflects the scientific method because one huge aspect of your entire project is that it needs to be clear and precisely written so that it can be replicated. This means you can use the same method for every book, article, or paper you write and be confident that you have a formula that reaches your goal. So write down your goal, make it clear, and write down your process. This is why I am writing this blog in the first place! If it’s not for anyone else, it’s for me to document what worked and what didn’t.
