Writer’s Block notes towards an autoethnography

OK an odd blog post, mostly for me. First a listing of the writing projects that have gone nowhere this year. As I was writing this, if for no other reason than trying to write something, I tried to capture my stream of consciousness about the my process of writing. This, isn’t a real autoethnography.



Description

Writing projects that I done very little work on.

Witch Marks

A Call (or trail) of Cthulhu adventure based on this news story . The idea involved having players playing two characters, one above ground character and one below ground character. The above ground characters would be loosely based on Time Team, and the below ground characters on Most Haunted.

A Mage the Ascension game. Set current day. While the Technocracy ‘won’ the ascension war about 20 years ago since then the Technocracy has been in decline. They no longer get any support from government (some parallels with end of the Cold War), and former embedded agents have been or are being pension off). Meanwhile the forces of anti rationalism are on the rise, the growing conspiracy theories, the rise of popularism, the pressure on the EU, the anti vaccination movement, the wellness movement and so on. The characters will be young, idealist, technocratic mages trying to hold back the forces of anti rationalism. Plenty of newspaper stories have referred to the EU as a technocratic exercise. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/16/europe-technocrats-politics



An idea for a novel, it would involve  some elements of transhumanism (which I think is a silly idea) because I want the central character to live through  a long stretch of the climate crisis. It would also explore this idea https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/climate-crisis-mental-health-environmental-anguish, which coincidentally appeared in the Guardian today, although I have been thinking about it for six months or so.

Finally an idea for a set of blog posts, ‘what I learnt from psychology’ I have half written one of those.

 Interpretation

So as I think about writing something I start thinking about how to write it, and that gets more and more complicated. So for this piece I am imagining writing a series of explainers for the various terms I am using, so a post on what autoethography means, on the RPGs on Cthuhlu and Mage, Transhumanism and so on. Of course that make the thing far too difficult to write. Instead I can use links to wiki.

I have written stuff before, how did that work, not going back to the beginning with this, just after I was working. The book chapters were based on lecture slides. I never wrote lectures, I did write lecture slides, originally directly written on to OHP acetates, then printed on printable slides (lots of printers with melted plastic inside from colleagues who did not check carefully if they were loading the right type) and then finally powerpoint and keynote slides projected on screen. I wrote the slides by imagining what I wanted to say, then writing headlines for that. Occasionally with what I felt were important quotes from research papers, later some links to things like you tube videos in place of quotes. Then I used those slides to guide the subsections of chapters I was writing. A two hour lecture would turn into a book chapter. So my writing process was about turning an ad libbed performance that I had read up on and thought about into a written record. Personally once I wrote those chapters I rewrote the lectures so that the lectures had fresh material compared to the books.

As I was thinking about the above paragraph I began to feel anxious or stressed. My writing process has become enmeshed with the situation at former work. There is a myth that teachers and educators are told; once you have developed your materials the job will get easier. Now I know some people for whom that might be true. A senior colleague when I first joined had files of yellowing paper that they carried into lectures. I have heard other colleagues, when negotiating lecture slots in a series of lectures say things like ‘I have written a lecture on x so I could do that’

In my final term I had a brand new set of (6, 3 hour) lectures to give on Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. For my third year and MSc lectures I would try to do some updating of every session every year and did extensive rewriting of the 12 (3 hour) sessions on social psychology I delivered for the MSc. In my gender and sexuality lecture series (12, 2hour sessionsI used up to date figures on things like sex crime statistics, mental health statistics, also trying to incorporate literature from the prior year. I did no more than try to put right some things that didn’t work for the 6 or so 2 hour lectures I did for the first year lectures (that isn’t all my teaching in the final term). In the balance of duties allocation we had approximately 1 hour preparation time for each 1 hour of lecture. That is impossible unless all that is being done is no change at all. So writing lectures was, in the last decade or so of my job time pressured and stressy. That I still have those feelings now could be explained in terms of Classical Conditioning.

Tentative conclusion

Well I started writing this about 23 hours ago, but I seem to have finished writing it, and it is not as if I have deadlines any more. When I was working I was more productive early mornings, by lunch time my head was just so full of daily stuff I found it hard to be productive. These days I find it hard to start doing any writing until around noon.