Trying Not to Be Slightly Offended by This...

From a book on conducting qualitative research, talking about writing up field notes from participant observation of people in a setting:

"It happens that observers differ enormously in the detail and length of the field notes they keep. Some seem to be frustrated novelists and have been known to write 40 or more single-spaced pages on a three-hour period of observation." --Lofland and Lofland, Analyzing Social Settings (1984), p. 67

And people (well, maybe it's just me, but today it's an editorial pluralism) wonder why, although novelists and qualitative field researchers both learn from observing people in settings, these two groups are somewhat estranged from each other?

Stereotypes, stereotypes...My primary question is, since when did any frustrated novelist write that much? It seems most frustrated novelists' problem is more of the writing too little than writing too much...

But maybe that's just my perception of the way the writing world works.

The larger question is, why can't we all just get along, since fiction writers and qualitative researchers are doing remarkably similar things (I should know, since I'm part of both groups)?

Plowing Through

Haven't officially started writing the (academic) paper due soon, but I've taken, to date, more than 17,424 words' worth of notes on it. The analysis is almost done--only a few more hours' worth of it. Of course, I have to do that today, along with a bunch of reading and grading and so on and so on and so on.

I'm pretty sure this is NaWriMo 2, but that I don't have the time to keep too much of a running tally on the sidebar. When I can, I'll include my results here and tally them up at the end.

I'm pretty sure notes will count in the final word tally as 1 "new word" for every 4 note words. So, in this case, I've garnered the equivalent of 4,500 new words already. That's reassuring, since that's the equivalent of approximately 15 pages of a paper and the paper has to be 20-25 pages.

Then again, I was never worried about having enough material for this paper. It was having enough time to do a thorough enough analysis before starting, and being able to fit in the most important things I wanted to say. Especially since this is one of the two papers this semester which should form the basis not only for conference papers, but also, hopefully, dissertation chapter-ish material (which may, in turn, provide me material for a book).

Thankfully, the analysis/note-taking part is almost done, and some manner of outline has begun to form in my head in the process. I should be able to plow out the paper this weekend, provided all goes well.

See, this is why I'm rewarding myself for the note-taking part--not only does it take a ton of time, it really helps move toward the paper-writing and make that process so much more smoother. (Or so I need to believe. ;)

Writing Tools: Organizing my Brainstorms and Research

Here are some tools for the writing life. I find them helpful for both academic and creative projects:

• Zotero (Mac or PC): Free Mozilla Firefox plugin. When I found this free program, I stopped using both EndNote ($100 USD for students) and SOHO Notes ($39 USD) as note organizational tools. I find this indispensable for my academic work--it will download the citations from the library site or other online services, and build a bibliography in a flash in Word (though you have to be careful about formatting, still, a bit). It, however, will allow you to save and organize book info from Amazon on anything, as well as take snapshots of any page and easily add notes and keywords to any of things I've already mentioned, so I also find it helpful for everything from saving articles relating to my creative projects to saving receipts. And it resides on your computer, so you don't have to be online to get to anything.
  
  
• CopyWrite (Mac only): A relatively low-cost, stripped-down word processing program designed for novelists, though I'm also considering its potential uses for my dissertation. It allows you to keep each chapter as an individual file but search and find and replace across a whole project. It also has a handy "notes drawer" for flipping between notes you want to keep about that individual project and for the project in general, a nifty tracking function for your progress (you put in a goal word count and it tells you how many percent you have as you go). Plus there's a full-screen editing mode to help you focus in and make your words bigger.
  
  
• Good old-fashioned journals (no computer required): I keep a lot of my notes on specific projects in my computer now--in Zotero and CopyWrite's notes drawer, but a set of good old-fashioned journals is also indispensable for collecting my writing brainstorms. A few years ago, I found a system that still works for me--I got a bunch of my favorite kind of spiral-bound sketchbooks (the kind with room for a pen to clip onto them) and I keep different kinds of notes and first drafts in each one, so I'll be able to access them topically or based on genre later on.
  
  The most important of these notebooks is the one in which I capture my random creative brainstorms and first lines/first pages of potential projects. I don't have to--in fact I'm not allowed--to finish these projects in there, which means I always know where to go back to when I need a new project to inspire me.