Reading, Reading, Reading...and Speed-Writing, Academic-Style

After all the non-schoolwork-related submissions last week, plus a big breakthrough on my dissertation idea, I've been getting back to the schoolwork portion of the semester with verve.

One breakthrough of the week: I wrote 7 pages of (I believe reasonably coherent) academic papers for one of my classes in 3 hours the other night. This is a good sign, as I will have to write quickly when I get around to taking my Big Nasty Exams (otherwise known as prelim exams, comps, or The Thing that Keeps You from Starting Your Dissertation Thoughts in Earnest, depending on your discipline, department, and/or institution).

Speed-writing practice with theoretical concepts fully in hand=good. One could even say that preliminary exams are a sort of speed-writing contest, not that different from NaNoWriMo (with ours, you even have exactly a month to complete them once you've started). Hm....

Okay, back to more reading of theoretical works in preparation to discussing them in class before more writing of papers and presentations about them, leading to final course papers before those ideas get reconstituted into Big Nasty Exams and then the dissertation, with perhaps some conference papers and academic papers somewhere in there (all of which will have inevitable creative by-products). And so the PhD goes on.

Reading and Writing at Different Speeds

So one of my professors mentioned again in last week's class that part of our job as graduate students was to learn to read at different speeds--to learn to scan some things very quickly while choosing to spend hours reading more important things in-depth.

I feel like my ability to do the fast kind of reading in the COM field is finally coming to me. It's always a learning curve for me to master this fast reading when approaching a new genre of heavy critical tomes (the same was true when I went back for my MA in English at first), but after a year of slogging through COM theorists and quantitative and qualitative articles and essays, I finally feel like I can scan these genres when I need to, which should make this school year significantly less laborious.

The thing is, as I reflect on Ril and the others at TextFIGHT doing the slightly insane but incredibly gutsy 3-day novel thing this weekend, writing is something that can--and probably also should, at times--also be done at that fast-scanning sort of speed.

I think the key to this fast-writing, as with fast-reading, is not just in learning to do it, but learning to do it so that one does it relatively well. That calls for a facility with both the craft and the rules of whatever genre you're working in. The material you come out with is bound to be rough, but being able to do it well shows a sort of mastery over the material you're working with, as well as a lack of self-consciousness about the process.

Our media ecology is an ideal test bed on which to develop this sort of lightning speed--and I can do it in blog posts, facebook statuses, wall posts, and emails, which is excellent priming for the pump of other kinds of quick writing. I've also been known to plow out a quick poem, creative non-fiction essay or a homework assignment, and I'm getting closer to this speed for COM essays--hoping I can get closer to it this semester.

The one key place where I haven't quite mastered the speed of fast writing, however, is in my creative writing. I feel like my mastery of the generic conventions and knowledge of my characters comes so slowly that I'm not there yet. I've been known to speed-edit after the first draft, but the first draft tends to come incredibly slowly, in part because it's always a very long side project that gets easily de-prioritized. I think, oddly enough, it will take going over the hump to fast-writing COM essays before I'll get the confidence to try something similar with my novel-writing.

I do hope that I get to do one of these contests someday, however--I think it would help. Oh, 3-day novelists (or anyone else), any comments on the process?