Image source: Wikipedia
With Jane the Virgin coming to an end soon, I wanted to spend a little time writing about an aspect of the show that caught my attention but which probably never gets talked about: its portrayal of research as part of the creative writing process.
Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway (with Elizabeth Stuckey-French and Ned Stuckey-French) was number six on the list of Goodreads’ popular creative writing books.
Because Writing Fiction is more of a textbook by nature (see below), it has more editions than other books on this list. For this project, I was able to get a hold of the eighth edition, which is not the most recent one. I make note of it only because there might be some content differences between the various editions that I’m unaware of since I only read the one. If you’re familiar with the book and you do spot some differences, I’d be interested to hear about them.
Below are some more detailed thoughts.
Image by HeungSoon from Pixabay
There isn’t a lot of research out there that investigates the information-seeking habits of writers and other artists but there’s something peculiar about the literature I am finding, especially the stuff that comes from the library and information science field. In a lot of cases, it seems like researchers who are interested in understanding how creative people do research are less interested in the role that research plays in the creative process than they are about the role the library plays in the creative process. Basically, there’s an assumption that the library is a necessary or appropriate component of this type of research. Or if it’s not, that it should be.
Respectfully, I disagree. I say this as a librarian.
Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay
This is a new post in an ongoing series where I’m answering questions that came up during my ACRL presentation “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” Previous posts discussed student proficiency versus student confidence, models for teaching the contextual nature of research, why we’re talking in terms of “research” instead of “information literacy,” and the relationship between some of these ideas and critical information literacy.
Today I’m going to spend some time on talking to faculty about the contextual nature of research.
Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay
The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler was a book I hadn’t heard of before finding it on this list, but I had heard of (and read) The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, which the ideas in this book are largely based on/adapted from.
This is where things with this series of posts are going to get a little timey wimey because even though I’m posting my entries on these books in the order they appeared on the original list, I didn’t read them that way. So even though The Writer’s Journey is near the top of the list, it was actually the last one I read. And if I’m being really honest, I was feeling a bit burned out on writing advice and wasn’t expecting this book to be as long as it was. But there were aspects of this book I ended up really appreciating, even though it didn’t have much/anything to say about research. Below are some thoughts.
I’ve been talking quite a bit here so far about research and I realize that I haven’t really defined my terms. On the one hand, “research” is a term that doesn’t seem to need defining. You know it when you see it. For example, when you type “research” into Pixabay, the images that come up show things that are recognizably related to the idea of research. There’s a guy staring at a bunch of notes pinned to a board. A microscope. A book with some glasses resting on it. A woman sitting at a computer while sipping from a cup of coffee. Stacks of books in a library. Another woman in a white coat in a lab. Beakers. Charts. Graphs.
Research. Obviously.
But maybe it’s not so obvious.
Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay
This is a new post in an ongoing series where I’m answering questions that came up during my ACRL presentation “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” Previous posts discussed student proficiency versus student confidence, models for teaching the contextual nature of research, and the difference between “research” and “information literacy.”
One of the harder questions I got was when someone asked me to clarify the tension I saw between critical information literacy and the idea of teaching genres of research. I stumbled a bit in the moment, so let me see if I can provide a clearer answer here.
Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay
So in May, I completed the Skillshare Teach Challenge, which is where you spend a month creating a course for the Skillshare platform. I first discovered Skillshare after searching for a viable side gig to replace one I’ve been doing for a long time that I knew needed to come to an end. The materials on Skillshare make a big deal about how their top teachers make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through their platform, which I took with a large grain of salt and actually if you dig deeper, you find out that productive teachers on Skillshare who release about one course a month make around $300 a month, which still seemed overly optimistic for my case. Anyway, I had an idea for a possible course and I wanted to try it out.
The course I created for the challenge is called Working with Scholarly Articles. Here’s the referral link, if you’re interested: https://skl.sh/2YTGicb
And here’s how creating it went.
Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay
Like Writing Down the Bones, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is one of the books where I look at the cover and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before, but I have no memory of ever having read it. I can’t help but think that this was a book I used to stare at longingly on the shelf at the bookstore back before I had money to spend on these types of things. Or maybe it was assigned reading from one of my undergraduate writing classes.
No idea.
Anyway, Reading Like a Writer was the fourth most popular book about writing on Goodreads when I started this project in 2018. Here are some thoughts.
Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay
So I don’t know how noticeable it is, but the tag line I chose for this blog is “Research is not a basic skill.” This has also been the title of various presentations I’ve done related to my article “Research is an Activity and a Subject of Study.”
As tag lines go, it’s not the catchiest or the cutest but I chose it because if you come to this blog and you leave only remembering one thing, I want it to be that: that research is not a basic skill.
Here are the details on why that matters.
Studying Research 