Tips from Dunleavy

"Authoring and thinking go together. You will very rarely work out what you think first, and then just write it down. Normally the act of committing words to screen (or pen and paper) will make an important contribution to your working out what it is that you do think. In other words, the act of writing may often be constitutive of your thinking. Left to ourselves we can all of us keep conflicting ideas in play almost indefinitely" (26)

State of Play

So the writing was going well, and I was giving myself smug pats on the back for having produced about 45,000 words (which I knew needed heavy editing, but stuff was being committed to paper). Then I stopped, took a step back and realised my argument didn't work. In fact, I was making about four arguments, and slipping in and out of all of them in different chapters. My chapter outline looked so neat and achievable on a digital A3 diagram, but when I started writing, it went horribly pear shaped. I knew it, but it took me months to accept it. As a smart man used to comment when I was labouring over piece of awful artwork: "there's no use flogging a dead horse."

So. I had a little cry, raged about a bit, drank a lot of wine and now I'm ready to start over. As Kate suggests, a metaphor is a helpful way to understand the bigger picture. And so it goes like this:

I'm standing in a fully stocked kitchen, but I don't know what I want to cook. Cooking by putting everything I like into one pot will not produce an edible meal. The ingredients have to be selected because they 'work' together. Once I decide what I want to make, there will be a lot of unused ingredients, but that's ok, I can use them to make something else later. (Or they might go off and I'll just have to throw them out). Everything I need is here, I just have to choose a recipe.

As I was staring at my keyboard and thinking it's ok, it's ok, it's ok, the computer spoke to me ... surely I can't be the first person restarting a writing project who has noticed these keys, telling me what to do:
Either that, or this is the point the psychologists will flag as when I "crossed the line".

the value of practitioner-researchers

Reviewing Jobling and Crowley's Graphic Design: Reproduction & Representation Since 1800 (1996), Victor Margolin ends with this criticism:

They are too ready to sacrifice design at the altar of an all-consuming capitalism, unlike Twyman, Meggs, and Hollis, who, as practitioners, convey in their writings a passion for graphic communication that is missing here. There is no reason why we can’t have critical analysis and a passionate engagement with the material. But that is another project.

This sounds like an argument for practice led research to me.