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Publish your ART. (OK, that first draft is shit!).

Hilary Bradbury discusses how to draft for publication

In this video snippet I walk us through drafting a paper for publication. This snippet comes from our Designing and Writing coProduction coLAB which I lead with Sofia Kjellström. Using the 7 Quality Choicepoints, I explain how the 7 different components of ART make up a publication. I also see how I could have improved my paper. Apropos Hemingway, we can always compost the shit for a next writing attempt (hmm, maybe iterating after publication is simply neurotic!) 

In a recent session of our “Writing coProduction” coLAB we got to the scary part. That’s when you start to share an initial draft with peers.  One of our participants got the ball rolling by bravely offering his initial draft. (It was a good one. Can’t wait to see the final version in print!)

As we discovered in our dialogue, we all hear a critical voice that worms its way into our drafting efforts. It goes something like … “your contribution isn’t important.”  Or more bluntly – and, ahem, to quote Ernest Hemingway – “your draft is shit!”

Being Hemingway he said it better. This quote appears in the 1984 posthumous memoir “With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba” by Arnold Samuelson. Hemingway says: “Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit.”

Hemingway was a Nobel Prize winning novelist. Yet the same advice – “there’s a lot of mechanical work” – works well for publishing ART. I suggest we start by expecting to revise and iterate, to check out good published examples and ask for critical feedback. 

Drafting brings clarity, helping us find what we really want to show/tell about our work. Of course it takes a few attempts. Let’s take it easy on ourselves as we gear up. 

Know that probably all writers feel tortured by the question of making a contribution. There is, I believe, a special ARTist torture because we serve a dual agenda: pragmatic as well as theory/practice contribution.

It’s amazing how long it takes to write a good paper (that’s its own topic). Yea, writing is hard. It really helps to have critical-friends in this work. So share your best drafts and prepare for truthful, timely, useful and kindly worded feedback.

My thanks to the coLAB participants for the conversation and inspiration. Happy writing!

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