Week 3 - (9/7-9/11)

We've begun to identify interest areas we might want to research. Why bother? Because your own experience tells you that you study better and are more curious when the topic intrigues you, when you are strongly affected by a subject or feel passionately about a concern. So how do we figure out what interests us? Good question.

Here's a quote that Susan Shaughnessy uses in Walking on Alligators. The quote is by John Atlas:

Biographers don't know how they choose their subjects, any more than poets know how an image comes into their heads.

I read this to mean that research is creative and magical, at times unpredictable and uncontrollable. 'Cool,' I think -- mostly because I'm for anything that will let me play and stretch and be surprised. Here's what else Shaughnessy says about detecting our interests:

We may never know why a particular subject comes to fascinate us. Perhaps it isn't even important to know. ... ... ...

When you feel haunted by a topic, you are receiving a message that your imagination is willing to cooperate in its exploration. What do you find yourself clipping articles about in newspapers and magazines? What kinds of buildings or landscapes draw you toward them? Is there a period in history that you always wanted to know more about? A type of person?

It is probably a little too simple to say that a topic chooses you. Rather, you are given hints as to what topics will bring forth a cooperative energy from your imagination. These hints are worth listening to.

Susan Shaughnessy, Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. 191.

What if? We relied more on our intuition and our unconscious to find a topic to research. Somewhere, I learned to equate research with deadly seriousness. Like some kind of cyborg on autopilot, I logically identify my topic of research and then pursue it with scientific exactness. Nope. That just ain't so. I need to stumble around a bit and do a lot of freewriting before I can find a topic that interests me. To narrow that topic down, I need to welcome surprise. Sometimes the best research finds are the unexpected ones -- when I go into the library stacks armed with my piece of scrap paper covered with call numbers for specific books, I often find an even more intriguing and useful text three spaces down or a shelf above the book I actually came to get. Finding a topic to research is all about discovery, and discovery entails surprise.