Doing the write thing — highlights from Bristol’s first WriteFest

WriteFest 2108 logo | cartoon person typing on a laptop

Writing is a universal experience for all research students. Whether you’re researching rats in Argentina or counting conjunctions in Classical texts, at some point your findings will need to be written up into a dissertation. Add to that the need to draft conference papers, journal articles, and grant applications, and a month focusing on writing seemed like a great idea.

This is the first time Bristol has been involved in WriteFest and we therefore initially had quite modest goals: to write 100,000 words over the course of the month. However, with Thesis Boot Camp as part of our WriteFest activities, we soon smashed that figure, writing a whopping 263, 343 words over 2 and a half days! This required us to re-evaluate and institute a #stretchgoal of 500,000 words! The final figures reveal that we actually wrote 349,229 over the course of 30 days, which is an astounding figure!

But it wasn’t all about the numbers. Our focus during WriteFest has been to develop healthy, professional writing habits. We featured three videos, each with three top tips of how to write productively.

Sarah Green, a part-time PGR student in History, offered some great advice about writing regularly, even if you can only squeeze in fifteen minutes a day:

Our PG Researcher Development Officer, Loriel Anderson, emphasised the need to schedule your writing sessions and the importance of taking breaks:

And Mike Gulliver, Research Staff Development Officer with Bristol Clear, spoke about writing in small chunks and working out what time of day you are most productive:

Through social media we shared several tools to help motivate and encourage our researchers to reach their personal writing targets, including highlighting how the Hemingway app can help to craft more precise prose, and how The Most Dangerous Writing App can provide a little extra pressure to keep writing! We even shared how to block out distractions through social-media blocking apps Freedom.to and StayFocusd.

Hopefully the use of these apps didn’t prevent you from taking part in our #writekindofmusic competition, which encouraged our researchers to share their writing playlists. Lisa Morgans, a researcher in Veterinary Sciences, won a £10 Rough Trade voucher for sharing her favourite instrumental and world music, including Songhoy Blues.

It is no coincidence that Self Care Week fell in the middle of WriteFest. A focus on word counts and competitions can make some people feel as though the only way to write well is to write all the time. However, we tried to stress the importance of taking care of oneself and the value of a well-earned break. We featured tips from the PGR community of how we can take care of ourselves, from practising yoga to finding a bit of peace and quiet each day. Simple, healthy habits to implement every day. Throughout November there were also opportunities for our researchers to meet some of the new Student Wellbeing Advisers, and to attend sessions with Bristol Wellbeing Therapies. We also hosted relaxation afternoons in the Hub, featuring free tea, coffee and board games. Finally, we explored the value of ‘making and connecting’ in our #crafternoon.

Throughout WriteFest we’ve learned the power of writing together – either physically, in our Writers’ Retreats and drop-in writing days, or virtually, by sharing our writing goals and holding one another accountable for our achievements. There’s something quite profound about knowing that by writing alongside others you can achieve more than you ever could working alone.

How to Break Your Writer’s Block

… or Getting Ideas Out of Your Head And Onto The Page

This post by Bristol PGR Pam Lock, who’s been running Writers’ Retreats at Bristol since 2014, was originally shared on the Bristol Clear Blog.

A man slumped in front of a laptop

Some days writing is hard. Whether you have writer’s block or just can’t translate your ideas into writing, here are some practical ways to get your ideas out of your head and onto the page.

Free Writing

What is Free Writing? Free Writing is a brain dump, a way to write down your thoughts and ideas without constricting them by constantly editing yourself. It can be particularly useful for people who are afraid to ‘dirty the page’ with words that aren’t quite perfect or who lose track of ideas because they are constantly editing as they write.

Free writing is not about creating beautiful prose. That is the next stage, or even the stage after that. As Terry Pratchett once said, ‘The first draft is just you telling yourself the story’. Once you understand what story you want to tell, you can shape and translate it for others to read and understand. Free writing gives you a different way to access and explore your ideas.

How do I do it? For five minutes, write non-stop: don’t lift your fingers from the keyboard or your pen from the page. Just keep writing. Don’t stop to ponder or make corrections or look up a word’s meaning in the dictionary. Just keep writing.

If you find yourself stuck for something to say, write, ‘I don’t know what to write next’ or repeat the last word you wrote again and again until a fresh thought emerges. It won’t take long.
Be strict, finish your sentence at 5 minutes and stop writing.

When can I use free writing? There are lots of uses for free writing. I recommend it:

  • As a warm up. If you want to get started at the beginning of a writing day, five minutes of creative free writing is a great way to get yourself into the groove before you start tackling your academic writing. It can also open up creative pathways in your brain allowing you to write more smoothly. Write on anything: the view from your window, your journey to work, a painting or photo.
  • As a method to move forward when you are stuck. We all get stuck. Sometimes we just can’t quite work out what we think about something. Sometimes a walk around the block can be good to clear your head. Or five minutes of free writing to help you access deeper thoughts or accept ideas you may have been blocking for some reason.
  • As a way to develop or close an idea. It is easy to get into an inescapable circular pattern of writing. You get obsessed with one idea and end up writing it in slightly different phrasing again, and again, and again until you have thousands of words repeating one thing. Sometimes you just need to close the idea. Free writing can be a great way to do this so that you can move onto the next thing.

Want to know more? For more information about free writing, take a look at:

Peter Elbow, ‘Freewriting Exercises’, Writing without Teachers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 3-11.

Richard Nordquist, ‘What Is Freewriting? How Writing Without Rules Can Help You Overcome Writer’s Block

Six-word summaries

If you find free writing too unstructured, you could try creating a six-word summary of your article or chapter, or even of a single paragraph that isn’t working.

  • Take a few minutes to think about what the piece you want to summarise is about.
  • You may find it useful to write down a few key words to get you started.
  • Spend five minutes sculpting a six-word summary of the piece
  • Not only can this help you work out the essence of your writing piece, the summary you produce can be helpful in the editing process too.
    • Ask yourself: Does every paragraph or sentence help me to communicate the essential ideas of this piece to my reader?
    • Use it to ensure you don’t include anything redundant or miss anything essential from your writing.

Talk to someone else

For some people, writing can be a lonely process. I advocate finding someone you like to write with and meeting up with them regularly for company and motivation. Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary.

Writing buddies can take many forms. Finding someone you trust to be quiet and productive during your writing time but who will be good distracting company during those very important breaks is a great way to improve your writing.

They can also help you break through writer’s block. Talk for 5 minutes at the beginning of a writing day about what you want to each. Challenge each other. Can you help improve or clarify each other’s writing projects? If you are stuck on something, talk it through with your writing buddy. Even if they are not familiar with your subject, they may just ask the right question to make you look at your ideas in a new way.


Want to get involved in WriteFest 2018, the celebration of academic writing held during November? Find out how the Bristol Doctoral College is marking the month in our round-up blogpost.