Coping 2: Braindumps
Coping is short posts on Fridays about coping methods for doing creative and focused things in an unfocused world. In Coping 2, braindumps.
A side project of this publication is detailing methods for working creatively in uncertain times. These are ways of coping, and maybe even thriving, when the world feels like it has a lot of downside to offer.
Braindumps are like free writing, but with a slightly different purpose and rules. I’m getting this similarity out in the open first thing, before anything else, because today I’m writing about a coping method that owes a lot to a well-known and widely-practised creative tool. If you don’t know free writing already, I’ll wait here while you look at Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_writing
If you’ve gone off and read that Wikipedia entry, this next statement may entertain you. It’s hard for me to write about braindumps because of the feeling that it’s necessary to differentiate the thing I do from the other, existing practices. This quest for novelty, significance, and differentiation is something I come up against a lot in my work, where one of the big imperatives in academic scholarship is to demonstrate the novelty of your contribution. Which means I get a bit blocked by that novelty imperative when I try to put braindumps into the free writing context. So instead of contextualizing, I’m going to skip right to the nuts and bolts.
Braindumps are a kind of free writing with a focus on emptying out all the busy thoughts. A good day for me involves doing a braindump before any other work, sitting down for fifteen or 30 minutes and just typing. Unlike some free writing practices, I don’t prevent myself from editing as I go, because that would require me to overcome what my hands automatically do while typing – not letting myself correct typos would be a flow-breaker. The goal isn’t to have ideas, or even to become un-blocked. The goal, instead, is to turn on the tap of obligations, anxieties, and stray thoughts and let it all flow out. I’m also big on to-do lists, so it may not come as a surprise that externalizing mental overhead into a document is something that I find effective.
Because I’m doing it on a computer instead of on paper, the other key thing is using the right word processor. It needs to take up the whole screen and prevent me from easily accessing other distractions or obligations. I use FocusWriter, but other full-screen text editors are available.
Basically, a braindump is finding the material conditions for focus and then furiously writing out all the thoughts in order to kick those mental squirrels off their treadmill.
