## 7 Nobody Ever Starts From Scratch “The white sheet of paper – or today: the blank screen – is a fundamental misunderstanding” (Nassehi 2015, 185) The process of writing is vastly misunderstood. If you grab off the shelf a random study guide or self-help book on writing and skim through the first pages, the chances are that you will encounter something like this: “To make your research more efficient, your first step should be to narrow the aspect you choose to focus on and also formulate an explicit question that your research and analysis will address.”[\[14\]](part0000_split_023.html#_ftn14)Almost always, the decision on the topic is presented as the necessary first step, after which follows everything else, like in this guide: “When you have chosen a topic that is right for you, having taken into consideration your personal interests and any necessary background knowledge that may be needed, assess the availability of sources.”[\[15\]](part0000_split_023.html#_ftn15)Thereafter, you will certainly find a multi-step plan you are supposed to follow: Be it twelve steps, according to the Academic Skills & Learning Centre of the Australian National University, or eight, if you go with the recommendations of the Writing Center of the University of Wisconsin, the rough order is always the same: Make a decision on what to write about, plan your research, do your research, write. Interestingly enough, these road maps usually come with the concession that this is only an idealised plan and that in reality, it rarely works like that. This is certainly true. Writing can’t be that linear. The obvious question is: If that is true, why not root the course of action in reality instead? In order to develop a good question to write about or find the best angle for an assignment, one must already have put some thought into a topic. To be able to decide on a topic, one must already have read quite a bit and certainly not just about one topic. And the decision to read something and not something else is obviously rooted in prior understanding, and that didn’t come out of thin air, either. Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for following endeavours. Basically, that is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer 2004). And even though the hermeneutic circle is regularly taught in university, writing at the same time continues to be taught *as if* we could start from scratch and move forward in a straight line – as if it were possible to pull a good question out of thin air and wait with the reading until the literature research is done. The seemingly pragmatic and down-to-earth-sounding advice – to decide what to write about before you start writing – is therefore either misleading or banal. It is banal if it means only that you should think before you put words on paper. It is misleading if it means that you could make a sound plan on what to write before you have immersed yourself in the topics at hand, which involves writing. It accompanies everything: We have to read with a pen in hand, develop ideas on paper and build up an ever-growing pool of externalised thoughts. We will not be guided by a blindly made-up plan picked from our unreliable brains, but by our interest, curiosity and intuition, which is formed and informed by the actual work of reading, thinking, discussing, writing and developing ideas – and is something that continuously grows and reflects our knowledge and understanding *externally*. By focusing on what is interesting and keeping written track of your own intellectual development, topics, questions and arguments will emerge from the material without force. Not only does it means that finding a topic or a research question will become easier, as we don’t have to squeeze it out of the few ideas that are on top of our head anymore, every question that emerges out of our slip-box will naturally and handily come with material to work with. If we look into our slip-box to see where clusters have built up, we not only see *possible* topics, but topics we have already worked on – even if we were not able to see it up front. The idea that nobody ever starts from scratch suddenly becomes very concrete. If we take it seriously and work accordingly, we *literally* never have to start from scratch again. Of course, those who *believe* that they do start from scratch don’t really start from scratch, either, as they too can only draw on what they have learned or encountered before. But as they haven’t *acted* on this fact, they can’t track ideas back to their origins and have neither supporting material at hand nor their sources in order. As writing has not accompanied their previous work, they have to either start with something completely new (which is risky) or retrace their ideas (which is boring). As proper note-taking is rarely taught or discussed, it is no wonder that almost every guide on writing recommends to start with *brainstorming*. If you haven’t written along the way, the brain is indeed the only place to turn to. On its own, it is not such a great choice: it is neither objective nor reliable – two quite important aspects in academic or nonfiction writing. The promotion of brainstorming as a starting point is all the more surprising as it is not the origin of most ideas: The things you are supposed to find in your head by brainstorming usually don’t have their origins in there. Rather, they come from the outside: through reading, having discussions and listening to others, through all the things that could have been accompanied and often even would have been improved by writing. The advice to think about what to write about before you write comes both too early and too late. Too late, as you already have passed up the chance to build up written resources when you face the white sheet of paper or the blank screen, but also too early, if you try to postpone every serious content-related work until you have made a decision on the topic. If something comes too early and too late at the same time, it is not possible to fix it by rearranging the order as the fictional linearity is the problem in itself. Taking smart notes is the precondition to break with the linear order. There is one reliable sign if you managed to structure your workflow according to the fact that writing is not a linear process, but a circular one: the problem of finding a topic is replaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about. Having trouble finding the right topic is a symptom of the wrong attempt to rely heavily on the limitations of the brain, not the inevitable problematic starting point, as most study guides insinuate. If you on the other hand develop your thinking in writing, open questions will become clearly visible and give you an abundance of possible topics to elaborate further in writing. After many years of working with students, I am convinced that the attempt of these study guides to squeeze a nonlinear process like writing into a linear order is the main reason for the very problems and frustrations they promise to solve. How can you not have trouble finding a topic if you believe you have to decide on one before you have done your research, have read and learned about something? How can you not feel threatened by an empty page if you have literally nothing at hand to fill it with? Who can blame you for procrastinating if you find yourself stuck with a topic you decided on blindly and now have to stick with it as the deadline is approaching? And how can anyone be surprised that students feel overwhelmed with writing assignments when they are not taught how to turn months and years of reading, discussing and research into material they can really use? These study guides, which neglect everything before a writing assignment is given, are a little bit like financial advisors who discuss how 65-year-olds can save for retirement. At this point you would be better off curbing your enthusiasm (which is exactly what one of the most often sold study guides in Germany recommends: first, lower your expectations on quality and insight).[\[16\]](part0000_split_023.html#_ftn16) But those who have already developed their thinking through writing can keep the focus on what is interesting for them at the moment and accumulate substantial material just by doing what they most feel like doing. The material will cluster around the questions they returned to most often, so they don’t risk too far of a departure from their interest. If your first chosen topic turns out to be not as interesting, you will just move on and your notes will cluster around something else. Maybe you will even note down the reasons why the first question is not interesting and turn that into an insight valuable enough to make public. When it finally comes to the decision on what to write about, you will already have made the decision – because you made it on every single step along the way, again and again every day, improving it gradually. Instead of spending your time worrying about finding the right topic, you will spend your time actually working on your already existing interests and doing what is necessary to make *informed* decisions – reading, thinking and writing. By doing the work, you can *trust* that interesting questions will emerge. You might not know where you will end up (and you don’t need to), but you can’t force insight into a preconceived direction anyway. You minimise both the risk of losing interest in a topic you have once chosen ill-informed and the risk of having to start all over again. Even though academic writing is not a linear process, that does not mean you should follow an anything-goes approach. On the contrary, a clear, reliable structure is paramount.