If you hate research, then [you] are probably not doing enough of it and your fiction writing is going to suffer in various ways.

* Sigh * Yup, it’s true.  It also doesn’t help when I see another writer produce a huge list of questions about details to research and all I want to do is hide because I’ve instantly gotten overwhelmed.  Don’t mistake this — I like some of the information I find because it does inspire creativity, like researching Chinaman’s Hat in Hawaii:

Screen reader: Palm trees and grass frame an island shaped like a hat the Chinese immigrants used to wear.

Butt the process of research is at the opposite end of creativity.  I’d almost rather do proofreading.

Almost.  Proofreading is pretty boring!

So it starts with making the research as efficient as possible.

I have to know exactly what I need.  What I’ve been doing is identifying details in scenes that I need to research.  Like if the scene is set outside, “What are common trees in Hawaii?”

Screen reader: Shot of a monkeypod tree in Hawaii, which resembles an umbrella.

Then all I have to do is bring the list of questions with me and hunt down the information with a fast scan through.  I also have to make sure I take good notes so I don’t have to repeat the research. Been there, didn’t want to do it, but got stuck doing it anyway.  I’ve always had a problem with being able to take useful notes, so I’ve been experimenting with visual note taking.

The time to do the research is also a consideration.  I ran across a reference in a book where a non-fiction writer would do footnotes when he wasn’t feeling particularly inspired.  So I try to do the research when I know I’m probably not going to be writing.  That way, it doesn’t feel like it’s cutting into the writing time.

Do you hate to research?  What do you do to make the process of it less painful?

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How do you take these three diverse subject — a princess, a boatman, and a lizard — and make them into a story?  My short story “Six Bullets” turns the princess into a soldier who has to fight an army of warriors of a river.  Check out the Forward Motion anthology, A Princess, a Boatman, and a Lizard.

Because last week I described a possible link between stress and perceived boredom, this seemed a good time for a tribute to the underestimated art of doodling. Being able to express ideas visually is essential to many individuals’ creativity. And doodling is a time-honored strategy for relieving both boredom and stress. But doodling can be more than that. Doodling may help you learn.

Andrade (2009) found that individuals assigned to doodle while listening to information performed better on a surprise memory test than those who did not doodle. Interestingly, the information presented was designed to be as boring as possible. One hypothesis is that doodling helped participants avoid daydreaming about something more interesting, and so absorb the material better.

It is depressing to think such things might have relevance in schools, but I suspect they do. No matter how hard we try, we can’t be scintillating to all students 100% of the time. A little bit of creative doodling might be just the thing to help those students learn, even when they aren’t terribly interested in the material.

In six minutes, Sunni Brown will convince you that your doodling is worthwhile—possibly even essential!

If you like the video, you might be interested in exploring her blog to see how these ideas play out in the business world. More importantly, think about how classrooms might operate if doodling was just another learning strategy, used whenever it was appropriate and helpful. We’d have classrooms full of colorful paper and markers and ideas. It sounds splendid to me. Have you tried it?

Andrade, J. (2009). What does doodling do? Applied Cognitive Psychology. Published online in Wiley InterScience

Image by Kate Pickering

Well today was the day we delivered our presentation on Blue Square to the other groups in the module. Davie, Martyn and myself have spent most of this week putting our presentation together, going over the slides, editing slides and rehearsing for our 20 minutes of glory. I’ll be honest, this is the most amount of effort I have ever put into a slide show presentation! Martyn was a key asset in our group, he lead the way and got the presentation put together in Keynote.

We got into the studio early this morning for another few practice rehearsal’s. By 11am we were ready and raring to go, we even managed to borrow a clicker remote to flick through our presentation, suave!

I think it’s fair to say our group was nervous about presenting, none of us really feel that confident in presenting but I think the practice runs really helped and we surprised ourselves. I was really impressed with the other groups presentations also, particularly the talk by Level 3 Animation. They done a really good presentation on the games industry and focused on a few companies in Dundee I was familiar with, including Outplay, where my boyfriend is an artist. It was nice to see that although they are a new company, they are not being overlooked.

So what’s next for the business module? On Wednesday we had a quick introduction to the next section of this module. Using the NESTA Creative Enterprise Toolkit we are going to be working on a Personal Enterprise proposal which will pave the way for our studies in Level 4. This proposal equates to 50% of our mark and should outline 3 our research for the summer. At present the brief is not available on MyDundee, however I drew a quick mind map (still trying out this method of note taking) during the lecture and outlined the key points.

As I come to realize this is actually what I’ve been doing the entire time. Giulia Forsythe inspired me to have my ideas and my drawings be broken down into. This would help in explaining why I drew this, what is it for and steps it actually took to come out that way (example: the process of getting one of my drawings as a tattoo)…I’ll show you what I mean as soon as I can…:)

Yes, I know that once SXSW gets started people often skip panels in favor of much more liquid pursuits, but since I began attending SXSW in 2010, there have been a number of panels and keynotes that have stuck with me and taught me things I could actually use and still refer to today. The Visual Notetaking 101 panel that Sunni Brown was on in 2010 helped me turn my doodling into something that gets a smile instead of a smirk from those sitting around me in a meetings. The insightful comments of the teenagers on a panel about teen use of Facebook and other social networking sites last year gave me a new point of reference for how teens see their online interactions. Dan Ariely’s mind opening talk about his book Predictably Irrational two years ago helped me see the way we make decisions completely differently.

So, I say Viva La Panel!

Here’s part of my thumbs up list:

• Applied Improvisation: Preparing to Be Unprepared by Brad Temple from Austin Improv Collective. Why a thumbs up? Because improv is awesome and taking an improv class taught me more how human beings interact and listen in teams then any management book has
• Inspired Creativity: How to Drive Innovation by Will Chase from Burning Man. Why a thumbs up? Because Burning Man fascinates me and so does the process of innovation
• Decentralized Organizations: Do They Work? by Kate Steinmetz from Burning Man. Why a thumbs up? Yes, another panel from someone at Burning Man, but this one looks awesome, and I’ve been super interested in this question since reading The Starfish and The Spider
• I’M HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS: Thank You Hyper Island by Iñaki Escudero. Why a thumbs up? Because Hyper Island is one of the more interesting models of education that I’ve seen
• For Better of for Work by Gary Hirshberg (Stonyfield Farm) & Meg Hirshberg (Inc. Magazine). Why a thumbs up? First, because they’re from my home state (go New Hampshire!) and second, because I think this is an interesting topic in the face of more and more people starting their own businesses and doing what they love
• Blah Me: What to Do When Words Don’t Work by Dan Roam. Why a thumbs up? Because I’m an avid believer in using illustration to get a point across…even if my illustrations look like they were created by a five year-old
• The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. Why a thumbs up? Because Chris has amazing things to say about how the way we are working is changing and he’s releasing brand new data at this session…yay data!
• NYC & SF Tech Scenes: By the Numbers by Jason Kincaid from TechCrunch. Why a thumbs up? Because I’m curious about the data and think that the success of both tech scenes matters
• Will it Blend? Your Local and Remote Workforces by Gary Swart from Odesk. Why a thumbs up? Because this is another topic related to work that totally fascinates me
• How Zappos builds a safe-to-fail culture by Zach Ware from Zappos. Why a thumbs up? Because I always learn something from Zappos
• Building a Startup Culture in a Boring Industry by Jennifer Spencer from PerkStreet Financial. Why a thumbs up? Because not everyone works in a startup.
• From Zero to Startup in 1 Year of Less by Brett Martin from Sonar. Why a thumbs up? Because I want to hear more of the story.

Sadly, my notes don’t look a THING like the examples in Eva-Lotta Lamm’s presentation on Sketchnotes.  This is a classic Fail Forward moment.

Day 1 – I actually sketched…

On the left hand page are the notes I took during Danah Boyd’s talk, Transparency is Not Enough.  She spoke passionately about how more and more children are becoming registered sex offenders thanks to the transparency that Megan’s Law provides.   Is transparency always a good thing?  Where is the balance?

Then on the right are the notes from Tim Berners-Lee who basically talked about leveraging existing taxonomies and developing links between them in order to create a universal language.  He used a bag of chips (or crisps) to explain.

Day 3 – My hand hurt?

I attended a vendor presentation (the vendor arrived 10 minutes late!).  It quickly devolved into buzzwords strung together, which clearly resonate with some people, but I’m not one of them.

I had no idea how to visually represent “value proposition” and “knowledge workers”.

But I really don’t want to talk about my failed attempt at visual note taking.  I want to talk about the Lolcat Bible!

Of all the presentations I saw at Gov 2.0 Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Citizen’s talk resonated the most with me.

Her message about using passion as a bridge to connect people to new messages was inspiring.  Days later I still find myself thinking about all the geeky science topics my organization could mashup with various passions.

As Kathy demonstrated people are passionate about their pets.  Heck, I’d say some are downright NUTS about their pets.  And if you invest 15 minutes in watching the presentation, you’ll see some of the passionate mashups Kathy uncovered.

My favorite passionate mashup is the LOL Cat Bible Translation Project.    And just in case you need it, read the history of lolcat on Wikipedia.