LJILJANA w CLIFF #7.1
We started our conversation talking about how your master classes are going and how you feel like you are accumulating enough information to make a full and minute presentation in two weeks but that you are spending most of your time with that Master Class during your commute so you listen much more than you read. Then we moved on to talk about my favorite topic, which is writing. We talked about the process of writing, how my process is to break things down into smaller and smaller steps so that I am never overwhelmed with the entirety of the project. Even though I am writing a book, I am only writing the outline, or today I am only writing the chapter notes for the next three chapters, or today I am only taking notes and making a very rough draft out of it. Or today I am only taking the rough text and cleaning it up.So every day I am doing some writing, but it is a small thing in my head. We talked about how to get better at anything. I told you about an interview that I saw with Michael Phelps in which he gave advice on how to be a better swimmer, about what exercises somebody could do to become a better swimmer and Michael Phelps said “try swimming.” Stephen King said the same thing about writing: if you want to be a good writer, you have to write. You were telling me How English is almost like a native language at work, that so much of is in English, and so getting these skills is very important. And among those skills is learning how to extract meaning from scientific papers that are written in English, and that it's not just the words but the expressions that you need to gain familiarity with. But you are developing a process and working through that. So after having a few different conversations about process and skill development, we agreed that we will talk again tomorrow about how the initial implementation of these things went for you today because it gives me an excuse to talk with you more about writing and I just love doing that.
