Writing the conclusion

I’m sitting in the library on a Saturday morning. The sun is shining brightly, and Cape Town is decked in blue skies. I’m trying to write my conclusion chapter. I’m experimenting with a form of free writing, with the aim of producing a spew draft. I’m writing around the themes or ideas I generated during a brainstorming and mind mapping exercise. I’m trying not to impose too many critical observations as I write – the kinds of critical observations that will usually make me stop writing because I judge the idea to be ill-conceived, poorly articulated, disconnected from another idea, lacking substantiation or irrelevant to my developing argument. I want to hold off on all this kind of judgement and questioning until I have written all I need to write about a specific topic or heading in the chapter. There will be enough time and opportunity to critique, rip apart and discard when I take the chapter to the next level in the writing process. I few months ago I found some useful advice about approaching a writing task as having many different stages that demand different things from the writer. An essential element of this approach is not to start the ‘editing’ process prematurely. I've tried over the past couple of days to take this advice on board and use this first level of writing as an experiment of ideas. And it seems to be working for me, I don’t have a blank sheet of paper or screen staring at me admonishingly.

Before I started to work on the conclusion chapter I was silently dreading it. I passively avoided moving myself in the direction of working on the task – playing stupid little games with myself, that all centred around avoidance and denial. When I finally sat down to work on it, a day later than planned, I was pleasantly surprised. It didn't seem so bad after all. I could write stuff. I chose not to judge what I was writing. In addition to the writing approach I’m adopting, I think there is a hint of confidence and clarity about my thesis project finally coming through. This really is my story and I can provided the justification for why I’m sticking with it.