Getting Real About Time

• Published in: Poets & writers Vol. 52; no. 5; pp. 25 - 29
• Main Author: Wilding, Judith
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Poets & Writers, Incorporated 01.09.2024
• Subjects: Architects; Autobiographies; Prose; Writing; Writing processes
• ISSN: 0891-6136

HOW DATA MODELING CAN HELP YOU COMPLETE YOUR NEXT BIG PROJECT DURING the summer of 2022 I attended the Postgraduate Writers' Conference at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I had the good fortune of taking a memoir class with Ira Sukrungruang, the author of six books, including the memoir This Jade World (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). At a networking event someone told me about a workshop on information architecture called Modeling for Clarity, hosted by an organization called the Understanding Group. To make my model I used a whiteboarding software called Miro. Since I was doing a radical revision and hadn't even outlined some chapters, I held my nose as I guessed at nascent chapters, giving them vague names like "Moving forward." [...]I reflected on how writing those chapters taught me essential prose skills and ways into my subject matter. Because of these learning chapters, my current writing process was more efficient and successful. [...]figure