Imagine you’ve paid an elf to churn out a first draft of your writing project. Although well-versed in your research and a dedicated typist, the elf is careless and carefree and is entirely unconcerned with the quality of the text. You aren’t concerned either. You read the result once the little imp has finished, and, shaking your head but perhaps smiling at the elf’s foolishness, you—a brilliant human—tear into the text to craft a more acceptable draft.
The elf is you. It is not a metaphor for generative AI, which need not touch your project. It is, rather, a version of yourself you can recruit to clack away at your keyboard without a care, providing a release for all the ideas that have been churning in your skull, kept in check by anxieties about the monstrosity that might appear when thoughts become statements.
The “elfing” technique—devised by filmmaker Zach Cregger and recently described in a charming discussion with a high school film class—is a reframing of the familiar strategy of free writing. Comedy writer Jason Swartzwelder of The Simpsons has promoted a similar technique. Built into it is a philosophy about writing and revising as a process of modulating the relationship to yourself and your work. Up front, you take a healthy distance from your work, allowing the elf to take responsibility for whatever occurs. It doesn’t matter if the elf writes something embarrassingly low quality, because you expect the draft to be bad and you don’t care. What follows is a period of trust in yourself. You understand that something fantastic, or at least good, is latent in the elf draft—which is likely still interesting, if unpolished—and that you are capable enough to bring it to fruition. The process that emerges is almost a collaboration between the different sides of you: the one that is easy for you to criticize and the one that you believe in and admire.
I like the concept of elfing because it’s practical while also being fun, funny, and playful. These qualities may make it seem more appropriate for Cregger’s task of screenwriting masterfully campy horror movies than for academic scholarship, but academia could use more self-conscious applications of humor. Many of us research and write about profoundly serious, important, and even disturbing topics, and we do so under straining circumstances. Alleviating some of the pressure this creates is the least we can do for ourselves. If it is possible to inject levity and humor somewhere in the process of academic work, it should be in the service of easing the anguish that a high-stakes writing project like a dissertation can produce. There is already something ridiculous about the teetering pile of anxieties that build, one atop another, as one takes stock of doubts about difficult subject matter, writing itself, and the impending valuation of one’s work. We might as well make some of that absurdity work to our advantage, acknowledging it and adopting it as part of the process. And if there is a place in academia to embrace goofiness, it is in the first draft that we know will vanish once the generation of text featuring a great mass of information gives way to the thoughtful, deliberate nurturing of ideas and knowledge.
Elfing may only help marginally with the challenges of revising. Having the elf as a scapegoat for the first draft and at least encouraging you to read that text as someone else’s creation may work for some. For others, perhaps it is useful to anticipate role-playing as a second, more competent elf. A discussion about the elfing technique with colleagues at the Fellowships & Writing Center led to a brief question of the type of elf at work, and a consensus that this is a bumbling Christmas elf or something similar. Another species may come into play as you fix the first elf’s errors. Perhaps the revising elf is akin to the tiny, skilled shoemakers of fairytale fame, scurrying around to sort out a cobbler’s life while he sleeps. Or the editor elf could arrive at your desk from Tolkien’s Rivendell, serenely calm and unwaveringly capable in all pursuits. Either way, it is worth envisioning that someone is there for support, even as you work on your own, and remembering that we elves at the Fellowships & Writing Center are here to help when you need a bit more.
What are you waiting for? Go start elf_draft.docx.
Banner Image: Jony, Elf rent zeepbellen achterna (An Elf Runs after Soap Bubbles). Courtesy of Rijksmuseum online collection.
