Pen and paper

I've been sitting here for a while now, trying to get some ideas together. I think I understand why lectures got upset with us if we had doodles on our drawing books and no ideas that sprung from them. All I have on this page are doodles and I've just realised that, that means having nothing. I've been hitting brick walls or dead ends with my research, its (research report) not all about the history of beads but its about what I'm doing. What am I doing?