Some of these are maxims that I've tried to follow, but recently I had to throw them overboard because I wasn't getting any writing done.
1. Maxim: Write every day and get the words down. You can always edit them later.
Did it work? Sort of. I tried the Seinfeld chain, Pomodoro, and everything else that could make me write. I did write, and occasionally my brain even engaged. But I've found that there was no depth to the writing and that I had to rewrite every word, sometimes many times, before the sense of thing would emerge. I was trying for quantity, when what I needed was quality.
Moral: Write in haste and edit at leisure.
2. Maxim: Try writing on a bare screen (like 750words.com, notes in Evernote, etc.) and you'll have more ideas without the distractions of the other text.
Did it work? For some things, yes. But I wound up with a lot of disconnected passages that I had to rewrite, and I lost the sense of the manuscript as a whole. I was writing generalizations, not arguments.
Moral: That manuscript is not going away. Sooner or later you're going to have to look at it, so you might as well face it.
3. Maxim: Stop for the day when you know what you'll write the next day (the Hemingway technique). In this way you'll always have something to start with the next morning.
Did it work? Of all these techniques, this is the one that went the most disastrously wrong. Several days ago I stayed up writing and wrote down all the things I needed to do next, convinced I would get up and get at it the next morning. Need I tell you that I did not do this and that I couldn't face the writing for five days after that? And that the ideas that were once so fresh are now something I need to go back and reconstruct?
Moral: If you feel like writing, keep doing it. You can always sleep, but you can't always write.
4. Writing is a job, just like grading papers and prepping for class. Give yourself a couple of hours (or 20 minutes, or half an hour) each day and then quit.
Did it work? I said this to myself this morning in my best Boice/Silva vein, and I just didn't want to stop. My students aren't getting their papers back tomorrow, either.
Moral: Writing is exciting. It's discovery. If you're feeling that way about writing, the other stuff will get done in its own time.
9 comments:
Why is no one commenting on this great post? I agree with you on 1, 2, and 4. Not completely sure about 3. I think it's more that you should know in your head where you're going---Hemingway even stopped in the middle of a sentence so he could pick up easily the next day---and sometimes that works for me.
But in general, I think the key thing is figuring out what works for an individual. A lot of the pronouncements about How To Write have come from the major authors who make the most noise about how to do it (or whose biographers make the most noise), whether that was the Romantics blathering about their Muse or Trollope with his 250 words every 15 minutes for 3 hours. And people, being a bunch of sheep, always say, "Oooh, so that's how!" or else, "Gosh, I could never do that!"
I think writing is like food: some people can't stand to have different foods touch on the plate, some would be happy eating the same thing all the time, some are more adventurous, but they all get nourished.
But it's funny how much we all want those maxims, or recipes, a way to deal with whatever the individual "it's hard" problem is.
I've decided once again that the problem with all of the maxims is, they don't get at the real problem, if there is a problem.
If there is no problem, then one writes, applying whichever of these maxims works.
I know this from the time when I always wrote ... which was from 6th grade to about year 5 of assistant professor. In those days I never lacked minimal conditions in which to write (didn't always have ideal practical conditions, but one way or another did have minimal conditions) ... so the use of whatever maxim or organizing technique I needed at any particular moment came naturally.
This point was just driven home to me in a new way by the graduate student member of a university committee I am on. There was a nasty experience on the committee and the student asked: how do you go home and write after going through something like this? I said: I don't - I go home and try to write, but zone out.
Moral of story: what I should do is recognize I've just gone through h***, go do something really restorative (and not just dutiful like the boring gym), then come home in a different key.
The commute used to do that for me.
[Off topic: can your students do a close reading? Mine are having an awful time with it. I asked someone in French and they said yes, it's a problem, they have given up asking. I asked someone in English and they said yes, it's a problem, and some have given up but they have not. I asked someone in Spanish and they said the problem is that the students don't actually read, and therefore cannot read closely either. Is this just us or is it a generalized problem?]
Also: "Moral: Writing is exciting. It's discovery. If you're feeling that way about writing, the other stuff will get done in its own time."
Well, yes. And this was the attitude I had before I learned more twisted things.
I think that is why all the maxims are so problematic -- they presuppose more drama. It is supposed to be hard, it is supposed to be what you don't want to do, it is nonetheless what you must do or die, etc. If you can cut the drama and own the writing the way you own other things, like that now it's time for lunch or whatever, then you can happily swim in it, your element.
In my case the drama around writing comes from love and grief, because the writing and research orientation were what I tried at one point to beat out of myself for purposes of immediate academic survival; I still have a lot of sadness and guilt around that episode that I have to cut through and put aside when I read for research purposes as well as when I write.
I tried to cure myself with discipline but would have done better to try something more like love. Love would mean saying: "Yes, this is your work; it is not a question of whether or not you have a right to it; it comes from you and it is yours."
"I've decided once again that the problem with all of the maxims is, they don't get at the real problem, if there is a problem.
If there is no problem, then one writes, applying whichever of these maxims works."
Yes, that's what I mean about "it's hard" rhetoric masking the real problem. Only sometimes I think the real problem has actually gone away but we get so accustomed to the drama that the mental noise starts up anyway when we try to write.
Undine, sorry Z & I are hogging your comments, but to answer Z's question, I teach close reading, and because my students have found it so hard, it's pretty much the only kind of writing assignment I give now. They do it several times a semester until they can do it well.
Thank you, Dame Eleanor and Z--and you are not hogging the comments! I think I use maxims to get myself concentrating on the process without inducing anxiety. If the maxim says you will write if you sit down every day at 9 or whatever, then I try to believe it.
I've written before about how my more natural time for writing is late into the evening when everything is calm. I can't always do this--no one can who has to get up at 5 am on a regular basis--but that's when I enjoy writing.
Z, like Dame EleanorI teach them how to close read, but although they can do it well when I'm leading them through a passage, they still struggle with it when they have to analyze passages on their own. I keep working at it.
"Yes, that's what I mean about 'it's hard' rhetoric masking the real problem. Only sometimes I think the real problem has actually gone away but we get so accustomed to the drama that the mental noise starts up anyway when we try to write."
Either I am just really atypical, or there are more people like me but they are drowned out by "common sense."
The writing is hard dictum reminds me of the relationships are hard dictum -- it is some kind of pernicious propaganda. If it's drudgery, nose to the grindstone is not the solution.
I don't suffer terribly from difficulty with writing, after a sort of initial kind of gag reflex protesting at having to think, but I do still use some of these tricks, actually. I prefer not to stop writing when I'm on a roll, but if I do eventually recognise that I have to sleep or the next day will go horribly awry, I do try and leave a starting sentence for the next paragraph in the hope of being able to pick up roughly where I left off. There is a minimalist version of this for when you're really stuck, either for time or for words, which is to just get that first sentence down. Turn the gears at least a little. Get something down. It's OK if you only start, because it'll be so much easier to restart the next time. So I find, anyway.
Write every day I always found terrible advice. I write in huge binges when the open time comes up; it won't, frequently, so you have to use it when you can find it, or have something unpleasant to put off. I mean, yes, it's part of the job--which means that morally, you can justify not grading papers if you were writing--but it isn't shaped like work except for those for whom it's *all* of a job, who have some kind of self-esteem and picture of themselves as operational human beings at stake. We can prove that to ourselves in other ways and don't need to turn writing into a job itself.
I do do article-like things in bare screens, sometimes. I'll start with a skeletal plan and then just build it up. It gets thrown into a word processor once I have a structured piece of writing. But it could only work for single standalone pieces, not anything that justifies the term `manuscript', I think.
Jonathan, that so sounds like my experience, especially this one--initial kind of gag reflex protesting at having to think--and the helpful nature of the bare screen for getting going.
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