I.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari
How We Write
A conversation has unfolded on Facebook over the last week on the topic of How We Write. Two of us who were involved in that conversation would like to push it forward, first offering our own experiences here, and then going on to collect the experiences of others who are also willing to share, perhaps (if there’s sufficient interest) putting together a collective resource on How We Write. (Note that this is not to be confused with ‘How To Write’ – these are idiosyncratic, self-flagellating approaches to the process.) So please add your experience in the comments, or share it in another way, and let us know if this kind of collective resource is something you’d like to read and/or contribute to.
The impetus for this conversation was a wonderful blogpost by Michael Collins on the occasion of a roundtable hosted by the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, on how to facilitate dissertation-writing groups. Michael’s thoughtful engagement with his own experience of writing – posted and reposted on a number of Facebook pages – led to an outpouring of personal accounts of the dissertation-writing years, both from those currently in the trenches and those for whom those years are very much in the rear-view mirror. What emerged was a clear sense of the diversity of writing practices that are out there: there’s no single ‘right’ way to write, and exposure to that range of practices might help those who are in the process of mastering academic writing to feel more confident in their own abilities, most of all by demonstrating that such ‘mastery’ is an ongoing – potentially limitless – effort.
In his post, Michael commented on the need for better writing support, both in the form of peer communities that provide uncritical support and shared goal-setting, and in the form of structured, scaffolded writing tasks. The first means of support can be facilitated by faculty and administrators, who can provide students with information on building student-led writing groups, good space to work in groups, and so on. The second means of support could also be provided, but would probably have to be provided in the form of supplementary instruction by teachers of writing. The reason: most of us faculty are not equipped to teach writing. Like Alexandra, I write in short bursts of productivity that punctuate long periods of frustration and distraction; I'm not sure anyone would want to learn to write the way I do. It’s possible that faculty who work in a different way, writing a disciplined page or two every morning, could provide the kind of writing mentorship that would be useful to doctoral students. But I'm coming to think that people simply have different styles of writing: the goal is to figure out what style works for you and learn to do it well.
I know that some faculty do write in a regular, methodical way – a few hundred words every morning, or even a page every day. Such writers include much admired mentors and good friends. And I have always assumed that my own inability to write in any way other than short bursts of manic activity is pathological. This poses a particular problem in mentoring students as they develop their own writing processes, because I would feel like a complete charlatan telling people to write the way I do: “Procrastinate until you're so consumed with anxiety that you go away and do something else, then let the ideas stew until you're ready to write, then don't talk to anyone for three days while you write. Voila, article draft!” This is not a sound pedagogical method.
And yet it works. As Alex Gillespie said to me, in the course of one of the Facebook threads arising from Michael’s blogpost, “Our way is a bit manic but it works right? I mean, we produce. And I enjoy the process.” It does indeed work, in the sense that it takes a terribly long time to get ready to write, to come to the point when the trajectory of the argument is clear; but when that time comes, the words pour out. When that time comes, when you’re truly in the writing zone, there's nothing like it – it’s fantastic, so exhilarating, completely satisfying. I could never get into that frame of mind through daily writing. Which means that it’s a form of addiction: the high of writing in a concentrated way, where you no longer think consciously about the words you’re writing but just hear the words out loud as you put them on the page, is absolutely intoxicating. So let me summarize a few examples of this experience, what it has felt like to work in this way. I’ll begin with an overview of my writing as it developed over the years I spent in graduate school (1988-94); the following several years, as the dissertation evolved into a monograph (1995-2003); and the very different experience of writing a second monograph (2004-08).
When I started writing in graduate school, I was lucky in three ways: 1) I had a remarkable experience of intense training in short-form (three-page) writing, in two graduate seminars on Renaissance poetry; 2) I taught in Columbia’s “Logic and Rhetoric” courses, teaching undergraduates to write (and rewrite) frequent short papers; and 3) I stumbled onto a topic in the very first semester of my MA program that would ultimately become the core of my dissertation. While this training in short-form writing – both as student and as teacher – might seem a world away from the long-form dissertation, the rapid turnaround of these short papers gave me the ability to write quickly, without thinking about it too much, as well as good training in close reading practice, both of which became useful building blocks in the dissertation. Teaching this form of writing was just as useful as writing this form, in that it required me to articulate the stakes of short-form writing in this way, and to guide students through the process. Finally, I had the good fortune to find my topic early: in the first term of the MA (in 1988), in a course on Medieval Allegory, I wrote a paper on “The Tripartite Narrator of the First Roman de la rose: Dreamer, Lover, and Narcissus.” It was a lousy paper, but its preoccupation with visual experience, mythography, and what I would later call “structural allegory” became the core of what became the chapter on Guillaume de Lorris in my dissertation and – ultimately – in the monograph that I published in 2004.
At that time, Columbia MA students were obliged to identify one seminar paper per term as having special status. This paper could be longer than the usual seminar paper, up to about 20 or 22 pages, and would be passed on from the initial instructor to a departmentally appointed second reader. The exercise was not a useful one, except in one respect: the requirement to think of writing in the longer form (not as long as an article, but longer than a usual seminar paper) asked us to think beyond the usual limits, and to imagine a still longer form of writing that might lie ahead.
When I started writing the dissertation, I was encouraged – as I still encourage my own students – to begin with the material I knew best. Accordingly, the first chapter I wrote was on the optical allegory of Guillaume’s Rose. It wasn’t a very good dissertation chapter, and it’s still the weakest chapter in the book; but it was the very heart of the whole project, the piece from which all the other parts emerged. I can remember sitting in a café in our neighborhood in the early 1990s, thinking about the Roman de la rose, reflecting on the two crystals at the bottom of the fountain of Narcissus and the way that white light would be refracted in them. As I thought about the passage, I peered into the surface of the stone in the ring I was wearing, and looked at the different sparks of color that flashed into sight. I felt like I was motionlessly seeing the object of thought; that if I only looked hard enough, I would understand how the parts of the argument related to one another, and I would see the shape of the whole.
In retrospect, that was a self-indulgent and probably silly experience. But it was absolutely central to my writing process. The protracted period of suspension, reading and thinking, doing other things – teaching, looking after children, etc. – were necessary to set the stage for the dissertation writing, which immediately took on a rhythm of its own. I could reliably write one chapter per term, and at the end of three years post-field exams, the dissertation was complete. I cannot emphasize this point often enough: the pace of writing was not because I am a disciplined writer, because I am the opposite of that. But I did have the confidence to believe that the writing would come when it was ready, and I pushed hard to get to the point when the words would be ripe and ready to fall on the page.
The same frustration and sense of deferral marked the years leading up to the ultimate publication of the book that emerged from the dissertation. On the advice of one of my co-supervisors, I put the dissertation aside after the defense. In retrospect, this may not have been good advice, because I found it very difficult to return to this project after a few years, ready to restructure and revise it into monograph form. On the other hand, the length of time that separated dissertation and monograph – nine years – may have given the work that was ultimately published a greater degree of maturity and cohesiveness would have otherwise been possible. And the tension that existed during that period between the work that I was finishing up (Seeing Through the Veil) and the new work that I was developing (what would become Idols in the East) was certainly very productive.
Writing a second book was very different from the first, in three ways. The first, and most important difference? I knew that I could write a book, because I had done it; this made it easy to be confident that I could write another one, and the only question was what shape it would take. That shape preoccupied me on and off during the period 1995-2008, most intensely in 2005-07, after publishing Seeing Through the Veil, finishing a collection of essays on Marco Polo, and finally turning completely to the task of writing Idols in the East. I had initially conceived of the book as separated into chapters focused on individual books or authors – on the model of Seeing Through the Veil – but gradually came to think of organizing it thematically, which is a much more difficult shape to control. As with the earlier project, there was a kind of epiphanic experience that came soon before the main part of the writing period: I was walking home, shortly before meeting a friend, and suddenly saw clearly how I wanted to connect the concept of orientation, understood in a polysemous way, to the theory of Orientalism. So I stopped on the street and scribbled some notes on cardinal directions and how identity might be conceived of in spatial terms. That ‘Aha!’ moment was crucial to my writing process. After that moment, it was a matter of shutting myself up in my office, not talking to anyone, eating lunch over my keyboard, and just typing out the words as I heard them.
Again, it sounds pretentious and magical, and completely implausible. But that’s what my experience has been like. And it is crucial not to lose sight of the enormous frustration, long periods of the inability to be productive, and painfully acute tendency to be distracted. I spend way more time wanting to write and not finding my way to it than I do in the act of writing. But when it’s happening, there’s nothing like it.
How can this story be useful to others? Maybe, just maybe, by letting those who are still laboring in the trenches of the dissertation know that there are many different ways of experiencing the creative process – because it is, at least in part, a creative process. Academic writing is basically simple, practical, methodical, steady work; except when it isn’t, when it’s instead ambitious and exciting and overreaching. I can’t imagine having dedicated so much of my life to this work without the rewards of this second aspect of academic writing. So what I would like to say, to those who are now writing their dissertations and feeling frustrated with their own progress, lacking confidence in their abilities to carry out their projects, is: KNOW YOURSELF. Are you able to be a disciplined writer, who puts down a couple of hundred words – or even a whole page – every morning? If so, God bless you, you are one of the lucky ones. That’s your process, and it’s a remarkably sane and productive one; I often wish I could work in that way.
But if you find yourself thinking about many different things at once – the chapter you should be writing, and the conference abstract that’s due next week, and the guest lecture on Ovid you will give next month, and the baby you have to pick up from daycare in a few hours – maybe you simply are that sort of thinker. If so, embrace your process and celebrate it, because you will be able to create the impression of remarkable productivity through the means of what is sometimes called Structured Procrastination. If the chapter isn’t coming along, write the conference abstract, even though it’s not due for another week; if the abstract isn’t coming along, write the lecture that’s coming up next month. You procrastinate, avoiding doing the task you should be doing by doing a different task that you also have to do. And the illusion is created – the magnificent illusion – of being able to do a tremendous number of things.
II.
Alexandra Gillespie
A conversation has unfolded on Facebook over the last week on the topic of How We Write. Two of us who were involved in that conversation would like to push it forward, first offering our own experiences here, and then going on to collect the experiences of others who are also willing to share, perhaps (if there’s sufficient interest) putting together a collective resource on How We Write. (Note that this is not to be confused with ‘How To Write’ – these are idiosyncratic, self-flagellating approaches to the process.) So please add your experience in the comments, or share it in another way, and let us know if this kind of collective resource is something you’d like to read and/or contribute to.
The impetus for this conversation was a wonderful blogpost by Michael Collins on the occasion of a roundtable hosted by the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, on how to facilitate dissertation-writing groups. Michael’s thoughtful engagement with his own experience of writing – posted and reposted on a number of Facebook pages – led to an outpouring of personal accounts of the dissertation-writing years, both from those currently in the trenches and those for whom those years are very much in the rear-view mirror. What emerged was a clear sense of the diversity of writing practices that are out there: there’s no single ‘right’ way to write, and exposure to that range of practices might help those who are in the process of mastering academic writing to feel more confident in their own abilities, most of all by demonstrating that such ‘mastery’ is an ongoing – potentially limitless – effort.
In his post, Michael commented on the need for better writing support, both in the form of peer communities that provide uncritical support and shared goal-setting, and in the form of structured, scaffolded writing tasks. The first means of support can be facilitated by faculty and administrators, who can provide students with information on building student-led writing groups, good space to work in groups, and so on. The second means of support could also be provided, but would probably have to be provided in the form of supplementary instruction by teachers of writing. The reason: most of us faculty are not equipped to teach writing. Like Alexandra, I write in short bursts of productivity that punctuate long periods of frustration and distraction; I'm not sure anyone would want to learn to write the way I do. It’s possible that faculty who work in a different way, writing a disciplined page or two every morning, could provide the kind of writing mentorship that would be useful to doctoral students. But I'm coming to think that people simply have different styles of writing: the goal is to figure out what style works for you and learn to do it well.
I know that some faculty do write in a regular, methodical way – a few hundred words every morning, or even a page every day. Such writers include much admired mentors and good friends. And I have always assumed that my own inability to write in any way other than short bursts of manic activity is pathological. This poses a particular problem in mentoring students as they develop their own writing processes, because I would feel like a complete charlatan telling people to write the way I do: “Procrastinate until you're so consumed with anxiety that you go away and do something else, then let the ideas stew until you're ready to write, then don't talk to anyone for three days while you write. Voila, article draft!” This is not a sound pedagogical method.
And yet it works. As Alex Gillespie said to me, in the course of one of the Facebook threads arising from Michael’s blogpost, “Our way is a bit manic but it works right? I mean, we produce. And I enjoy the process.” It does indeed work, in the sense that it takes a terribly long time to get ready to write, to come to the point when the trajectory of the argument is clear; but when that time comes, the words pour out. When that time comes, when you’re truly in the writing zone, there's nothing like it – it’s fantastic, so exhilarating, completely satisfying. I could never get into that frame of mind through daily writing. Which means that it’s a form of addiction: the high of writing in a concentrated way, where you no longer think consciously about the words you’re writing but just hear the words out loud as you put them on the page, is absolutely intoxicating. So let me summarize a few examples of this experience, what it has felt like to work in this way. I’ll begin with an overview of my writing as it developed over the years I spent in graduate school (1988-94); the following several years, as the dissertation evolved into a monograph (1995-2003); and the very different experience of writing a second monograph (2004-08).
When I started writing in graduate school, I was lucky in three ways: 1) I had a remarkable experience of intense training in short-form (three-page) writing, in two graduate seminars on Renaissance poetry; 2) I taught in Columbia’s “Logic and Rhetoric” courses, teaching undergraduates to write (and rewrite) frequent short papers; and 3) I stumbled onto a topic in the very first semester of my MA program that would ultimately become the core of my dissertation. While this training in short-form writing – both as student and as teacher – might seem a world away from the long-form dissertation, the rapid turnaround of these short papers gave me the ability to write quickly, without thinking about it too much, as well as good training in close reading practice, both of which became useful building blocks in the dissertation. Teaching this form of writing was just as useful as writing this form, in that it required me to articulate the stakes of short-form writing in this way, and to guide students through the process. Finally, I had the good fortune to find my topic early: in the first term of the MA (in 1988), in a course on Medieval Allegory, I wrote a paper on “The Tripartite Narrator of the First Roman de la rose: Dreamer, Lover, and Narcissus.” It was a lousy paper, but its preoccupation with visual experience, mythography, and what I would later call “structural allegory” became the core of what became the chapter on Guillaume de Lorris in my dissertation and – ultimately – in the monograph that I published in 2004.
At that time, Columbia MA students were obliged to identify one seminar paper per term as having special status. This paper could be longer than the usual seminar paper, up to about 20 or 22 pages, and would be passed on from the initial instructor to a departmentally appointed second reader. The exercise was not a useful one, except in one respect: the requirement to think of writing in the longer form (not as long as an article, but longer than a usual seminar paper) asked us to think beyond the usual limits, and to imagine a still longer form of writing that might lie ahead.
When I started writing the dissertation, I was encouraged – as I still encourage my own students – to begin with the material I knew best. Accordingly, the first chapter I wrote was on the optical allegory of Guillaume’s Rose. It wasn’t a very good dissertation chapter, and it’s still the weakest chapter in the book; but it was the very heart of the whole project, the piece from which all the other parts emerged. I can remember sitting in a café in our neighborhood in the early 1990s, thinking about the Roman de la rose, reflecting on the two crystals at the bottom of the fountain of Narcissus and the way that white light would be refracted in them. As I thought about the passage, I peered into the surface of the stone in the ring I was wearing, and looked at the different sparks of color that flashed into sight. I felt like I was motionlessly seeing the object of thought; that if I only looked hard enough, I would understand how the parts of the argument related to one another, and I would see the shape of the whole.
In retrospect, that was a self-indulgent and probably silly experience. But it was absolutely central to my writing process. The protracted period of suspension, reading and thinking, doing other things – teaching, looking after children, etc. – were necessary to set the stage for the dissertation writing, which immediately took on a rhythm of its own. I could reliably write one chapter per term, and at the end of three years post-field exams, the dissertation was complete. I cannot emphasize this point often enough: the pace of writing was not because I am a disciplined writer, because I am the opposite of that. But I did have the confidence to believe that the writing would come when it was ready, and I pushed hard to get to the point when the words would be ripe and ready to fall on the page.
The same frustration and sense of deferral marked the years leading up to the ultimate publication of the book that emerged from the dissertation. On the advice of one of my co-supervisors, I put the dissertation aside after the defense. In retrospect, this may not have been good advice, because I found it very difficult to return to this project after a few years, ready to restructure and revise it into monograph form. On the other hand, the length of time that separated dissertation and monograph – nine years – may have given the work that was ultimately published a greater degree of maturity and cohesiveness would have otherwise been possible. And the tension that existed during that period between the work that I was finishing up (Seeing Through the Veil) and the new work that I was developing (what would become Idols in the East) was certainly very productive.
Writing a second book was very different from the first, in three ways. The first, and most important difference? I knew that I could write a book, because I had done it; this made it easy to be confident that I could write another one, and the only question was what shape it would take. That shape preoccupied me on and off during the period 1995-2008, most intensely in 2005-07, after publishing Seeing Through the Veil, finishing a collection of essays on Marco Polo, and finally turning completely to the task of writing Idols in the East. I had initially conceived of the book as separated into chapters focused on individual books or authors – on the model of Seeing Through the Veil – but gradually came to think of organizing it thematically, which is a much more difficult shape to control. As with the earlier project, there was a kind of epiphanic experience that came soon before the main part of the writing period: I was walking home, shortly before meeting a friend, and suddenly saw clearly how I wanted to connect the concept of orientation, understood in a polysemous way, to the theory of Orientalism. So I stopped on the street and scribbled some notes on cardinal directions and how identity might be conceived of in spatial terms. That ‘Aha!’ moment was crucial to my writing process. After that moment, it was a matter of shutting myself up in my office, not talking to anyone, eating lunch over my keyboard, and just typing out the words as I heard them.
Again, it sounds pretentious and magical, and completely implausible. But that’s what my experience has been like. And it is crucial not to lose sight of the enormous frustration, long periods of the inability to be productive, and painfully acute tendency to be distracted. I spend way more time wanting to write and not finding my way to it than I do in the act of writing. But when it’s happening, there’s nothing like it.
How can this story be useful to others? Maybe, just maybe, by letting those who are still laboring in the trenches of the dissertation know that there are many different ways of experiencing the creative process – because it is, at least in part, a creative process. Academic writing is basically simple, practical, methodical, steady work; except when it isn’t, when it’s instead ambitious and exciting and overreaching. I can’t imagine having dedicated so much of my life to this work without the rewards of this second aspect of academic writing. So what I would like to say, to those who are now writing their dissertations and feeling frustrated with their own progress, lacking confidence in their abilities to carry out their projects, is: KNOW YOURSELF. Are you able to be a disciplined writer, who puts down a couple of hundred words – or even a whole page – every morning? If so, God bless you, you are one of the lucky ones. That’s your process, and it’s a remarkably sane and productive one; I often wish I could work in that way.
But if you find yourself thinking about many different things at once – the chapter you should be writing, and the conference abstract that’s due next week, and the guest lecture on Ovid you will give next month, and the baby you have to pick up from daycare in a few hours – maybe you simply are that sort of thinker. If so, embrace your process and celebrate it, because you will be able to create the impression of remarkable productivity through the means of what is sometimes called Structured Procrastination. If the chapter isn’t coming along, write the conference abstract, even though it’s not due for another week; if the abstract isn’t coming along, write the lecture that’s coming up next month. You procrastinate, avoiding doing the task you should be doing by doing a different task that you also have to do. And the illusion is created – the magnificent illusion – of being able to do a tremendous number of things.
II.
Alexandra Gillespie
On Academic Writing
http://oldbooksnewscience.com/
I only write when I have to. Because reasons. It’s just the way I write.
I used to invent the necessity in “have to.” “How will you fund the fourth year of your DPhil?” asked my Oxford supervisor in October 1997. I was 23, fresh from an undergraduate degree; I had little Latin, less Greek. (Ha ha! I had no Greek.) I hadn’t read much English literature, come to think of it. “I will finish in three years,” I told her. “Good,” she said.
And because I had said it, I did it. Well, sort of: by October 2000 my thesis existed – not great, but fully footnoted at least.
To get to that point, I needed immediate deadlines as well as deep, energizing anxiety (fear I would not keep my word, fear I would disappoint, fear I would run out of funding). I gave my first year MSt qualifying paper at a conference: high pressure but good fun. So I scheduled conference presentations for the rest of the thesis. There’s nothing like the prospect of giving a paper to “famous” academics to make you write a whole chapter about early printing on the train from Oxford to Glasgow.[1]
Now, by the time I boarded that train, I had seen hundreds of early printed books and I had a database full of notes about them. I had some super OHPTs.[2] I even had some thoughts written down. This is because my advisors would leave fear-mongering notes in my pigeonhole. “Come over for coffee” and such.[3] Terrifying. I would respond defensively, with 5,000 words.
But it was the conference-going that was most fruitful. To this day, I do all the writing that really matters to me on the eve of a talk, or while I am travelling to deliver it.
Gadding about also gave a productive shape to my academic life. I made friends. I realized how much I needed community. I joined societies, started collaborations, committed to publications, applied for library fellowships, organized a conference, and took on a big load of teaching (my favourite interlocutors are always students).
The end of October 2000 came, and I did have a thesis ready. But somehow I also did not. It still seemed a bit wrong. Moreover, I did not have time to fix it, because I was occupied with all those other ‘necessities’.
So I stalled. I worked on the other stuff for months. Eventually one of my Oxford teachers asked the question I was too scared to ask myself: “Alex, when’re you gonna hand that thang in?” [4]
Shame works like fear for me. I went straight home and revised 80,000 words in 19 days. I got about three hours of sleep per night. Towards the end I was so tired that I hallucinated a rat on a can of soup at Sainsbury’s. There he was: and then – oh dear! No rat. That was when I decided it really was time to hand the thang in.
None of this was healthy, but it was kind of . . . great. I had been thinking about problems with that thesis for six months. Solutions emerged in an exuberant rush. I wrote 3-5,000 words a day, including substantial new sections that I later published, verbatim, in Print Culture and the Medieval Author (2006).
Anyway, that was then. Now I am much older and in a privileged rather than precarious position. I have tenure, research funding, brilliant students, glorious colleagues.[5] I’ve had formative experiences. Through them, I’ve realized that fear and anxiety are less necessary to me than I once believed.
But – happier, more accepting, middle aged – I still maintain the patterns I established as a graduate student. My time is completely, deliberately filled up. I am up to my teeth in teaching, supervising, grant writing, collaborative project management, commissioned essays, reviews. (I have some principles that guide my selection of activities: (1) Remember the rat! Leave time for sleep. (2) Prioritize kids and partner. (3) Avoid assholes.)
When I can squeeze time out of my schedule, I read and think. I inflict my thoughts on members of my research lab. I visit archives, just for a day or two. I scribble ideas down in a notebook. I contribute tl;dr comments to Facebook threads.
And then I write – but only when I have to write. A few weeks ago, I wrote 6,000 words in six hours, so I could send them all to Maura Nolan.[6] This was a lot, even for me. But – Maura Nolan! I’d write 6,000 words for Maura any day.
What is to be learned from this? I’m not sure. This post is very much about me (me, me, me). I offer it mainly because, in a recent Facebook conversation, younger colleagues expressed their belief that all ‘successful’ (i.e., privileged) academics were steady-as-she-goes, 300-words-a-day people. Well, not me.
I suppose my advice about writing is not actually about writing. It’s more about being:
· Learn who you are, and then be it more, instead of thinking, always, that you are meant to be less.
· Be grateful for everything, because you have learned from all of it and you love learning.[7]
· Practice patience and empathy with yourself and others.[8] (However, do reserve a little hostility for assholes.[9] )
· You are okay, and it will be okay (or else it won’t be okay, and that will be okay too).[10] Once you truly believe that, writing and all manner of things will be well.
Notes
[1] Early Book Society Conference, July 1999, organized by the lovely Martha Driver and Jeremy Smith.
[2] A now defunct technology, remembered fondly by elderly people.
[3] My advisors were Anne Hudson and Helen Cooper, and they were unfailingly generous in every way.
[4] Those who know him will recognize the Texas twang of Ralph Hanna III.
[5] Like Suzanne Conklin Akbari, who with Michael Collins and ITM created the space for this discussion.
[6] So she could respond to my paper for the Digital Premodern Symposium, May 2014, hosted by Claire Waters and Amanda Phillips, with help from Seeta Chaganti and Colin Milburn. Thanks to them all: I had a blast and got a book chapter out of it!
[7] So, gratitude is not for everyone, but it’s how I reconcile myself to chronic illness and medications that affect my day-to-day functioning; and the injury of my daughter at birth and her mild disability. Am I grateful for the incompetent and rampantly misogynist doctors I met on this “journey”? Well, no, of course not. But I am grateful for what is. I am all good! And so is my kid. When, despite best efforts, self-recrimination and helplessness sweep over me, I turn to mindfulness practices, e.g. http://thework.com/. (H/t: the magical Andrea Bonsey).
[8] It helps to see human beings as overgrown toddlers. We’re all struggling to regulate our emotions. We’re awful when we’re tired, hungry, or in pain. Sometimes people feel shy, or need to have a little tizzy. Be gentle and wait; the tizzy will pass.
[9] True assholes are easy to spot. They are the ones whose tizzies involve dumping on people under and around them (but never above them). They are obviously in a lot of pain, but their pain takes an ugly and destructive form. Be empathetic; that will allow you to see that their assholery is not about you. But do not waste your your emotional energy on an asshole. Note, further, that many of us have internalized others’ assholery so completely that we are assholes to our Self. This makes us especially vulnerable to the asshole Other. Here is how I have learned to handle assholes, over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg.
[10] The poet Kate Camp wrote those words down for me on a scrap of paper and gave them to me as farewell gift when I left NZ in 1997. I carried it round in my wallet until I passed the DPhil, when I passed it to a friend. But it took me another decade to get her point.
http://oldbooksnewscience.com/
I only write when I have to. Because reasons. It’s just the way I write.
I used to invent the necessity in “have to.” “How will you fund the fourth year of your DPhil?” asked my Oxford supervisor in October 1997. I was 23, fresh from an undergraduate degree; I had little Latin, less Greek. (Ha ha! I had no Greek.) I hadn’t read much English literature, come to think of it. “I will finish in three years,” I told her. “Good,” she said.
And because I had said it, I did it. Well, sort of: by October 2000 my thesis existed – not great, but fully footnoted at least.
To get to that point, I needed immediate deadlines as well as deep, energizing anxiety (fear I would not keep my word, fear I would disappoint, fear I would run out of funding). I gave my first year MSt qualifying paper at a conference: high pressure but good fun. So I scheduled conference presentations for the rest of the thesis. There’s nothing like the prospect of giving a paper to “famous” academics to make you write a whole chapter about early printing on the train from Oxford to Glasgow.[1]
Now, by the time I boarded that train, I had seen hundreds of early printed books and I had a database full of notes about them. I had some super OHPTs.[2] I even had some thoughts written down. This is because my advisors would leave fear-mongering notes in my pigeonhole. “Come over for coffee” and such.[3] Terrifying. I would respond defensively, with 5,000 words.
But it was the conference-going that was most fruitful. To this day, I do all the writing that really matters to me on the eve of a talk, or while I am travelling to deliver it.
Gadding about also gave a productive shape to my academic life. I made friends. I realized how much I needed community. I joined societies, started collaborations, committed to publications, applied for library fellowships, organized a conference, and took on a big load of teaching (my favourite interlocutors are always students).
The end of October 2000 came, and I did have a thesis ready. But somehow I also did not. It still seemed a bit wrong. Moreover, I did not have time to fix it, because I was occupied with all those other ‘necessities’.
So I stalled. I worked on the other stuff for months. Eventually one of my Oxford teachers asked the question I was too scared to ask myself: “Alex, when’re you gonna hand that thang in?” [4]
Shame works like fear for me. I went straight home and revised 80,000 words in 19 days. I got about three hours of sleep per night. Towards the end I was so tired that I hallucinated a rat on a can of soup at Sainsbury’s. There he was: and then – oh dear! No rat. That was when I decided it really was time to hand the thang in.
None of this was healthy, but it was kind of . . . great. I had been thinking about problems with that thesis for six months. Solutions emerged in an exuberant rush. I wrote 3-5,000 words a day, including substantial new sections that I later published, verbatim, in Print Culture and the Medieval Author (2006).
Anyway, that was then. Now I am much older and in a privileged rather than precarious position. I have tenure, research funding, brilliant students, glorious colleagues.[5] I’ve had formative experiences. Through them, I’ve realized that fear and anxiety are less necessary to me than I once believed.
But – happier, more accepting, middle aged – I still maintain the patterns I established as a graduate student. My time is completely, deliberately filled up. I am up to my teeth in teaching, supervising, grant writing, collaborative project management, commissioned essays, reviews. (I have some principles that guide my selection of activities: (1) Remember the rat! Leave time for sleep. (2) Prioritize kids and partner. (3) Avoid assholes.)
When I can squeeze time out of my schedule, I read and think. I inflict my thoughts on members of my research lab. I visit archives, just for a day or two. I scribble ideas down in a notebook. I contribute tl;dr comments to Facebook threads.
And then I write – but only when I have to write. A few weeks ago, I wrote 6,000 words in six hours, so I could send them all to Maura Nolan.[6] This was a lot, even for me. But – Maura Nolan! I’d write 6,000 words for Maura any day.
What is to be learned from this? I’m not sure. This post is very much about me (me, me, me). I offer it mainly because, in a recent Facebook conversation, younger colleagues expressed their belief that all ‘successful’ (i.e., privileged) academics were steady-as-she-goes, 300-words-a-day people. Well, not me.
I suppose my advice about writing is not actually about writing. It’s more about being:
· Learn who you are, and then be it more, instead of thinking, always, that you are meant to be less.
· Be grateful for everything, because you have learned from all of it and you love learning.[7]
· Practice patience and empathy with yourself and others.[8] (However, do reserve a little hostility for assholes.[9] )
· You are okay, and it will be okay (or else it won’t be okay, and that will be okay too).[10] Once you truly believe that, writing and all manner of things will be well.
Notes
[1] Early Book Society Conference, July 1999, organized by the lovely Martha Driver and Jeremy Smith.
[2] A now defunct technology, remembered fondly by elderly people.
[3] My advisors were Anne Hudson and Helen Cooper, and they were unfailingly generous in every way.
[4] Those who know him will recognize the Texas twang of Ralph Hanna III.
[5] Like Suzanne Conklin Akbari, who with Michael Collins and ITM created the space for this discussion.
[6] So she could respond to my paper for the Digital Premodern Symposium, May 2014, hosted by Claire Waters and Amanda Phillips, with help from Seeta Chaganti and Colin Milburn. Thanks to them all: I had a blast and got a book chapter out of it!
[7] So, gratitude is not for everyone, but it’s how I reconcile myself to chronic illness and medications that affect my day-to-day functioning; and the injury of my daughter at birth and her mild disability. Am I grateful for the incompetent and rampantly misogynist doctors I met on this “journey”? Well, no, of course not. But I am grateful for what is. I am all good! And so is my kid. When, despite best efforts, self-recrimination and helplessness sweep over me, I turn to mindfulness practices, e.g. http://thework.com/. (H/t: the magical Andrea Bonsey).
[8] It helps to see human beings as overgrown toddlers. We’re all struggling to regulate our emotions. We’re awful when we’re tired, hungry, or in pain. Sometimes people feel shy, or need to have a little tizzy. Be gentle and wait; the tizzy will pass.
[9] True assholes are easy to spot. They are the ones whose tizzies involve dumping on people under and around them (but never above them). They are obviously in a lot of pain, but their pain takes an ugly and destructive form. Be empathetic; that will allow you to see that their assholery is not about you. But do not waste your your emotional energy on an asshole. Note, further, that many of us have internalized others’ assholery so completely that we are assholes to our Self. This makes us especially vulnerable to the asshole Other. Here is how I have learned to handle assholes, over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg.
[10] The poet Kate Camp wrote those words down for me on a scrap of paper and gave them to me as farewell gift when I left NZ in 1997. I carried it round in my wallet until I passed the DPhil, when I passed it to a friend. But it took me another decade to get her point.
