It's wednesday. I'm having one of those grey, lack-lustre weeks where the sky is full of sleet, my cats have become incontinent, and I'm fighting-off the kind of first-world but endless problems that make you want to crawl under a duvet, with a pint of gin. And I got some disappointing news that means I'm stuck in the first circle-of-hell, domestically speaking, for at least another month.
*But* today I crossed the final 't' of the first half of the chapter I'm working on - the chapter that refuses to die. And I'm hell-bent with gritted teeth on slaying the rest of the beast by the end of next week.
Sometimes writing is a joy. The ideas fly, the words pour out, I feel inspired and curious and everything works. Other times I get stuck, but I can unstick myself by picking up a book, doing some reading, finding something out. The issue with this chapter is neither of those. I have all the necessary ideas and knowledge in my head. Perhaps too much. The issue is I can't settle on a way to put them on the page. It's as if the sheer volume of thought is stuck at a bottleneck. I keep writing and then re-writing and then opening a new document and starting again, but I'm never happy with how it sounds.
I've been seeking help (procrastination?) in general how-to-write guides, like Paul Silvia's How to write a lot. I find a lot of such advice pretty useless. There is a lot of emphasis on doing tons of planning which has never worked for me - although shhh, don't tell my students I said that, because I still give that advice out a lot. Another thing they always bang on about is getting into a regular writing habit, and getting words written even when you only have small chunks of time. It sounds so sensible! and I'll admit, since Helen Beebee forced me to concede this recently, that I've never conducted a sound empirical test of that advice, personally.
The thing is, I don't have any issue with *writing*, per se. That is, if we're talking about the actual production of sets of coherent sentences on a page, I can gush those things out like microplastics in a Hama beads factory. Niche metaphor, sorry. The problem is not so much quality, but repetition. If I force myself to write on a topic for 30 mins every day, I often end up rewriting the same kind of thing over and over. I can only build on what I've already written if I have a longer window of time, because to build on something I need to start out by reading what I've already written and concentrating enough to actually develop it.
And for a large piece of work, like a whole journal article or paper, the task of reading over and taking it what I've already done, so that I can improve on, takes a long time - like a day or two. I think of it like cognitive juggling. Doing philosophical work requires me to get several conceptual balls into the air at the same time, for long enough to see how they fit together. And the work of getting them into the air is often slow and exhausting. The more balls there are the longer it takes. And if I get interrupted, because I've got to meet a student or pick my kids up or something, then all the balls crash to the floor and i have to tiredly start over.
I don't know how other people get around this? Maybe it takes them less effort to get their balls into the air? I like that sentence.
Anyhow, I feel like I need decent uninterrupted stretches of time to write in, especially towards the end stage of a chapter or paper, but this month I have that. I have two 3-day child-free periods where only my own lack of will power and desire for crisps need interrupt me.
I've taken on some advice from Katelyn Knox, who says to overcome log-jams you need top stop writing *in* your book, and start writing *on* your book. What she means is that you're probably lost in the trees - the details of your sentences - and you need to back out and look for the woods. She says you should take some time to look at your book (or chapter) as one object - at its overall shape and narrative arc. I like her phrase "without this work, your book might continue to resemble an amoeba."
Probably an amoeba is a more apt metaphor than the angry, slippery sea monster I have in mind when I talk about slaying my chapter. Although I can't imagine eviscerating an amoeba is all that satisfying. Mind you, I'm vegetarian so perhaps I ought to figure out why this chapter is making me feel so blood thirsty!
What I'm saying, reader, is that this hurts right now, like a half-marathon runner at the 10th mile, I'm feeling the burn, the endorphins are waning, but I'm gonna keep slapping that pavement. Or tossing these balls. Or something.
No comments:
Post a Comment