The Writing Month of November

November, it seems, is the month for writing. It has been some time since I posted to the blog, but I want to gently revive it by encouraging you to take part in two November writing projects.

First, this November sees another round of the famous Nanowrimo, which is well worth the fun and craziness. I tried it out a few years ago during my heavier teaching semester and even though it was a stretch on some days I did achieve the 50, 000 word target by November 30. It really doesn’t matter how good or bad the finished product is because the realization that you can write 50, 000 words in one month is incredibly uplifting. I did use it to write fiction, but there is no reason why you couldn’t use it to write anything you want to write.

At the other end of the scale, and equally productive, there is the ‘Mindful Writing Day‘ event on November 1. The challenge of this project is to pay attention to one thing on November 1st and then to write it down.

It isn’t a choice between one project or the other (although, obviously, if you are feeling fragile, start with the more focused task of paying attention to one thing and see where it leads you). Both projects offer us the opportunity to commit to writing something down and to know that all around us others are also trying to come to voice as we are.

 

Habitual style

Today is the first day of my year of being on unpaid leave from my permanent job.

It is a slightly confusing situation to explain. Am I employed? Yes, but I won’t be at work for a year. Sabbatical, then? No, I am not getting paid. So, it’s a holiday? Not exactly. I have outstanding professional commitments to honour. I still have plenty of academic work on my desk including undergoing tenure, going to conferences, writing a major grant application, reviewing a book  and trying to finish two article drafts. So, not so much a holiday as a desperate attempt to do everything I think ought to be possible in 12 months of not having to teach or attend committee meetings.

There isn’t anything abnormal about this as such. All the people I know who actually have had sabbaticals have described the delirious joy-panic (I am sure there must be a single German word for this compound emotion) of realizing that they have an ‘unstructured’ year in which to do their own work. However, as a procrastinator this situation is a classic set-up for me. It is the opportunity, finally, to do everything right, to become the disciplined person I’d like to believe I can be, to have time every day to write, read and think. What could possibly go wrong?

Self-help literature loves nothing more than to convince you that all you need to do is replace your bad habits with good ones. Habits are not the problem, the latest self-help guru tells you, bad habits are the problem. It is undeniably true that good habits are better than bad ones (much better to brush your teeth twice a day than ignore your dental hygiene altogether), but that isn’t the end of the problem. Pema Chödrön explains it like this:

The habitual pattern never unwinds itself when you’re trying to improve, because you go about it in exactly the same habitual style that caused you all the pain to start.

I am finally getting wise to the fact that setting about the year ahead with the notion that I am finally going to fix all that is wrong, missing and lacking in my writing life by becoming ‘disciplined’ is itself part of the problem. I habitually approach writing with the view that it is the most important and self-defining act I can engage in, and therefore I mustn’t do it ‘wrong’. Whether I actually write or not, my attitude remains the same and so, often, if I am honest, getting some writing done doesn’t help me understand that it is just writing, instead it reminds me that I am so far behind on getting the ‘important’ writing done that I feel defeated and stop writing again.

The point isn’t to develop a better habitual style (what would that be?), but to confront the thoughts that animate your habitual style in the world as real, unwavering truths. Right now, for me to imagine myself as a person who doesn’t write is to imagine myself as a failed person. I can’t just switch to some other self-defining activity, something easier, simpler or more commercially viable, because I have attached writing to my sense of self.

You’d think, perhaps, that this could make it easier to write (‘It’s who I am’, ‘Writing is my life’), but it doesn’t because there is also a judgment attached to this writing–it has to be good writing. Actually, let’s be honest, the little critic demands that it has to be bloody excellent writing to confirm my right to exist.

Instead of screwing my courage up to attempt some more heroic writing, then, what I need is to fully experience the ordinariness of writing by sticking with the basic task of arranging and rearranging words on a page. I don’t for a minute suppose that I can outwit my habitual style in this way, but at the very least I might be able to unsettle its certainty.

 

A child of illusion

In the Buddhist tradition of training the mind with lojong slogans we say, ‘In post-meditation, be a child of illusion’. It means that when you go back to moving around the world after you’ve been siting in meditation, you allow yourself to continue to experience things free from your habitual ways of sorting them into the categories of good/bad, easy/hard and desirable/repulsive.

My moment of post-meditation did not last very long.

In fact, rather amusingly, I seemed to slip straight back into my habitual patterns as soon as I left the meditation centre. I started worrying about all the marking I needed to do, the teaching prep, the reference letters and other myriad things. I went straight to thinking about how I ‘had’ to get these things done, because other people need them from me, before doing any of my own writing. In short, I started worrying about the person that I must be in the world in order for the world to be acceptable to me. As I’ve noted before, it always seems like something else necessarily comes before the writing, and post-meditation that feeling was no different.

I recognize, though, that I am working with my mind somewhat more clearly, since rather than feeling totally disheartened about it, I notice that I saw myself doing it and thought it was quite funny. So tomorrow, I will wake up, meditate and try again.

 

The most difficult way

When I give the workshop on procrastination I begin by showing the participants this wonderful video by Johnny Kelly.

One of the lines that strikes me every time I watch the video is this definition: ‘procrastination is finding the most difficult way of doing something.’ I think that is somehow the core of the problem. It isn’t simply not doing a thing; it is a much more complicated tangle of wanting to do a thing, avoiding it and then doing it in the most time-consuming or emotionally consuming way.

It is certainly important to make it simple to get to work. I’ve always worked most regularly when there was a very short distance, literally and figuratively, between my bed and my desk. Literally is fairly easy to organize. For six months of my doctoral studies, during which time I wrote two chapters from start to finish, I was in a room about 5 ft by 6 ft that contained a single bed and a desk. I wrote almost every day of that six months, because there was nothing in the way between waking and writing. I don’t necessarily recommend that as a way of life, unless you are a nun or a prisoner, but it has a certain simplicity.

Making the figurative distance between bed and desk as short as possible is somewhat more complicated. Unsurprisingly for a procrastinator, I am a worrier. I can and do worry about anything and everything that I think I might be responsible for. My most active worrying time is definitely the first 30 minutes after I wake up and that can make the distance between my bed and my desk infinite. One solution–one that I used when I was an MA student–is to wake up slightly earlier than is entirely comfortable and go straight to my desk. As a student I would write for three hours from 6 am to 9 am, and then the day would begin. Writing itself became the space between sleeping and waking. I only ‘began’ my day after 9 am, so technically there was no distance at all between waking and writing.

There is no shame, I’ve realized, in asking yourself: what is the simplest way to do this? Simple isn’t the same as lazy. Simple is what is the shortest way?;lazy is can I avoid making the journey? I don’t want to avoid the journey, but the way I am going about it now is definitely taking too long.

 

Have a day off

Today’s lesson is short and sweet: have a day off.

I am nearing a deadline for the submission of a first draft and although I’ve put in at least six hours on that writing work this week I am behind schedule, so I thought I would break my regular habit of taking my Saturday completely off. When I say ‘off’ I mean it. Normally on Saturdays, I don’t check my work e-mail, write or prepare for classes. This Saturday, I thought that I should try to push myself a little and do a couple of hours of work on the article. The idea seemed innocent enough.

The morning sped by as I began by doing various other chores and errands (doing laundry, paying bills, renewing vehicle license stickers), because, of course, if I was going to write, then there were a few other things to take care of first. I even broke my strict rule of not reading my work e-mail on Saturdays. It was just before lunch when I realized that I was doing what I explicitly gave advice not to do during the workshop earlier this week. I was continuing to work because things needed doing, and they were important, and if I took the day off it would just be irresponsible of me, and blah, blah, blah.

So instead, I returned to my regularly unscheduled Saturday. I went for a walk on the lake in the glorious winter sunshine; I spent three hours in idle conversation with my partner; and I spent the evening eating a meal and watching television with a good friend and her son. I accomplished nothing, but now I know that I will be able to get up tomorrow, sit down at my desk and start writing again. It was a good reminder that you don’t have to earn days off as a reward for the work you get done, they are a crucial part of your whole work process.

 

A light hand on the rudder

If you ask a keen practitioner of something–running, dancing, baking–what they enjoy about the practice in question, they’ll be able to give you a sensory account of their pleasure. Indeed, when I’ve asked an enthusiastic person ‘what do you enjoy about …’ I’ve been able to enjoy the activity vicariously. But if someone were to ask me what I enjoy about writing, I’d be hard-pressed to give them an answer that doesn’t relate to the finished product (knowing someone has read and understood or enjoyed my words, seeing my name in print, knowing that my tenure file will look ‘respectable’ if I can get something published).

I realize that this is a significant part of my procrastination problem. I am oriented too much towards what will get made and not what I am doing. Of course, as any struggling procrastinator or perfectionist will tell you, getting the thing finished is an important task. But focusing on what you are going to make all the time is counter-productive.

For someone like me who, as I wrote yesterday, already confuses doing with being, it seems frankly perilous to give up my focus on the end-goal. If I don’t drive myself to achieve a particular goal, I am quite sure nothing will happen. The fact that very little happens when I maintain an iron grip on the necessity of having the goal is quite beside the point. Having the high standards reassures me that I am a good sort of person with good sorts of writing intentions.

Thomas Sterner’s The Practising Mind offers one of the most useful ways to crack this particular myth that I have read. The whole book is a practical meditation on how to remain focused on process not product, but he has this in particular to say about goals:

When you constantly focus on the goal you are aiming for, you push it away instead of pulling it toward you. In every moment of your struggle, by looking at the goal and constantly referencing your position to it, you are affirming to yourself that you haven’t reached it.

You can have goals, they aren’t useless, but Sterner urges us not to be confused about what they are for. He says they are rudders to ‘steer your practising sessions, but not an indicator of how you are doing’. You need a rudder, but it is simply something that is at your disposal to help you get where you want to go–no more, no less.

I confess that I can’t quite see my way, yet, to keeping such a light hand on the rudder. The atmosphere in which most academics work is not conducive to this kind of thinking. When you are ranked and promoted not only by how much you publish, but also in what kinds of journals and how often you are cited, it is difficult not to be focused on the goals.But I can see that focusing more and more intently on the goals isn’t getting me anywhere either, so I am prepared to try another way.

In fact, Sterner offers the perfectionist a dream come true if you will just try it his way: ‘If your goal is to pay attention to only what you are doing right now, then as long as you are doing just that, you are reaching your goal in each and every moment.’

 

Writing as a way of life

My ability to turn up here every day and write something has shown me that actually I can write on a regular basis, even during a busy week. Oh dear. So I can make a commitment to writing every day. I don’t have to be in the mood, or set aside long periods of time to do it. Damn. Damn. Damn.

Like many other people, I used to be convinced that if I couldn’t work for at least 2 hours continuously on my writing I couldn’t really get anything done and so it was not even worth attempting it. I must confess that making the commitment to write for 30-45 minutes daily, even on those days when I teach, really does work. I don’t know why that doesn’t fill me with glee. In some way it deflates the romance of writing.

It is really rather strange that many of us would like to hang on to our romantic ideas about writing, rather than get some writing done. If I am very honest, the experience of ordinary, everyday writing has taught me is that I had some rather fanciful notions about what writing as a way of life would be and I wasn’t thinking enough about how the actual writing was going to get done.

Here is a good way of examining your commitment to writing, to find out whether you want to write, or whether you just have a craving for writer’s style. In her classic guide, Becoming A Writer, Dorothea Brande asks the reader to make a commitment to write at exactly the same time every day for a mere 15 minutes. You don’t have to write for very long, but you do have to decide beforehand that you are going to write at, say, 9.30 am, and come what may you must write at 9.30 am. She puts the matter very strongly:

you have decided to write at four o’clock, and at four o’clock write you must! No excuses can be given. If at four o’clock you find yourself deep in conversation, you must excuse yourself and keep your engagement. Your agreement is a debt of honor, and must be scrupulously discharged. If you must climb out over the heads of your friends at that hour, then be ruthless … If, to get the solitude that is necessary you must go into a washroom, go there, lean against the wall, and write (77).

Why, you might wonder, is this so important (and she really is strict — 4.05 pm is not good enough, it has to be 4 pm). Her point is that there will always be some reason, good sensible reasons, not to write (in fact, what could be less sensible than spending your time writing?). You have to find out whether you are so invested in doing the writing that you will find ways to organize your life in order to write. If you can do it for 15 minutes at a pre-arranged time for several days in a row, her argument is that you have the mental capacity to do the writing.

She concludes rather ominously, ‘If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing. Your resistance is actually greater than your desire to write, and you may as well find some other outlet for your energy’ (79). We don’t like to hear that kind of  blunt advice nowadays (Brande’s book was originally published in 1934), but I have a sneaky suspicion she is right. That being said, I haven’t yet succeeded in completing this exercise. But I keep trying.

 

The confidence trick

One of the mysteries of writing is that however much of it I do–and by now, my publication record notwithstanding, I have actually racked up pages and pages–I never seem to believe that I can do it the next time. This is a genuine puzzle to me because with all the other skills I have learned–dancing, playing cello, tai chi–I always have confidence that I can dance the next dance, learn the next piece, carry out the next sequence. Of course I knowthat I can still literally write. Most of what I do in the course of any given day is writing. However, despite having written academic text before, I cannot quite believe that I can do it again.

How do we trick ourselves into believing that we can pull it off again? The easiest answer is to go on writing the same thing over and over again, or at least taking the same tack again. I suppose that most people believe that this is what academics do; they have a formula and they repeat it. To some degree the format and conventions supply some of the content, but ultimately skilled academics don’t write like that. Style matters everywhere, because it is how we think originally. I am always heartened to read the early and late works of some critic or theorist and find strong, surprising differences in style and approach.

A senior academic once said to me that whenever he felt this way, he consulted his cv and reminded himself of what he had done. Looking at the trail of evidence that he had indeed written, he was able to write again. Perhaps because I have not written as much yet, I find it difficult to use that trick. I look at my earlier work and cannot entirely persuade myself that it was my doing. Perhaps it was a magic trick. I know the pixies didn’t write my dissertation, but I find it difficult to remember the labour and discipline that produced the text.

I think the real solution to this problem is forming a clearer sense of your process; knowing what conditions and habits enable you to enter into the slipstream of effortless articulation. In the postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco emphasizes the importance of this:

The writer (or painter or sculptor or composer) always knows what he is doing and how much it costs him. He knows he has to solve a problem. Perhaps the original data are obscure, pulsive, obsessive, nor more than a yearning or a memory. But then the problem is solved at the writer’s desk as he interrogates the material on which he is working–material that reveals natural laws of its own, but at the same time contains the recollection of the culture with which it is loaded (508).

He goes on to say, later, that among the best commentators on process are ‘minor artists, who achieved modest effects but knew how to ponder their own processes’ (509). Knowing your own process, then, may not be a guarantee of great artistic results, but it may be a key to practising usefully–producing lots of minor works that allow you, occasionally to grasp a little genius.

I have realized only recently that one of the things I find enabling is to write to a very specific person, using the intimacy of writing a letter to a friend. By temperament, I am not much of a social butterfly. I need and enjoy one-to-one time with people in order to feel that I have had a meaningful encounter. It makes sense, then, that also as a writer, I cannot perform to an assembled crowd, however friendly the crowd may be. I like dialogue and exchange, but I need a fairly delimited sense of who I am having that conversation with to say something useful.

I’ve also realized that I like and need to read things several times over again and again in order to feel as though I have digested them sufficiently to write about them. This does, undoubtedly, make me very slow. It also makes me feel stupid, since just about everyone else seems to be able to read a book once and start writing about it. (At least, that is how it seems to me). Since I mostly write about literary and cultural theory, it is not a terrible handicap to be a repeat reader. It takes ten readings of Homi Bhabha before you really understand his project. The point is, that if you don’t know this about your process, you can make yourself unduly anxious wondering why you can’t start writing that article about historical fiction when you’ve only read Lukacs The Historical Novel once.

Perhaps one of the strangest depths to plumb is to work out where your ideas come from. I have long been conscious of a persistently lateral tendency in my thinking. I know that I do not develop my ideas in the same way that other people develop their ideas and therefore I am highly suspicious of my thinking. I don’t trust it, even though it is the source of my originality. If I can’t overcome that sense of suspicion, then I won’t ever be able to make use of it in my process.

In contrast with my strange, lateral mind I am consistently struck by the logical precision of my peers, and wonder how I ever made it to this position when I think and write as I do. But a friend suggested a version of the senior academic’s trick to me: I am here. Much better academics than me have read my work and found it of some value and I can trust their opinion that I should continue trying out my thoughts. We can’t depend on others to give us the confidence we lack, but we can have confidence in their belief in us. It’s a confidence trick of the best kind.

 

Gentlemen to bed, for we must … write?

It is now mid-afternoon and I have been putting off the writing I cleared my way for today. I am completely up-to-date on every other thing on my desk–bills, work e-mail, marking. All I have to do is write, to work on my draft due at the end of January. I am just not doing it. Now would be the time for some of that alchemy I wrote about earlier in the week. Who and what am I resisting here ineffectually, and who or what could I be resisting much more effectively by doing the writing?

(Any minute now, I’ll have to physically get up from my desk and walk away from my desk. It happens like a reflex when I try to bring myself gently but firmly to the point.)

Mostly, I don’t want to be made uncomfortable by trying and failing to write what I want to write. It does feel like a physical reaction. It is similar to the feeling of wanting to eat when you are very hungry, only there is no one around to cook you anything and you don’t want to cook, you just want to eat. You know that cooking will lead to eating, which is what you want, but you’d feel so much better if someone else just did the cooking. (I wonder why writing keeps leading me to cooking and eating analogies.)

When I am in this state of mind I find that I can actually write if I sit in my bed, tucked up under the duvet. I really like writing in bed; it seems to puncture much of the physical discomfort. Luckily, laptops make bed a completely plausible location in which to write, but I feel as though I can only occasionally indulges in this as a kind of luxury. It takes a certain Proustian genius to turn your bed into your regular writing location.

Whether I can bring myself to work from my bed on a daily basis, it is an interesting reminder of the ways that writing is embodied activity, not only in the sense that you require a body to do it, but that thinking and drafting require a kind of effort from you that is physical. We seldom discuss writing in these terms, falling somehow into the idea of mind separate from body, magically smoothing over the fact that it takes a body sitting for several hours at a desk to turn thoughts into words on paper.

Perhaps it isn’t so strange, then, to think of bed as a wonderful place from which to write. With apologies to Messrs. Coogan and Brydon — Gentlemen to bed, for there is writing to be done!

 

The alchemy of resistance

About ten years ago I remember seeing a street vendor whose cart had a chalkboard that was filled with inspirational quotes, one of which was supposedly from Virginia Woolf. It read ‘We are afraid of seeing clearly, and of being seen clearly’. It came back to my mind today as I was thinking more about the problem of wanting to be very articulate and at the same time resisting the task of articulating. Woolf, or whoever penned the quote, was quite right. If we say exactly what we mean, others will also know exactly what we think and there is something terrifying about that.

As I keep circling around the task of drawing up a personal writing manifesto I find myself prey to the worst kind of superstitions. I am afraid that if I say what writing means to me I will be horribly exposed–everyone will see that I can’t say what I mean, or that what I aim to do is ridiculous, irrelevant or fatuous. Some tiny part of me is sure that what I have to say matters, but I genuinely feel as though I cannot give too much credence to that small voice because if I do speak out loud I will be cut down.

David Morley suggests that the actual experience of humiliation, of having your efforts to write rejected or undermined, can be a useful spur to writing, that ‘humiliation, like humility, creates articulate energy; anger and a sense of injustice can help you find your voice and your subject’ (47). I would like to believe that is true, but I am not yet sure how to translate the experience of humiliation into the ability to articulate.  Perhaps it is a question of some kind of resistance alchemy–turning our procrastination, a form of resistance to ourselves, into defiance, resistance to the external forces that are working to prevent our writing. Strange that I have never before thought of writing itself as one of my practices of anti-colonialism. Morley also invokes the idea of colonialism, so I will end with his words– ‘Moments like this should fire you up for writing: for writing back and against those who have colonised your language’ (47).