Writing about writing (instead of writing)

When I started 2012 with a resolution, of sorts, to write every day for a month it was primarily as an exercise in awareness. I wanted then, as I still do, to be someone who, on a daily basis, writes mindfully and patiently. Clearly that is still a work in progress, but it is equally clear to me that I wouldn’t keep trying to write, however painfully, if I didn’t actually want to do it.

Nevertheless, soon after I started the month of blogging last year I met up with an old friend–who was kindly reading the blog–and he said, ‘you sure write a lot about not writing’. That made me laugh, but I have to admit that I also felt rather shamefaced about it because I was afraid it was true. What I heard my friend say, which wasn’t necessarily what he meant at all, was ‘you keep writing about writing–why don’t you just write (you seem to be able to)?’

The answer is that I find it difficult to say what I want to say, and I’ve realized that this is largely because I am not clear in my own mind who I am writing for. Some writers think that you primarily write for yourself, but I have never found that very convincing because if you wanted to write for yourself there really would be no reason to make it available to other people. If you want to write–and you want other people to read what you write–then you are trying to build a relationship with other people.

After I wrote my last post about writing as an act of hospitality I realized the metaphor was a genuinely enabling one, and a kind of answer to the problem of the ‘others’ to whom we address ourselves. At first, perhaps, you don’t invite just anyone into your home. You make plans, you prepare, and you cultivate a friendship with people before you invite them over. It is possible that for the rest of your life you never learn to have people over any differently. You keep a tight rein on things–only inviting people you like and know into your home, with much forethought about what you will serve them and the music you will play. People entertain and write like that quite profitably and prolifically. Maybe you have always been a bit more freewheeling. You invite anyone over, at any time, with a breezy ‘excuse the mess’ while you push all the newspapers, candy wrappers and other jetsam onto the floor. You invite people in easily, and have some fun too, but perhaps people don’t often invite you back or want to stay around a very long time. Or maybe you love to have people over, but for some reason or other you never quite get around to it and always meet up in restaurants or coffeeshops instead. Whatever it is, you know what you normally do and how it pretty much generates the same  encounter over and over again.

Quite literally, I find myself without a place to host from. I’ve moved around a lot over the last fifteen years–from Canada, to the UK, to Finland, back to Canada, back to the UK–and so I have a lot of friends I would love to have over, but I never seem to be in one place long enough to get the party started. Instead, I have a lot of once-a-year meals in restaurants with friends that I haven’t seen for a long time. I seldom have anyone over and I rely on relatively new friends in all those places to invite me into their settled homes, or old friends to put me up in their homes for 2-3 days at a time while we reconnect until the next annual, or biennial meeting. I suppose this is where metaphor meets the world-as-it-is. I am not sure where my place in the world is.

Diasporic and migrant writing emerges from an experience of dislocation, of making home again in a new place without losing sight of the old place and telling a story about that. But multiple dislocations become harder and harder to narrate. It isn’t that the experience itself is absolutely disorienting (I am not confused about who I am), but more that we still–as yet–lack the narrative forms to tell the story of being frequently on the move, between here and there. (I’ve often wondered how an agent would sell my short stories set in various small towns around Canada and Finland, with some metropolitan tales of London and Helsinki thrown in.)

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed the concept of ‘minor literature’ to capture the idea of stories that are written for people who don’t yet exist, or better who are in the process of becoming. To keep following my metaphor, minor literature is a kind of hospitality-as-a-way of life, hospitality on a grand scale, where you prepare to host people you don’t know, who you aren’t entirely sure are ever going to show up. You create a space that they will feel is theirs, without quite knowing who they are or when they will arrive. The result might be bizarre (think Kafka or G V Desani or Rosario Ferré), but it is also strangely compelling. You want to keep going back there, but you don’t know why. How does the minor writer, the one who creates this hospitable experience for unknown others, write? Kafka’s example isn’t exactly a happy one, but his writing is, in its extraordinary way, a place where all kinds of people can enter and feel at home. (Years of teaching Kafka has empirically demonstrated that to me.)

It is difficult to say what you want to say, especially when you are a writer since, as Thomas Mann wrote, ‘a writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people’. All you can do is keep following your impulse to persist in writing and making a place, a text, for people who you trust will appear one day. One day, instead of writing about writing, you will find yourself writing.

 

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.

 

There’s writing, and then there’s writing …

It is a sign of the potential for writing to become addictive that as I get closer to the end of January, I wonder what I could do for the month of February. It might seem slightly counter-intuitive for someone who procrastinates about writing to be considering committing to another month of daily blogging, but it is part of the logic of procrastination not to want things to end or not to know how to end them. Now that I am writing I am afraid to stop because I know how painful it will be to start again.

On the other hand, I am forced to recognize that this writing is not hard and that is why I come back here every day with relatively little struggle. Writing here is at least partly a distraction from the writing I am not doing elsewhere, and could easily become a kind of alibi for not getting down to that work. In fact, our days are so full of other kinds of writing that it is a wonder we ever get to the really demanding tasks. In any given day I write several e-mails to students, colleagues and friends; comment on papers and drafts; and prepare lecture notes. All of that writing requires some effort and allows you to practice your basic writing skills, but like everything you have to take on the more difficult, more risky, tasks in order to develop your abilities.

 

A bad day

The only insight I have today is that I have no insight into my problem at all.

I’ve had a few days when I’ve tried to write and haven’t and now I have added some feelings of panic, fear and anger about that action (or non-action) to the mix. This morning I reached the point where I was completely convinced that I’ve never written anything worthwhile and never will solve this problem.

I am dimly aware that this too is just a phase of the process–that people often do feel this way–but this feels ‘real’ in a way that the other phases don’t. It seems true to me that I am not getting anywhere near solving the problem of procrastination. When I have these thoughts, I remember all the other things I put off doing and how long this has been going on and it seems ‘objectively’ true that I am a useless human being.

This will pass too, but it will require a huge effort and the energy that should go into the writing itself will be going into reassuring myself that I can do the work and not be a procrastinator forever. It is the most energy-consuming way to do such work and increasingly I am anxious that eventually I just won’t have the energy even to reassure myself that I can write.

How is it that other people can work without using up so much of their energy? In the past I’ve assumed they are more talented and disciplined than me, that they have qualities I don’t have and cannot seem to acquire however much I try. That is more or less confirmed by reading any other academic’s list of publications and awards, but it is also contradicted by another set of people we all know who seem to get ahead with the minimum of effort and planning.

You cannot know if your reward will be commensurate with your effort. You can make a good guess that if you work hard, you’ll get more than if you didn’t do much at all, but you can’t be sure about that. Procrastination, at its core, is about managing the risk that you’ll put the effort in and not get out of if what you expected and wanted to get. You can manage that risk by refusing to put in what you are not absolutely sure you’ll get back out of it, or you can manage it by accepting that sometimes you’ll have to put more in than you’ll get back out. (This is why procrastination belongs and proliferates in capitalist societies; it is not necessarily a compliant response, but it is completely consistent with the logic of capitalism.)

At the moment, I cannot divest my thoughts and emotions from this logic. But perhaps I do have a tiny sliver of more insight into the nature of the problem than when I started writing the post.

 

Procrastination by any other name?

One of my research interests is the history of how psychology and psychoanalysis have become dominant forms of knowledge through which we understand ourselves. Though I don’t discount them as forms of knowing, I am troubled by the ways they block and divert us from thinking about how we are formed socially, philosophically and politically. To that end, I am interested in how we can talk about things that seem essentially psychological in other terms.

Procrastination is one of those human practices that is almost unintelligible outside the language of psychology. It is an individual’s maladaptive thoughts and behaviours formed in reaction to the real world they live in and it correlates with other psychological conditions, such as perfectionism and lack of self-confidence. The solutions are often behavioural, but also consist of dealing with particular emotions and thoughts. Certainly, it has taken some time for the psychological discourse to eclipse the moral one (i.e. there are people who are lazy and weak), but how else might we think about it?

I’ve already alluded to some other possible lines of thought such as how increased professionalization and institutionalization produces procrastination, or how procrastination works as a form of ineffective resistance against the system, but it is actually very difficult to think beyond the idea that it’s an individual problem best understood and treated as such. Somewhat in the style of Nikolas Rose’s Inventing Our Selves or Ian Hacking’s wonderful essay ‘Making Up People‘, I’d like to see someone explain how procrastination has become an object of study as well as something people experience and use to explain, examine and govern their own actions.

The terms on which we understand such problems obviously determines the solutions we can find for them. If we could also think of procrastination as something other than personal pathology, or bad self-government, we might stand a better chance of changing what we do.

 

A good day

Today I did not procrastinate about anything, which ordinarily would leave me with a rather strange problem: what to blog about?

Fortunately, one of the things I did today was to give a workshop on managing your procrastination on my campus and it showed me that people who struggle with procrastination are looking for practical solutions to their problem. Inevitably, when people hear about a workshop on procrastination they want to start making jokes about whether it will happen, or whether it will be postponed until later. Hilarious.

It doesn’t seem so hilarious when you find yourself genuinely unable to do things you need to get done. And how do you explain this to others without finding that they suggest you are just lazy/badly organized/ill-disciplined?

The people I met at the workshop today did not give the appearance of being any of these things–they ranged from undergraduates to faculty members, working on first-year essays to revisions to their doctoral theses. They were all industriously taking notes during our time together and came up to ask questions and engage with me afterwards. They did want to find a way to solve their problems, while displaying a good sense of humour about their situation as they recognized what I was describing.

In a rather roundabout way I feel as though all my own procrastination, which has led me to read about the subject and develop the workshop, might be the seed of something that helps others take control of their procrastination. It doesn’t make my procrastination worthwhile exactly. I’ve lost out on some important opportunities because I just couldn’t bring myself to write, but it does suggest that awareness of the problem, if you keep working with it, leads you to solutions. In this case, the solution isn’t a magic cure for my own procrastination (though, to be fair, there is certainly less of it than there used to be), but it helps reduce the amount of procrastination in the world. For the moment, that seems like a good result.

 

The chance of a lifetime

There comes a moment in every procrastination cycle when I just find that I am bored with my little procrastination drama. Trying to stay mindful of my particular ways of manifesting procrastination means that I get bored quicker nowadays (I see through my own narratives quicker, rather than finding them fascinating). In theory, that should mean that I also get back to writing quicker. In practice, it often means that I say to myself ‘oh you need a diversion from the boredom–watch something on the internet’.

We are endlessly wily with ourselves it seems.

The boredom is a sign that even I don’t want to carry on with the procrastination anymore. And yet? And yet, there is still the faint hope that something might come along to save the situation without me actually having to do the writing. Boredom isn’t quite the end of hope, then, it’s the moment when you are tired of waiting for the magic solution to show up.

Those who write about procrastination professionally seldom acknowledge that often it’s not a bad solution. Neil Fiore is one of the few who notes that people tend to use habits that, at first, have worked. How many times has it happened to you that you put something off, and it turned out to be good because (a) someone found another solution and you didn’t need to do it, (b) someone else did it, (c) the deadline was moved or (d) some other ‘Act of God’ occurred. As a child, if you ever put off doing homework and then a snowstorm/hurricane/flood meant you didn’t have to go to school, you’ve experienced the magic of procrastination.

Unfortunately, everyone other than procrastinators seems to realize that this is just magic and by definition, therefore, not likely to happen regularly enough to become a stable factor in your work process. Strangely, even when it regularly doesn’t work, some part of your mind irrationally sticks to the fact that it worked once.  When I was a child a tutor came to the house on Wednesday afternoons to give me extra French lessons. I regularly walked home from school hoping that M. Raymond would not be there to see my homework was not done. He was ALWAYS there. I never won that particular gamble, but it didn’t stop me from betting every week that this time I was sure to win. After all, I’d won elsewhere, right?

Perhaps it is the pale shadow of gambling that makes procrastination such a difficult habit to break. But why chance it? Writing is a much surer thing.

 

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 Pressure Cooker

It is certainly true, as I wrote yesterday, that when I want to articulate something precisely my resistance to it increases in direct proportion to how much I want to say it ‘right’. This is no doubt also why I find revising so painful (and the thought of having to revise what I have so painfully crafted still more painful). One of my MA supervisors once told me that there were two kinds of writers: those that write quickly and in a rather messy way and those that painstakingly build up their text carefully chosen word by carefully chosen word. She assured me that either way was fine, simply a matter of temperament and inclination. In fact, everything you will read about writing encourages you to make use of both skills: first getting it all down freely and in all its chaotic spontaneity and then combing through, rearranging and paring the shape. I do make use of freewriting and have duly kept morning pages à la Julia Cameron for months at a time, but if anything it has only made the moment of switching to painstaking mode more difficult. Now I am faced with pages and pages of notes and ideas that I have to assemble carefully into a beautiful whole. It is exhausting just thinking about it.

I can also attest, however, that it is in the shaping and paring phase that I actually experience something like flow, not in the freewriting. For me, freewriting remains a kind of mindless writing, but combing through the lines of thought over and over again is when I become absorbed. Why, then, isn’t it possible to enter into this flow more regularly and frequently, so that this part of the writing process becomes its own intrinsic pleasure?

Now, for example, I have to return to the task I am resisting and I am painfully aware that I can’t work on it slowly. It has to get finished tonight. Pressure does cook things more quickly, eliminating much of the time spent in slow and steady simmering. It takes only a few extra minutes of the pressure cooking, however, before your beautiful stew turns into an unidentifiable mush. You can still serve it. Call it a soup–add a garnish of cream to suggest that this was what you intended all along. Only you know that you meant to make a stew, with each ingredient still separate but beautifully combined.

 

History of a writer Part 2

It was only in my second year of my undergraduate degree that I became an English major and started spending my time writing once again. I don’t remember any significant bouts of procrastination during the degree. Quite the contrary I remember something that I probably use as my benchmark now–I spent hours in the library looking at what other people had to say about Margaret Cavendish, John Fowles and Bharati Mukherjee and then thinking about it. I drafted papers readily and eagerly.

It was not that I consciously gave up on my fiction writing. Whenever there was the opportunity to write a non-traditional academic assignment I always took it, including another instance in which the professor was very excited about the finished product and wanted to publish it but the proposed publication came to nothing. And yet it has to be said that I was thinking more and more about academic writing because … because? I find it difficult to answer that question. I spent time around other people who were  all on the road to graduate studies, people who didn’t have ambitions to be writers but instead were planning on becoming critics. I wasn’t part of a social group that talked about writing fiction and I didn’t seek it out either.

As I continued graduate studies, I just didn’t spend any time working on anything other than my academic writing (although, I was always, I hope, attentive to style), but I never gave up thinking that one day I was going to write fiction. That seemed confirmed for me by the fact that I found it more and more difficult to find novels I wanted to read, but instead kept saying to myself ‘I really need to write a novel that does x differently’. As my twenties went by I gave up on being the hot new thing, but I didn’t give up on the idea that I really was going to be a fiction writer.

As a doctoral student, when the professionalization really started kicking in, these two threads of writing–and all the affects and histories embedded in them–started to tangle and confront each other more directly. During one of my first academic blocks, I kept thinking about the fiction I wanted to write and sometimes even started writing. A few people around me even encouraged me to pursue that, but I always returned to the academic writing believing that I couldn’t succeed as a fiction writer anymore–that I had left it too late to work on that kind of writing, that I had left it too late to become even remotely good at it. The ideas for things I wanted to write about never ceased, but the sense that it was really possible began to fade.

It occurs to me now that I was trying to switch back to fiction as my academic writing became saturated with professional obligations and expectations. Equally, it seems that I channelled my energy into academic writing at least partly because I thought I couldn’t get published as a fiction writer. I didn’t then, or now, resolve for myself what I wanted my writing to do. I don’t think the distinction between fiction and scholarly writing is necessarily that important, but I do think it is important to know what you are personally writing for. Suddenly, it seems to me that when I said before that I wanted to write I meant it almost literally–I liked to write things rather than sing, cook or build them. I didn’t stop to think what writing does and how I wanted to participate in its action.

When I say I want to write now, in this moment, there is a considerable amount of compulsion in the desire. I have to–to have an academic career, to get promoted, to do my job properly. I can’t distinguish what is mine and what is the necessity of keeping up institutional appearance in that mix. At another level there is also the remembrance of my other writing ambition–the desire to be a great fiction writer–and the compulsion to try to realize that dream so that I don’t have to live with the knowledge that I never even tried to fulfill it. The compulsion obscures any pleasure that I once derived from writing. In fact, I don’t quite know where I am going as a writer any more. All I do is keep writing in the hope that writing itself will get me somewhere else.