My Week in Writing, Day 3: Ebb Tide

Today is international Talk like a Pirate Day.  Arrrr.

Coincidentally, pirates figure big and important in my paper, which ought to make it inherently exciting. Yet my paper is not.  In fact, in my musings today (which was really all I wrote), I wrote this sentence: "This is full of pirates, FFS!  How on earth am I managing to make that boring?!?"

And then I heard an interview with Jill Lepore on NPR, and I thought, "Love her work or hate it, but she knows how to write in a way that people want to read."

(I should note that this comes one day after I found out that my sister-in-law found my book less than gripping, and two days after receiving some rather dismal sales figures for the book for the last year.  My confidence in my ability to interest readers is pretty low right now.)

And so I once again trashed what I had written, and went back to the conference paper I presented.  And tomorrow, I get up, and try to think like a reader, like my sister-in-law, like Steve fucking Inskeep.  Because I know this can be interesting.  I'm just not there yet.

My Week in Writing, Day 2: À la recherche de l'écriture perdue

As I noted in an update to my previous post, my "Week in Daily Writing" got derailed early on: no sooner had I triumphantly announced that I had hit my goal, completed a section, and logged almost 800 words (including 350 or so from the weekend) than I, in a laudable attempt to Back Everything Up All The Time, managed to delete everything I had written. To make matters worse, I deleted the thesis statement that had finally come to me over the weekend, after wrestling with it for so long.

My reaction went something like this:

"No." 

"Oh no." 

"No."

"Nononononononono."

[dramatic pause/several fruitless attempts at recovery]

"Shit."

It was like that.  I missed the words less than I did the thesis. Because I have been struggling pretty hard with the "So what" question about these very neat documents, and I thought I finally had something.

Eventually, I came to two conclusions:

1. Sometimes freeing yourself from old writing lets you escape an unproductive rut. [corollary 1a.: If I can't remember a thing about it, the thesis may not have ever been that great]
2. I've lost some words, but it's not that many, and if I just sit around moping, I get to stay at zero.

So, this morning, though I didn't get up "early" as I wanted to, I did manage to write for over an hour, and knocked out the first 650 words... again.  I still don't know where I'm going, but for now, I'm just going to try to write my way in and see what happens.

Creaky: A writing post

A couple of weeks ago, I joined a writing group, because I wanted to get an article cranked out.  Did I mention that I haven't published anything on the new project yet? At all?

In any case, my goal for the last week was simple: read/skim three "classics" on the Big Picture Topic, and write a 400-word synopsis. The reading took a while, five of the seven days. And then, for the last two days, I sat down to write.  400 words.

And I couldn't make it.

What the hell? When I came back from my first big research trip, I was habitually setting daily goals of 600 words and whizzing past them without even trying, doubling that on most days.  This week, I couldn't get a lousy 400 words in two days.

Is it because it's new material? No, it was even newer back then. Is it because I'm trying to Write An Article, rather than shitty-first-drafting? Well, perhaps that's part of it. But mainly, I think it's because I'm creaky and out of shape. It's been a long time since I've written every day.  And yet I know from experience that "Write Every Day" actually works. Just let go of the need to be perfect, and write.

So, in the spirit of an Autumn of Modest Goals,[1] I've set myself three goals, provisionally for this week only:

1. Get up early
2. Write 200 words first thing every day -- even if they're crap.
3. Make sure before going to bed that I have the next day's writing task laid out for me.

And this morning, I got up early (for me, anyway), meditated, made coffee, and wrote 260 words -- plus scratched out a few notes for a later section.

Let's see how this goes.


UPDATE:  Crap crap crap!!!  I went to back up the writing, and somehow... I managed to overwrite my copy with something last updated ten days ago...  And the newer copy, with all that work, is nowhere in sight.  Nowhere.  What. The. Hell.

::whimper::

[1] Autumn of Modest Goals appears to have happened accidentally. In August, I quit smoking.  Nothing else but that. In September, I appear to have managed to cut my diet soda consumption down to one 12-ounce can a day. It's actually kind of satisfying.

"Show me your largest, heaviest books, please."

No, that's not quite what I said in the library today.  Yet I came out with four books, two of which are 800+ pages.  They are both, by the way, by early medievalists (Wickham [2005] and McCormick [2001]).  So, ADM, Jonathan... If I throw out my shoulder, can I blame you somehow?

An Encouraging Conversation with Voice of Reason

Voice of Reason [1] stopped by my office today. She has been, like me, working on an article project (though her work is about three to four months more advanced). And like me, she's apparently been producing a lot of words with very few great thoughts to hold it all together.

We've been talking a lot about our frustrations with writing, and how they're producing doubts about the new projects we're working on, respectively. The underlying theme to all these discussions is: "Why can't I be smarter?"

And somehow, over this weekend, we both realized an important truth: the first book project -- the one that made us feel like we knew something -- didn't start out as a first book. Before that, it was a dissertation, and an article or two along the way. And before that, it was three years of research, reading, fumbling, and following dead-end roads. The lesson here is that bumping into walls is part of the process.  And it's part of the process that you have to repeat with every damn thing you write.

"You mean I have to keep feeling dumb every time I do this?" I ask myself.  Well, yes. And that's going to suck.  But knowing that it's part of the process is kind of like the doctor saying, "Now, this is going to hurt." It doesn't stop it from hurting, but it lets you know that the pain is normal, expected, and most of all, temporary.


[1] To those new to the blog, Voice of Reason is a friend, colleague, and former neighbor who reacts to situations with an equanimity and grace that I stand in awe of. She is who I want to be when I grow up.

The Union Makes Us Strong

My faculty union is far from perfect. It often focuses on the wrong things. It misses crucial opportunities. It's sometimes tone-deaf. But it has managed to bind together several campuses, embrace lecturers as well as tenure-track faculty, and make us a force to be reckoned with, rather than steamrollered over.

In the roughly ten years since I have been at Grit City U., we have had two contract negotiations.  Both times, the union has had to vote to strike before we could get a serious contract.  But still, at least we could organize. We are currently ratifying a contract that doesn't include any raises at all, or really, anything to make up for the last three years of stagnation. But we're also protected against losing anything that we've gained, even though the state economy has been in serious trouble for a long time.  In this situation, no loss is very close to a win.

As we celebrate this Labor Day, I think of my friends working in Florida and other states like it -- states where somehow, state university employees have to work on the one day a year dedicated to the worker.  I think of the struggles of the twentieth century, and hope they won't be undone. And I celebrate and support workers (yes, even intellectual laborers!) everywhere. 

The fight is beginning again.  United we stand.

Morning Person, Redux

Reflections on the first week coming soon, but here's what's on my mind today:

I have always been a morning person by nature.  When I lived in an apartment in downtown Puddletown, I loved getting up at six to walk the mile to the gym before school, or at seven to walk around, latte in hand, in the morning drizzle and quiet before the city woke up.  I liked already having accomplished stuff before most people were awake.  I liked having the city to myself.

Something happened during my 2007/08 year in Fellowhship City, though: I became the kind of person who sleeps in.  Maybe because it was cold.  Maybe I stayed out later.  Maybe because I was, at that time, sharing my mornings with another person who was anything but a morning person.  Maybe because the "I need to sleep more to recover from the last four years of pushing myself" became a habit.  Whatever it was, it became a struggle to get out of bed before 8, and things kind of stayed that way.

This month, the good habit to cultivate is to create a good morning. For me, this means getting up early, meditating (even for 10 minutes), and working on my writing.  Maybe not every day, but five days out of seven.  Why do this? Because I've done it before, and I've noticed that it makes me a happier person. Also, because I've joined Dame Eleanor's writing group, so I need to make sure to carve out time for this.

So, maybe taking on one thing at a time is good for me.  Last month, I managed to quit smoking.  True, I managed to gain 7 pounds in a month, because I mostly sat on my butt watching TV (distraction!) and stuffed my face with carbs and sugar to smother the cigarette cravings.  But I'm okay with that, and I've turned the corner a bit, I think. Now, I'd like to see if I could do it again.  We shall see.