A few years into my first job, someone put a copy of Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks into my hands. It was a revelation. The first few chapters are all about writing anxiety, and how to deal with it (by writing a little bit every day). I was thunderstruck to realize that all the problems I was having with writing were so common — it was astonishing to read such accurate descriptions of my own emotional turmoil (as we say nowadays: “I felt seen”), and a relief to hear such clear instructions for what to do about it. Of course, it took me years to actually implement those instructions — I think it was about 5 years later, when I was finishing my book, that I really got into a practice of plonking myself down at a table in a coffee shop (at 6 am, which was brutal, but the only time I could carve out) and writing for an hour or two every day. It was fairly grueling, but it really does work — even if you only write a page a day, or less! those pages really add up. But the other big thing it taught me (which was further reinforced by Eric Hayot’s Elements of Academic Style) is that writing is a process of thought, not a record of thought. That is, you don’t sit and think and store up ideas in your brain that you then transcribe onto paper. You have the ideas by doing the writing — writing makes the ideas happen. Internalizing this knowledge produces a seismic shift in your working habits, and is what really helps writing feel more pleasurable than grueling (sometimes).
Anyways, since that encounter with Belcher’s book, which felt like it came several years later than it should have (why did no one tell me this stuff when I was in grad school?? I even did a dissertation write-in retreat, which was great because it provided me with a free hot lunch every day — but if they had given us all a copy of even the first chapter of Belcher’s book, or even just told us some of this stuff…), I’ve occasionally dipped into a book or two on the topic (such as Hayot’s), both for my own benefit, and to learn about how to be a better teacher of students who have their own writing difficulties. And as it happened, I’ve just finished two that I’ve been reading off and on for months (this seems to be my pandemic mode of being; lots of books going at a time, sigh): Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics and Amitava Kumar’s Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style. They’re completely different from each other, but both are great, and gave me lots of ideas and inspiration.
Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What is very much a how-to book/advice manual for struggling academics. She focuses primarily on the psychology of writing, or rather, the psychology of obstacles to it. The whole point of the book is that writing should ultimately be a pleasure. One of the big take-aways is that, in addition to having the document, or documents, where you’re actually writing whatever thing you’re working on, you should also have a “ventilation file” where you can write about whatever feelings you’re having about the writing. If you feel stuck and don’t want to write the thing you’re writing, you write in the ventilation file about why, and in doing so, you can identify what is holding you back (subsequent chapters cover some of the major myths we cultivate that keep us from writing — the idea that we need to read more, or that we aren’t smart enough, etc — and matter-of-factly lay them to rest). Airing out these grievances helps you recognize and confront them.
This seems very wise to me. I had this epiphanic moment last summer, when I was working on something, where I realized that there was a little voice in my head that was just droning, on repeat, after every sentence I wrote, “This is stupid, this is utterly facile and obvious to everyone, oh my god what are you even talking about” and it was EXHAUSTING. It was such an entrenched part of my mental landscape that I wasn’t even completely aware of it, I just felt this extreme weariness from having to constantly reply, “Yes, yes, I know, it sucks, but let me just get it out and then I can make it better, ok?” Once I realized that this was happening, I started recognizing that negative voice and firmly telling it to shut up. And after awhile, it went away! It was amazing! It made everything so much easier! I imagine that having a ventilation file like the one Jensen describes could help accelerate this process (this is also something like what Hayot advises when he says that if you feel really stuck, create a new document and write about your feeling of stuckness — I do this, and it really helps). The various chapters describing the specific myths that hold us back were useful as well — some were very familiar, in a similarly “wow can you just see directly into my soul??” kind of way.
Amitava Kumar’s Every Day I Write the Book is something else altogether — more of a meditation on various forms and styles of academic writing, with a little bit of conversation on process. It’s not a how-to guide or even an analysis, exactly, so much as a kind of being-with various writers whose work Kumar admires. The book is a collection of vignettes, mostly 1-2 pages (the premier form of experimental academic writing these days…not that I’m complaining, I love it*), each on a different aspect of writing. I really enjoyed the book, less as a guide to writing — though I really admired the conversational intimacy of it, which really made me feel like I was chatting with Kumar over coffee, which in turn made the ideas seem that much more approachable — and more as its own species of literary criticism. But it did also give me warm fuzzy feelings about the idea of writing, and the kinds of writing I could (can?) do. I especially loved the communal feeling of the book — Kumar seems to have a lot of friends, but maybe also a habit of just up and emailing people whose work he finds compelling and asking them questions? It gives you this great sense of academic community. I also loved his many references to posting things on facebook, or reading other people’s posts.** Yes, there are many crappy things about social media, but also some good ones!
Of course, it’s easier to think about the problems of writing and how you’ll deal with them when you’re…not actually writing. I mean, I guess this blog counts as regular writing, though I think of it as separate. But I’m not writing an academic book right now, which makes me feel a little at sea, even though I am writing various other things. I’m still trying to learn how one writes a second academic book (if you have any tips, send them my way…), but for now, I’m learning to find pleasure in writing, which seems like a good start.
*Except occasionally, when I don’t. It decidedly irked me in the new translation of Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon.
**I got an especially big kick — like an actual thrill — when I recognized the text of one of the posts. The excitement isn’t just that we have a mutual friend (academia is a small world, after all), but that we see some of the same things in our feed, ie, I too, could be inspired by some of the posts I see, or rather, I could actually indulge in staying with that inspiration and thinking about it more.
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