My basic philosophy is to distinguish clearly between external obstacles to writing and internal ones. We have considerable power over internal obstacles, so we can work on those. We have less power of external factors, so we can either work to change those or circumvent them, or some combination of the two.
Not having a lamp to read by is an external obstacle to scholarship. Not bothering to buy a lamp from office depot to solve this problem, however, is an internal obstacle. A noisy neighbor is an external obstacle. He's too noisy; I cannot concentrate! Nevertheless, the attitude that as long as I Iive next to him, I'll never write a word, is an internal one. If we only have external obstacles, we are in good shape, because the internal ones we can learn to overcome.
If we attribute an internal obstacle to the outside world, then we are defeating ourselves. The world is not letting me be the scholar I want to be, so why try?
Now here's where this gets tricky. I don't want to ever suggest that an obstacle is not real or significant. I don't want to be insensitive to your teaching load or family obligations, your sensitivity to noise, your medical problems. The more significant the external factors are, the harder it will be to write. What this means, though, is that you will have to be even more rigorous about not letting any internal blocks get a hold of you. In other words, you will be in even less a position to blame anything on the noisy neighbor.
4 comments:
I know that my obstacles are internal. All of them. Nature has blessed me with an ability to concentrate amidst any kind of noise and bustle. Internal obstacles, however, often prevent me from taking full advantage of this great quality.
If we only have external obstacles, we are in good shape, because the internal ones we can learn to overcome.
Seems like there's a missing lemma here, e.g. "most external obstacles turn out on closer inspection to be convertible into internal ones."
I backed off from saying that because, while that's the unstated implication of the post, but I didn't want someone with a 4/4 teaching load to come at me!
The more obstacles you can redefine as internal, the better. Then you will have more control. But I don't want people blaming themselves either for things really, truly outside of their control.
Thanks for teaching me the word lemma. Cool word. In Spanish lema is a motto or slogan but I didn't know lemma as the internal part of an argument.
Right, "most". I don't want to deny the existence of real external obstacles (that would get into the territory of "The Secret").
Post a Comment