Stupid Motivational Tricks

Writing as Product, not Process

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 17:02:00 +0000

I envision writing as a product, not a process. I think an over-emphasis on the process itself is damaging in that it prevents us from envisioning the final product that we are aiming for. I call this the translators fallacy: suppose the translator goes back and forth between the words "vertigo" and "dizziness" a half-dozen times, finally settling on "dizziness." The translator can write a beautiful essay explaining the process, but ultimately the reader of the translation only has the final result, one work of the other. It doesn't matter if a sentence is revised many times if the end-result is not better.

There should be, I feel, a base-line first-draft style that is serviceable and produced with some degree of fluency. Revisions of style might still be laborious, but they will make something good even better.

Fluent Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:58:00 +0000

I'd like to be able to write fluently the way I can sometimes talk fluently. In other words, produce complete sentences continuously on the first try, writing pretty much at the pace of medium-slow typing. I can do it in blogging, but more rarely in scholarly writing. I think the culture of revision means that we have trained ourselves not to write so fluently: after all, we can always go back and rewrite it. I'm thinking about trying to develop that capacity of fluency. I did it this morning, finishing the preface to the new modernism book fairly quickly.

Here the key might be to notice when I'm doing it and trying to remember what it feels like.

Resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:15:00 +0000

My ideas about resolutions for the new year is to make is something modest, possible, and productive. Last year, my resolutions were to improve my reading knowledge of Italian and to learn more about Duke Ellington. Both are ones I fulfilled more or less. This is much better than having a resolutions having to do with refraining from a particular activity, or the typical weight-loss and exercise resolutions that fill the gyms during the first week of January.

For 2010, I am going to have 6 month resolutions, because I found that I didn't do much Italian after June. I did become a half-way-decent Ellingtonian, but here too my interest shifted. So this year I am going to increase my knowledge of the Hispanic poetic tradition beyond the 20th century and beyond Spain. January-June I will do mostly the popular tradition in conjunction with my course. July-December, I will fill in some gaps in the cultured tradition.

The Dream Book

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:02:00 +0000

I often times write table of contents for books that I know will probably not be written. Last night in my sleep and waking up every hour so as not to miss my flight home from the MLA, I thought of a book for a more popular audience on Spanish-language poetry. I started to think of what the chapters would be. I got this idea to choose 5 widely disparate poets from diverse places and centuries and make half the book on them--with the other half being an introduction to topics.

Now I probably will never write such a book, at least not in this form, but I probably will use some of the material I've worked on to write some sort of book. My idea is to write a version for Spanish of something like Jacques Barzun's book on French poetry for readers of English verse. I couldn't do it like Barzun, because of the differences between how French is positioned vis a vis the English speaking reader and the way Spanish is. For example, even though Spanish poetry has been more widely translated than French, I think there is a longer tradition of readers knowing something about French poetry. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think English poets have known more Ronsard or Villon than Lope de Vega or Quevedo.

Also, because I'm no Jacques Barzun.

Anyway, the idea here is to dream up impossible projects and maybe carve possible ones out of them later. Secondarily, not every idea is going to work out as planned.

Equanimity

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:10:00 +0000

Are you calm, relaxed, and a little bored while writing? Or hyped up and nervous? For me writing is a very intense activity. I wouldn't want to do it more than 3 hours a day, and two are even better. There should be a little adrenaline flowing, but the ideal should be a flow of alert but still relaxed attentiveness. It might be hard to cultivate this, because most of the time you are writing you probably won't feel this way. You still have to plug on through various moods rather than waiting until you feel this way (you might never).

What I recommend is that when you do hit that sweet flow, notice it and remember it. What made it happen? Maybe it was something that kicked in about 45 minutes in, like a runner's endorphins. How long did it last? 10 minutes? An hour? Once you've figured out onset and duration, you are in a position to exploit those states when they do come and maybe recreating those conditions. They are doubly good: they can produce good work, and also be motivating since they simply feel so good.

It is a mistake, though, to think that good writing can only flow from maximal flow states. In fact, I think i am usually not in one, yet still can produce good results. I think I am too often just hyped on caffeine and way too anxious. The trick is to have a balance between cultivating good writing moods and not letting their absence get in the way--the latter phenomenon is one of the main causes of writer's block. If you wait to feel good to write, you are making a mistake, because the good feeling will only come once you've been writing for a while.

Envisioning the Project

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:30:00 +0000

Writing is unlike many other activities, in that thinking about writing is actually (almost) writing itself. I often write things out in my head when I am not in front of the computer or a notebook. By doing so, I usually have phrases in mind when I sit down to write. We call writing the actual putting down the words in some written form, analogue or digital, but we also call writing the composition itself, independent of its physical manifestation. Almost writing. Obviously if you do a lot of writing in your head and never put anything down in written form, you will forget a lot: eventually almost everything. That is why mental writing is incomplete. Yet it is hard to imagine not forming sentences in your mind as you are working on the project--reading something else about your topic, for example. With book reviews, for example, I find that I start to write the review in my head the minute I start reading. I find it useful to do a lot of purely mental work at the beginning of a project. Imagining the book already complete and the relation of each part to every other part. This almost has to be done mentally because not much is written down yet! You also have to develop advanced memory skills to be able to hold a lot of complex information in the mind at once. Not memory of details, so much, as of the bigger picture.

The Break-Through

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:43:00 +0000

The break-through will often occur after several days of intense work. This occurs when you feel you've made substantial progress in envisioning the entire shape of the project. All of a sudden, you will have written several good pages.

Guest Post by Julia

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:42:00 +0000

I have a very valuable trick down below.

This is a way to get yourself motivated. If you are reading this, get away from the computer. Gosh. What are you doing just sitting here? You're wasting your time, do something productive.

The Way I Work Here

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:25:00 +0000

is to shift back and forth between working on my project itself and meta-blogging about the process here. I think it's important to be somewhat self-conscious about work habits and the like. I'm constantly shifting what I do in one direction or another--without changing fundamental principles.

Humility and Pride

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:43:00 +0000

... are both just names for different kinds of ego adjustments, down or up. There are plenty of reasons to be humble and plenty of reasons to be proud of accomplishments too. You could probably tear yourself down pretty easily if you wanted, and yet you could also do the reverse just as easily. For example, I could think of about 50 people who are in better institutions than me, making more money, or more famous, etc... in my field, depending on how narrowly or broadly I defined it. Or 20 people who know more about Lorca or Gamoneda. On the other hand, I can point out that I can out-publish everyone in my department. That I've published in PMLA, Diacritics.

It's probably hard to avoid both kinds of mental activity. You might do one more than the other, but they are both forms of ego management, and I think most people do some of both almost every day. They can both be motivating, too. Nevertheless, the main focus should be on the "working ego," that is, the ego that gets things done and the immediate gratifications that come from actually working on stuff on a daily basis. In other words, past accomplishments are great to remember if you are otherwise having a bad day, and humility is motivating it you feel too complacent, but the real pleasures of ego are in the act of creation itself. In other words, in writing itself feeling good to you as you do it.

Existential Threats

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:24:00 +0000

... are obstacles to writing having to do with the larger picture. They can come in the form of personal doubts. Thoughts like "I'm not good enough to do this" or "Scholarship is really not that valuable anyway," or "They won't promote me even if I do write this book." They can also come in the form of serious illness, or being in a position where there is not sufficient time for scholarship (4/4 teaching load).

In my case, I was stalled for a while in the late 90s and early noughts. I kept re-configuring my project. I published articles still, but could not seem to get that next book project out. Having to commute between Kansas and St. Louis was very difficult (as it still is). I was very depressed for long periods of time. Being told that "you're only good at writing books" made me not want to write a book--perversely. The way I resolved it was to embrace my ambition rather than being embarrassed by it. A therapist I had who always told me that being productive would not make me happy... With all due respect, I am much happier now that I have found a way to be more productive. Unlike other addictions, being addicted to publishing books and articles is completely healthy. Trying to be less driven was not getting me anywhere.

If a threat is existential and self-generated, as mine was, then it is susceptible to solution. In this case it is a matter of turning existential issues into pragmatic ones, in other words, cognitively redefining something that was existential and making it a practical set of obstacles that can be broken down into component parts and resolved. If the existential obstacle really is existential, then you still need a healthy dose of pragmatism, involving figuring out whether you can still do some scholarship under desperate circumstances.

Calling off a Project

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:21:00 +0000

Ok. The new Lorca is not going to work as planned. I realized there wasn't enough Lorca there, in my plan, and that I didn't really want to analyze actual poetic works by Lorca very extensively, and that a reader would expect that in a book with Lorca in the title. I realized I was too swayed by the momentum of Apocryphal Lorca and by the potential marketability of the Lorca name.

So it's back to the new modernism project, which will be called something like Modernism and the Paradoxes of Spanish Literary History:.

This is really fine. It's going to be better this way. There is really no wasted work, because you need to go down a certain alley as far as you can before you realize it's not where you need to be going. I can still use most of the idea on Lorca I was going to include, but I don't have to stretch them out over as many chapters.

One of the most advanced tasks of scholarship is mentally organizing large amounts of material in a coherent way and convincing way. I just woke up today knowing that I needed to just re-arrange things enough so that they would work.

100-1,000 words

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:05:00 +0000

Increasing your word-count by 100 words would involve sitting down for a few minutes at any point in the day and just fiddling around with your document. That's like 4 or 5 sentences. On the other hand, writing a thousand words would be a very good day that you wouldn't expect to have more than a few times a month. So what you would want to aim for is about 250-750 words a day, depending on whether the words were actual prose or rougher notes. A page of really good prose (250-300) words would be very good for a day's work. That puts you on track to write a book in a year of writing, 365 days. You should be able to put together that "year" in the space of 3-4 years.

Usually you only need a second monograph for full professor, so basically you only need to do this year of work at least once between the time you are promoted to associate and some reasonable time afterwards. Yet this second book can be extraordinarily hard to get done. That shows that it is really more of an existential problem than a practical one. I'm going to have to think about some tips to convert existential problems into pragmatic ones with practical solutions.

Exploiting Inefficiencies

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:22:00 +0000

I know I have many kinds of inefficiency in my working methods. Since I live in two places, I often don't have access to the book I need when I need it. There are distractions, etc..., so that time is not always used efficiently. It would be depressing to think that I am working at 100%: that would mean that I've already done everything possible to reduce any wastage of time. I like the feeling that I'm maybe at about 40% of the maximum. That means that if I really wanted to, I could easily increase my productivity any time I wanted to. If I really need to do something in hurry, I can do it, because there is extra slack there. Also, I can take my time and exploit the fact that even wasted time spent on the project is not really wasted.

Once in while I look at some things I'm doing and try to make them more efficient, but I'm not at all obsessive about this, because I like the feeling of some degree of extra capability that I don't always have to use. Recently, for example, I unsubscribed from some email lists I was on and organized my files on my computer desktop in a more rigorous way.

So the SMT of the day: be efficient, ma non troppo. If you are already getting done what you want, you can increase efficiency in order to get the same amount of work done in less time, but you don't necessarily have to aim at 100%.

Bridges

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:49:00 +0000

A less bellicose and more irenic metaphor for my work is building bridges. I like to situate myself in a place where I can be an expert in two different areas and bring them together. The Lorca book is an obvious example. I knew considerably more about American poetry than any Lorca scholar, and considerably more about Lorca than any specialist in American poetry. The trick was the build enough bridges to make the project work. In my new Lorca project I am going to be combine my knowledge of modernism internationally, including American poetry but not exclusively so, Lorca, and Spanish intellectual history.

The bridge has to be anchored on both sides of the river. It can't just be a pier; it has to reach the other side. It must permit two-way traffic. It has to be wide enough. It has to also not fall into the river.

No Rough Drafts

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:39:00 +0000

I never write a "rough draft." Nor would I ever show anything to another human being that was a rough draft. The term I use is "penultimate draft." In other words, it's not final yet, but next-to-final.

I have basically four categories. Notes, which can be in any form and have no style to speak of. They might not even be complete sentences.

Next, prose per se. I usually use three asterisks *** to separate what I've written in prose at the beginning of a chapter and the mere notes at the end. The hardest part of writing is pushing forward and creating prose out of mere notes.

Thirdly, penultimate prose: every sentence has been written over several times.

Finally, final prose, such as that which would occur in the publication itself. Every sentence is more or less fine tuned.

I would only show writing at the third stage to anyone else, because it would be an insult to them and would show me not at my best. If you want help with your work, get it to a presentable stage first, so that the help can take place at a higher level. Oftentimes the feedback descends to the level of the work itself. In other words, if there are a lot of distracting stylistic tics, the reader will focus on those rather than on the ideas.

What is your metaphor for your own work?

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:11:00 +0000

Mine is the idea of agon. Much as I don't want to be influenced by Harold Bloom, I see literary criticism as a struggle, a conflict. I don't think something is worth writing about unless it involves a significant critical problem. I don't even mind a polemic. I am motivated by ideas like having my ideas prevail, by competition with rivals and by struggles with the poetry itself. I want to win. Some of the negative emotions of the agon are actually motivating for me. For example, I might let my anger about weaker readings motivate me into doing something better.

I don't know if there is stupid motivational trick here. Maybe it's that you should consciously think of what your own metaphorical conception of your work is, clarify that to yourself. I think everyone has one, or should. Now once you have that clear, what are you going to do with it? What are the sources of power in the metaphor? What are the potential pitfalls?

In my case, for example, the idea of a struggle or agon allows me to excel in certain ways, to choose non-trivial critical problems, to have a stake in what I write. On the other hand, it makes me too testosterone driven, too angry and polemical. It's something that I have to consciously control in order not to let things get out of hand.

Positive thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:20:00 +0000

Here are some thoughts that are probably true about your project.

I have already accomplished a lot of this project.

Even if you are a beginning stage, you've done some readings, taken some notes. Maybe you've done an encerrona.

I can sit down at any time and get some substantial work done on it.

You can always add items to the bibliography, change some rough notes into prose, or write some rough notes on something you were thinking of.

Monitoring Emotions

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:38:00 +0000

What emotions are you feeling while writing? Frustration, anxiety, doubt, even anger might be present. On the positive side of the ledger, pride and satisfaction, excitement, anticipation. I believe the techniques of cognitive therapy can be useful in looking at how to get the writing done, because a lot of the obstacles take the form of cognitive distortions. One thing you can do is to monitor your emotional states, give them names.

I don't recommend trying to eliminate negative emotions, because I think without them you aren't doing it right. In other words, if you are not concerned about how the project is going to turn out, if you don't have a stake in what you're writing, why do it? If it's super easy and pain free, you probably aren't challenging yourself enough. Realistically, you are going to feel some bad things while writing from time to time. What I recommend, instead, is acknowledging that writing can be painful and keeping some kind of equilibrium. If emotion is the reason why you're not writing, then you have to tackle the problem emotionally.

Got Prose?

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:54:00 +0000

Almost everything I do professionally involves writing. The few things that don't consist of reading other people's writing, or engaging in oral communication of some type. If you can't write well, you have a huge handicap that will hold you back in most humanities fields. If write superbly well, you will have an advantage over other people. This single factor is so huge that I wonder why we don't just make that the whole focus of the first year of graduate school.

A List is Not an Argument

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:36:00 +0000

A list is not argument--but making a list of ideas might be the first step in creating an argument. In other words, if you jot down a list of 10 unrelated ideas about a particular topic, you might then put them in a logical order, subordinating some to others, eliminating those that aren't as relevant and come up with an argument.

Gym

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:15:00 +0000

I'm going to the gym; I will see if I can walk around the track and do some lecture / discussion notes for my other class using the 25-idea walk method and the complete sentence game.

Preface or Introduction?

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:54:00 +0000

I prefer the preface to the introduction. The preface puts forward a brief summary of the chapters and says what the book is going to be about. Writing a preface is like writing a grant proposal or plan for the book. The nice thing about it is that you are writing the book while planning to write it at the same time.

Introductions are typically longer, and include more contextual and theoretical background. What I like to do is to make the first chapter do double duty: be introductory in some way, but also present substantive, non-introductory points. For example, in Apocryphal Lorca I used the first chapter to talk about Lorca himself, rather than his American imitators. I wasn't introducing the book, but writing another kind of essay that prepared the ground for the rest of the book.

I'm not saying this is the right way to do it. Your project--or your own personal style of doing things--might require an introduction rather than preface--or both. If you have both you have to keep their functions rigorously separated, which I've always found difficult.

Monitoring Your Internal Chatter

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:22:00 +0000

Chances are, if you are anything like me, you have an internal chatter going on all the time about your work. It is important to monitor this chatter because it is giving you useful information.

Listen, first of all, for positive messages. What are you telling yourself about your project? What metaphors are you using? For example, I found myself repeating the phrase "seamless whole" over and over again. Conceiving my project as a single long essay was motivating for myself.

Vague positive messages like "I can do this" are less helpful, I've found. They are not actively harmful, but they aren't as motivating as very specific metaphors or images. By the same token, vaguely negative messages should be brought to the fore and actively refuted. I'm thinking of things like "I don't know enough to write such a book" or "I'm not smart enough" or "I'm a lazy person." We all have those thoughts and they can be very damaging.

Very specific negative chatter, in contrast, can be helpful in clarifying specific problems in the substance of the work itself. If you keep hearing that voice in your head say it's not satisfied with your contextualization of Valente in regards to counter-reformation theology, that's significant information that you can use.

Then there is the chatter that actually contains ideas that you can write down. This is not meta-chatter, but actual thinking about the project that you should always be listening to.

So monitor your internal voices and filter out the destructive ones, using the useful information for your own benefit.

Scholarship is complicated, hence the need for simplicity

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:58:00 +0000

Scholarship is inherently complex: the ideas themselves involve interrelations among many different elements. Major projects entail years of work. It can be difficult to keep track of bibliographical citations and research materials over time. Hence the need for a streamlined approach: having only one major project at a time; striving for clarity of intentions and clarity of expression; making the project only as complex as it has to be. You don't want to simplify your ideas, but you want to analytically separate their genuine complexity from the spurious complications that come from unclear intentions and stylistic verbosity.

Sometimes if you strip away the excess verbiage from your thesis, you might be disappointed: your thesis is rather obvious, even clichéd. I believe a thesis for a paper, article, dissertation, or book in non-technical humanties field should be something that you could explain in clear language to your mom or non-academic uncle. At the same time, it shouldn't sound merely trivial to the expert in the field. Having a very clear thesis will help to keep your focuc over the long haul.