How good is it? / How good am I?

With a drawing or a song, I can ask, how good is it? Or I can ask, how good am I at doing this? These are usually the wrong questions, though they are different from each other. Am I a good songwriter? I don't really care, because nothing is of consequence in the answer. Is a song good? If I like it myself, that is enough for me. If you like it, even better. I could be a good songwriter and write a song that's not as good as another, etc... Tons of people hang up their art works in coffee shops around town. Some is fantastically good, some is not, but it shouldn't really matter to the artist what I think.

I do things seriously, whether I am an amateur at any particular thing. In fact, I have decided to pursue hobbies seriously rather than thinking of them as something I am bad or good at. Thinking you are bad at something is every bit as much of an ego move as thinking you are good. To invest serious effort simply means that you think of the activity itself as more significant than your ego investment in it.

Shame is a factor. For example, I have played piano in the student union for anyone walking by. I don't have to feel embarrassed any more, because I realized that nobody really cares how well I play, if they are listening at all in the first place.

It's the same with everything I do, except that I am a professional literary critic slash academic, so there I have criteria which are common to the field of inquiry itself. They are commonly held, and I have my own preferences on top of that, my own quirks.

***

If you confuse "how good am I" with "how good is it" you will be in trouble. Suppose you write a paper for school in two hours. The paper might not be good, yet, because it is not really done yet. You might be good at writing papers, but you haven't spent enough time with this one yet. If you spend endless time and still can't make the paper good, it means you aren't good at it... yet. You need to write many papers in order to learn how to do it. The ego is mostly a hindrance: you need basic confidence, but you need to be able to look at a piece of work outside of yourself and see what needs to be fixed.

The Flow Trap

It might be a mistake to put too much emphasis on mental states. The "flow" will not be there every day, or even most days. If you expect the production of scholarship to be consistently ecstatic you will be disappointed. Also, the ideas will frequently flow, but the prose might never just come out easily. You'll have to accept that.

On the other hand, the experience can be mostly positive and productive, on most days, and over the long haul as well. The idea that writing should mostly be a painful process is also mistaken, and a dangerously self-fulfulling prophecy. It can lead to the avoidance of writing. Most procrastination in scholarly writing is due to those two factors:

(1) Not be able to achieve a flow. The writer has it backwards, usually, not realizing that the flow is inherent to the work process itself, not something that exists before you sit down to write.

(2) Avoidance of anxiety. Writing is associated with frightening negative thoughts.

It's Easy to be Self-Critical, but Hard to Turn Self-Critiicism to Advantage

Anyone can beat themselves up with a long list deficiencies. I do it all the time. Self-criticism is actually a powerful tool, if used right. The problem is that negativity is typically de-motivating, since it's hard to enjoy something that you know you are doing badly. If you aren't self-critical, though, it is hard to improve to the point that you can enjoy your writing. Complacency doesn't really get you anywhere either.

The trick is to develop self-criticism itself, the ability to evaluate your own writing and see where it needs to be changed,for example, as one of your special talents. To see that a sentence I've written is a piece of shit might be disappointing, but I can move from "this sentence is crappy, therefore I am a crappy writer" to "Boy, I am really good at finding these sentences in my own writing and fixing them before anyone else sees them." Or "I am really good at anticipating possible objections to my arguments."

As I've pointed out before, there is really no point in singling yourself out as particularly bad at things that almost nobody else is good at either. That is also a form of egoism.

Further Steps to Happiness / The Network

Another barrier to happiness is the absence, or weakness, of a scholarly network. Working in isolation, thinking that nobody cares about your work, can easily make you unhappy. The way I've solved this problem for myself is through blogging. Honestly, I cannot get enough prolonged contact with good minds through teaching, interacting with colleagues at the office, occasionally seeing people I know at academic conferences, and the odd citation to my work here or there. It's just not enough, even when it's all added up.

I see no problem with blogging, even for people in early stages of a scholarly career, as long as you don't see it as substitute for the sustained attentions of scholarship. You can use twitter, facebook, or linkedin too. The point is to diminish the solitary nature of writing by writing directly for a more immediate audience. Once you have academic publications, make sure they are available online as much as possible. Do what you can to increase your network in RL too, but networking possibilities are greatly expanded through the internet.

Next Steps to Happiness / Believe that your Work is Valuable

If you believe that your work is esoteric, overspecialized, trivial, useless, of interest to nobody else, then it will be difficult to develop a happy relationship to it. In the humanities we often refer to our own work in these disparaging terms, thus internalizing what we think of as the larger society's vision of our work, and alienating ourselves from our sources of strength. We only do this work to get a line on our cv, for promotion, tenure, to get the next degree, etc... Right?

The "the humanities will save civilization" rhetoric does not really help, either. If only people studied humanities, then they would be great critical thinkers and citizens, and would never vote for Republicans. I'm sure you've all heard those arguments.

No. The answer is to remember that the exercise of the human intelligence is the greatest thing ever. Work that employs and expands the human intelligence can never be without value. In my case, I know for a fact that poetry is the greatest and most complex art form possible. The study of poetry is a marvelous thing, because it is one kind of intelligence applied to another. I get to match myself against Lorca every day and find myself wanting.

(When I meet people and they see the attitude I have to my work, they don't think it's useless any more. Usually it's more like "Hey, that's pretty interesting.")

You don't have to agree with me about my particular reasons for valuing my own work. I don't really care. I know my work is valuable, but what about yours? At some core level, don't you think that what you are doing is the most important thing that anyone can do? Or at least the thing that you ought to be doing?

Then you can be happily engaged in your research and writing, deriving satisfaction from it. Knowing you can do it well is just one component: you also have to believe it is worth doing.

First Steps Toward Happiness / It Must Give Pleasure

The first step toward a felicitous relation to your own writing is to do it on a regular schedule. You can't be a happy writer by avoiding writing. You will not enjoy the avoidance any more than you will enjoy the unpleasantness of the writing itself. Either way you are screwed without a schedule to anchor you.

Next, I want you to take pleasure in good prose, first by reading appropriate models. Find writers whose prose you actively enjoy and admire. For some, like me, it might be Guy Davenport, or John Kronik, or Ricardo Gullón. A model whose prose you could realistically emulate in your own lifetime is probably better than, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Francisco de Quevedo. Then take pleasure in a well-formed paragraph of your own making. Don't be satisfied with bad or mediocre writing, because it is hard to derive pleasure from it. If you are a scholar of literature you have a certain advantage, in that the very objects of study are masterpieces of writing.

Discard unhelpful myths. Don't believe that it has to be unpleasant in order for you know you are doing it right. Don't feel guilty if particular parts of the process come to seem almost effortless. That just means you've achieved some level of skill after a lot of effort.

Derive power from your existing strengths, whatever those are. A good working memory that allows you to keep track of complex materials? A keen philosophical mind at ease with abstract concepts? An innate sense of rhythm and balance? A training in another, unrelated discipline? A metaphorical imagination that makes you adept with analogies and comparisons? Synaesthesia? An ability to concentrate on a single problem for hours on end? Good problem-solving abilities or mental flexibility? A sense of humor? A large vocabulary? It's likely that you have one or more such abilities, including one I have not listed, to some degree.

***

What I am not saying here is that a "positive attitude" is sufficient. I have no patience for that kind of useless advice. What I am giving, rather, are some of the components of a positive attitude, components which you will have to put together with some serious thought, effort, and attentiveness. Nor am I promising painlessness or an easy shortcut to get to where you are going. If you are not a happy writer now, it will take some time to get there, because you have a lot of bad habits to overcome.

Building a Happy Relationship (to Your Writing)

Many if not most academic writers I know do not enjoy a happy relationship to their own writing.* They don't enjoy the process of writing or even the product--their own prose style. Writing, even for those with active, vigorous research programs, is a burden or a torment, offering few if any pleasures. Curiously, the romantic vision of a scholar involves suffering in order to produce, but the end result is not a brilliantly inspired work of art, but rather a routine publication. Such scholars might speak of their own articles as mere entries on their curricula vitae, without a clear sense of pride in what they've done. Their unhappy relationship to the process of writing taints the publications themselves.

I've had an unhappy relation to my own writing at times, so I am speaking from experience. But I also know that this way of thinking is not necessary. The happy writer draws strength from her scholarly base and takes pleasure in the act of putting sentences together. An article from such a scholar is a genuine contribution to the field and a further source of happiness and pride. Do you have to suffer to create? Maybe, but I think we all have suffered enough anyway: there is no need to introduce extra suffering into the process.

___

*Thomas, quoting Tolstoy, says that all happy writers are alike.

The Noisy Neighbor

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.

Writer's Group

Anyone interested in a virtual writer's group? Every Monday evening, we will meet on line and talk about what each of us wants to do the following week and what we accomplished the previous week. If we didn't get done what we wanted to, why not? What was the obstacle? Was the obstacle preventable, correctable, will it be there next week? Is it a self-imposed obstacle or an external one?

There should be no guilt or bad feelings about not having gotten something done. For me, last week, for example, I can say that I didn't get written what I wanted. The obstacles were partly logistical and partly emotional. One problem was that I didn't define very clearly what I wanted to get done. I don't feel particularly bad that I didn't write as much. Rather, the information I have about why I didn't will help me for the next week.

Mindfulness

I went to a "mindfulness" group at the psychological clinic here. I don't know much about the topic yet, but it struck me that one definition would be using your own mind to your benefit rather than to your detriment. In other words, don't outthink yourself. Notice the thoughts and emotions you are having and allow them to pass through you without overstaying their welcome. I've always thought the best way of dealing with negative emotions is to pay no attention to them at all and hope they would go away, but I'm open to new approaches.

Self-Consciousness

During a recent writing session my attention was mostly focused on the writing itself. I wasn't monitoring how I felt, listening to either negative or positive voices in my head "You are stupid" "You are brilliant." The writing felt good, but I wasn't concentrating on my ego either positively or negatively. I was happy but in an unself-conscious way.

Positive focus on the ego or negative focus are both distractions. I can stop and admire myself for a sentence I just wrote without too much interruption, but that isn't the main point. Negative thoughts are worse, when they are about the self and not about the writing, because they interrupt more obnoxiously.

Notice the profound difference between "This sentence still doesn't say what I want it to say" and "I am inadequate; I will never finish this article." Both are "negative" thoughts, right? But the first is specific and productive (you can fix the sentence) and also detached from the ego. You wouldn't break into tears when you realized that a sentence didn't say exactly what you wanted it to. The latter is generalized (cannot be addressed in any way) and wholly unproductive.

So the SMT I derive from this is that your writing is not you. Its imperfections are not imperfections of your self, and its virtues are not virtues of you either. It is an exterior object on which you are working. The more you focus on it and not yourself, the better. If the ego distracts, either positively or negatively, put it back in its place. Feel pride in what you do, or as much anxiety as you want, but separate that from the real work of writing.

Inadequate, Tired, Stupid

According to Munger, the academic writer working hard enough should feel inadequate, tired, and stupid while writing. Let's break this down a bit.

(1) Inadequate. You shouldn't be writing from a place of incompetence. You have worked on your scholarly base and you are defending well-defined claims. Humility is all well and good, but without some faith in what you are affirming you won't be able to speak with authority.

(2) Tired. You will work better, write better, if you are well-rested. There is no point in fetishizing exhaustion. If after 2 hours you are tired, stop writing.

(3) Stupid. You might feel stupid because of something you are failing to understand. It's fine to feel frustrated by an intellectual challenge, but you have to know that you are smart enough to rise to it.

So no, none of these feelings is a sign that you are working productively. Inadequate, tired, and stupid is a good recipe for writer's block.

Why?

This article by Michael Munger gave me pause. Most of it is helpful, but his statement that

[w]hen you are actually writing, and working as hard as you should be if you want to succeed, you will feel inadequate, stupid, and tired. If you don't feel like that, then you aren't working hard enough.

seems very, very wrong to me. First of all, the stupid fetishization of "hard work." Writing has to feel bad to produce good results, according to this kind of thinking. Often, I feel more than fine when I am writing, full of energy rather than tired, adequate rather than inadequate, and even reasonably smart. I'm not denying that negative thoughts will often accompany writing, but these thoughts are not signs of virtue or hard work. They have no value in themselves.

Cultivate a confident, energetic but relaxed alertness while writing. Exercise your intelligence. Don't be afraid of feeling it. If you tell yourself writing has to be painful, chances are you will be right! Even if you end up writing well, your writing will feel crabby to your reader, just like a drummer with tense muscles is not likely to be playing "in the pocket." I've had highly productive writing sessions that felt almost effortless, where I've felt brilliant.

Do not confuse this idea of "feeling it" with waiting to feel good enough to write, or expecting to feel good invariably while writing. Tedium, frustration, and fatigue will make appearances sooner or later. Where I differ with Munger is that I don't believe they are signs that you are doing things right. I think of negative thoughts and emotions, rather, as signals telling you to make adjustments to your attitude, your work habits. In that sense, and that sense alone, they are valuable.

***

Happy New Year. This post was published on 1/1/11 at 1:11 a.m.

The Page is Never Blank

For the scholarly writer, the page can never be blank. There is always some reading, some research, some thought, that precedes the act of writing. Once the page is not blank, then the process of writing becomes one of modifying, revising, what is already there on the pages or on the screen.

Excuses

In my work diaries I often put down the word "nothing" for a day nothing was accomplished. I never offer an excuse for that day. There may be a reason why I didn't get anything accomplished on that particular day. Maybe I was driving 5 hours between my two residences; maybe I was teaching and meeting with students. Maybe I was reading something for my project and didn't have anything to show for it in tangible terms. It makes no difference why I didn't accomplish anything on a particular day. What is important is that I know how many days I accomplished something and how many days I didn't.

Learning not to make excuses for yourself is fundamental. Suppose I had really good reasons for not working. I could be sick, or stressed, or whatever. At the end of the week, then, I have either have a list of accomplishments or a list of excuses.

Writer's Block and Creativity

You don't really have to experience writer's block. The days where you don't get quite as much written just get averaged into your total level of production, just like the days when you do a bit more that usual. The "typical" day will either be below average or above average. In fact, I can just about guarantee that about half your days will be below average! On a day when you are blocked, you can edit other parts of your project, or take very rough notes on an inchoate part of it. Work at either extreme, fixing almost polished prose or just getting words down by hook or crook. The next day you can just try to make complete sentences out of those notes. Once you have complete sentences, no matter how badly written, you can convert them into better prose.

***

The one thing I don't know how teach is how to get that spark of originality, how to generate really good ideas in the first place. For me, the ideas just arise out of my normal reading habits, out my intellectual involvement with the subject matter. Everything I read just suggests interesting ideas to me, though of course I only use a small fraction of those in my research. Students are supposed to learn this by observing other people doing it, by discussing their own ideas in class, but this process does not "take" with every student. The good news is that people can have successful scholarly careers with no real spark. That is good news for them, but bad news for scholarship, which ideally should be imbued with the creative spirit.

I have no faith in creativity as the next educational buzzword. Once you decide you want creativity, you will devise rubrics to measure it. I will let you in on my secret, though. Ask the tough questions. (Find out tomorrow what the tough questions are.)

Untricking Yourself

What Stupid Motivational Tricks really is about is untricking yourself. In other words, reversing the stupid ways you've tricked yourself into not getting things done by being so busy working at not working.

The Best Time to Start the Next Chapter

is right after you finish the previous one. The same day if possible. Take advantage of that momentum. My daughter's music teacher said that right after an audition is a good time to do a lot of practicing. Why? Because you have peaked for that audition, so the practice will be in that higher zone and thus be more effective. With writing, you can take advantage of the fact that you were just now writing very well, in finished prose rather than in rough notes, in order to complete the last thing you wrote. Mentally, you will be riding that wave of elation rather than experiencing let-down.

I recently finished an article and two chapters, so I am beginning with chapter that has intimidated me in the past and that I have to conclude by February. If I finish this, I will be 5/8 done with the book, more or less.

***

If you want to take a short break of a day or two, then, don't do it between chapters, but in the middle of one of them.

Out of my Element

I feel very secure in certain situations but very much out of my element in others. I have to work once a month at a bingo parlor (don't even ask!). It is so foreign to my normal routine that it causes anxiety in me. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it doesn't come at all naturally to me. The bingo place is also in a neighborhood I never go to. I feel very uneasy about going out of my normal territory.

The place is smoky. People who don't look very rich are throwing twenty dollars bills at you to buy pull-tab cards that give them a chance to win one dollar back. I spend six hours there.

This made me realize I am a very fearful person, very attached to certain ways of doing things and reluctant to move outside of a certain zone. There is nothing in this zone attractive to me either.

I'm not sure what this is a metaphor for... I'm sure it has something to do with scholarly writing. Maybe you'll tell me.

Enjoy Your Moping

There's a lot of anguished time spent not working. If you are really stuck, then try to just do something completely different and mindless for a while rather than using your moping time moping. I find looking at episodes of The Rockford Files useful.