coldhearted scientist وداد

Now much has been discovered.

RIEDUCAZIONE

It was abusive but the thing about it was that, like all abuse, its ultimate goal was to teach self abuse. I already knew how to do that, having learned about it very early on in life. Education militated against it, which is why I liked education. Reeducation reactivated the earlier tendency and that is what happened. We will work from now on in that sense. Note that this does not mean I have discovered a root cause. I have only discovered something.

Related: my struggle with my current piece of writing has to do with the place it deals with, the things that happened there. The place and societal situation were for me what is called “triggering” (as I said then). The piece is hard, as I have said before, because it awakens my ire which is about that place, but more fundamentally about something else. I know why the place is triggering, but I had forgotten the real reason why the piece is.

ÉCRITURE

Hattie turned me onto an extremely interesting book, now out of print, although it should not be: Mike Rose’s When A Writer Can’t Write. This is not a self help manual, it is an academic book in composition theory. There is an essay by Robert Boice in it but there are many other pieces, including David Bartholomae’s apparently famous “Inventing the University,” on which I have commented before. Now we will take a few brief notes on Donald M. Murray’s essay “The Essential Delay: When Writer’s Block Isn’t” (219-226).

THE ESSENTIAL DELAY

+ A normal, necessary, always terrifying delay precedes effective writing. E.B. White and Virginia Woolf talked about waiting the way a surfer waits for a wave, or a gardener waits for a fruit to be ripe. (I add: Vargas Llosa said you do not write because you “should” but because you cannot resist. I add: I like that pregnant period the way I like “earthquake weather,” but it is what my more inept advisers have always told me to cut out.) Hemingway, Kafka and Levertov all advised waiting.

+ There are long quotations from journalist Carol McCabe. The time just before writing is key because it is (in my words) like the last stages of gestation, she suggests.

+ One must accept the fact that there is no certainty that the waiting will be productive. It may have no issue. Each writer fears not being able to write again, but experienced ones know it will although it may take some time to start. (Contrast: the anti-procrastination manuals’ insistence that one start NOW.)

+ There are five things the writer needs to know or feel before writing.

1. INFORMATION. “Amateurs try to write with words; professionals write with information.” You need a lot of information and it is dangerous to start writing too soon. Then you have only ideas, concepts, theories, abstractions, and generalizations. A good writer avoids the vague and general, and seeks precision and hard edges.

2. INSIGHT. Insight for me, as I see from this text, is the moment when the images and phrases I want to use start to stream in a common direction. You must have this to start writing. The hard work of writing – the work you are there to do – involves shaping this insight toward precision.

3. ORDER. Barbara Tuchman says writing blocks come from difficulty of organization. Many writers do not like to begin before they know what their last sentence will be. They say the end must be implicit in the beginning; if not, you do not know where you are going. Even more spend a very great amount of time on the first line or lines, as they determine the form of the whole piece.

4. NEED. You have to feel a need to say something, or perceive a need that a certain thing be heard. In the case of assigned or invited pieces you must also find a personal need to parallel the external one (and it must be a writing need, not a bureaucratic one like needing a grade or tenure).

The writer, not the editor, must have ultimate control. We must write for ourselves first, and others afterward.

5. VOICE. Writers tend to delay writing until they can hear the voice that will run through the draft. To do that you have to LET GO of the “get it done” mentality.

ET JE VOUS DIS

1. This delay is very different from “procrastination.” To have it, you still have to work: you have to keep your writer’s hours, look at your material, meditate upon it.

2. To allow yourself this delay does not mean you should not write steadily once you do start – with vacations when necessary. That is true even if writing is not your job. You do not want the project to go cold.

3. I wonder if Murray’s “delay” is actually what the writing people are trying to have us do by “prewriting.” I did not hear of “prewriting” until dissertation time and then book time … I was allowed to write many papers and articles unsupervised, and I used the delay but never prewrote (and never procrastinated). At dissertation and book time, however, I was assigned prewriting and not allowed a delay.

The prewriting was required internally but would not be published, so I got it done right away to get it out of my hair. Then, I knew, I needed to go on vacation to blow the contents of the premature “prewriting” entirely out of my mind, blast them to oblivion, so I could purify my ideas again so as to settle in for my delay. Instead I got: “Well, now you have pre-written, so start writing for real.”

At this point, in the case of the dissertation, I took the vacation and then the delay anyway, after which I started writing for real. As we know, nobody believed I could be writing enough, only 25 pages a month, I would never finish in a year, but 25 multiplied by 10 is 250 and I was finished in ten months.

In the case of that book, which was both more and less serious, I was more obedient. Having littered my mind with prewriting I tried to start right up. This failed. Since I had not taken the vacation and the delay, I procrastinated. And I point out that had I not undertaken the prewriting, I would not have needed the vacation … and the time of the prewriting could have been the time of the delay.

Thence my hypothesis, that “prewriting” may have been invented by composition people to teach people who do not know how to use the delay, how to use it (and not fear it).

Morals:

a. Teachers and mentors: never just spout standard advice – find out to whom you are speaking first.
b. Writers: enjoy that delay, and use it well.

Axé.