A Memorable Fancy » writing

SomethingSomethingMo

erik — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:45:14 +0000

Most readers here are probably familiar with NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which started yesterday. Well, a few people have decided to co-opt or adapt it into something else. Charlotte Frost at Phd2Published suggests AcBoWriMo for Academic Book Writing Month and James Smith at MITH suggests NanoDHMO for a digital humanities project.

I like the spirit of these projects. As someone who often self-censors or automatically says “no” to things, I like the idea of just doing it, no matter how crazy it sounds, and worrying about editing later. As much as I like these two ideas, though, I’m sticking with NaNoWriMo. Maybe the other projects should try for different months. It would be kinda cool to have a different crazy project each month.

Difficult writing

erik — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:05:42 +0000

Prompted by Jeffrey Eugenides’s new book The Marriage Plot (which I have begun and am enjoying so far), Steven B. Johnson ruminates in the NYTimes book review and on his blog about his own prose style in college at Brown in the heyday of semiotics and deconstruction. Although he points to some positive practices that remain from that education, he makes fun of his own writing style and talks about the years he took “detangling” his prose style. In response, Alex Ross posts some of his own embarrassing early prose at the New Yorker in an essay entitled “Worst College Essays 1989″.

These essays suggest that the difficult prose of poststructuralism is a vestige of an earlier period, confined to the 1980s. Both authors also suggest that they have outgrown that style over the years. I have been looking back at my grad school writing, and reflecting on what was expected of me in the 2000′s, and nothing seems to have changed. I wonder if all that difficult theory is a hazing process, or something for young scholars to cling to for security, or just a rite of passage into academia or the broader intellectual world. Is it a function of youth? I’m not sure, but I do know it did not end in the 80′s, and I wonder what passages we will point to in a few decades to indicate the seeming absurdity of our own discourse.

The opposite of writer’s block

erik — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:55:51 +0000

I am one of those writers who worries a lot about writing. What do I want to write and why, how should I write, how do other people write, both in style and in their practice, what should I make my students write, and why?¹

First of all, I need to invent a waterproof contraption that will let me write in the shower, which is where I get most of my ideas, only to lose them when I emerge.

The apparatus. Is it strange to think that a piece of software can loosen you up or encumber you? I have been writing on the beta version of Scrivener for Windows for almost a month, and I have written over 10,000 words in the last two weeks or so. I have outlined a book, and organized a suite of short stories. In Word, I stare at the screen, get bogged down in functionality. It is a strange experience. I’ve been playing with the idea of buying a typewriter, Paul Auster style, but that seems incredibly silly. I get it, though, the adherence to a particular device, or, in my case, software. I will definitely buy it when it comes out.

Pressing “Publish”. I have also been saving a lot of blog posts as drafts, never publishing them, either because the time seems to have passed, or they don’t yet seem just quite right, or because I fear they reveal too much about me as, you know, a human being. I am all paranoid about the job search situation, and I don’t want to alienate anyone by, like, having opinions and such. It’s very strange.

Reading. Been reading a lot of essays and short stories. Joy Williams keeps breaking my heart in small chunks. George Saunders blows me away in both his fiction and essays (the essay “Braindead Megaphone” is a great piece on current media practices). SimonVan Booy’s stories each contain a small universe.

Block? Thing is, I’m not stuck. I’m more like the Michael Douglas character in that movie I can never remember the title of (the movie is Wonder Boys. What can I never remember that?), where he doesn’t give anything to his editor because he can’t stop writing. Ok, I am not quite like that, but I am writing a lot, and I do not want to share it with you. Most of it. I’m also not smoking a bunch of weed, like he does in the movie. Just so you know.

My hope is that when I have enough raw material, I’ll be able to look back and carve something interesting out of it. Or several somethings. Writing is revision, it has been said. Speaking of which, I am revising portions of my diss for publication, and hoping to move on from there to something else, but I’ll be damned if I know what that is right now. I have been compiling research on the concept of “attention,” which I hope to write about as it intersects media studies, but it still has to take shape.

What is the opposite of writer’s block?

more on teaching writing in a later post

Writing practices

erik — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:45:30 +0000

I have, over the past years, had trouble finding time to write and keeping up momentum, especially at the beginning of the semester, but I have found some practices that work for me. Here are examples of how some successful authors write, followed by some of my suggestions:

Jonathan Franzen removed the wireless card from his laptop and glued a plug into the ethernet jack.
Paul Auster has an office with only a typewriter and a phone, to which only a few people have the number. No radio, no TV. And yes, a typewriter. (Diane Rehm show. Go to about 21:00 for initial description and 38:00 for more fascinating details about how he handwrites everything, and then types it out. Diane’s exclamation of “Paul! Why?” at 39:30 is one of my favorite Diane Rehm moments).
Cory Doctorow writes 20 minutes each day, and publishes about a novel a year.
Graham Harman uses “lucky places,” but advises to do what’s right for you. (Good followup here as well)

Here is what I’ve learned over the years, most of which agrees with some or all of the above advice:

Don’t wait for inspiration. Writing every day is key. Waiting for inspiration simply does not work — you will always find something else to do, put off writing until later, and forget the inspiration, if it ever even comes.

Eliminate distractions. We have all sat down to write, fired up our twitter client, or checked facebook or RSS readers “just for a minute,” only to end up hours later shopping online for shoes, browsing for information about lemurs, or reading online comics. Start the word processor first. If you can’t resist going online to “research” something (and you use Windows or Mac OSX), consider Fred Stutzman’s Freedom program, which turns off all networking for a preset time.

Make time. Finding time is difficult. I have simply begun to wake up at 5:30am, which gives me a few hours more than I normally have. Anyone who knows me knows that I do not like to wake up early, but once the day gets started, I find it incredibly difficult to sit down and write. At 5:30, all is quiet, the phone will not ring, and I can’t find anyone to chat with online.

Find a place to write. We can’t all have a separate apartment like Paul Auster, but a quiet place to write is nice. That said, I wrote much of my dissertation in the library, but also at home and in coffeeshops, where I do most of my editing. (Alex Halavais warns against libraries as distraction-heavy (about halfway down the post), a position with which I partially agree). Right now for me, home is a good place to write in the morning, and elsewhere in the afternoon.

What practices do you observe to keep writing?

Free writing

erik — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:03:57 +0000

This somewhat disjointed reflection on writing is sparked by a discussion at fimoculous whether one should write for free. The question revolves mainly around journalism, but extends to other media forms as well. This leads us to Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which I have not read but which Malcolm Gladwell reviews and critiques for the New Yorker. The idea behind Free is that, in the case of writing, there is an abundance, not a scarcity, of information, and with music it is difficult to impossible to contain “piracy,” so in both cases a new approach becomes necessary – that of giving stuff away and making money off of the ancillary markets it creates. This means a lot of free labor up front with the hope that proper marketing or attention will recoup the time/work spent. Some more established musicians (David Bowie, NIN, Radiohead) are doing just that: giving the music away for free and making money on touring and merch. [Since I started composing this post, Chris Brogan and Mark Cuban have also weighed in on this issue, talking about brand identity, and using free writing to build recognition (although, frankly, I don't get Cuban's argument about content being free but not freely-distributed).]

None of this seems particularly new to me, as we have been doing something similar in academia all along (although I suppose the stakes are different in many ways). I write for free here in my blog and in other spaces, and, ultimately, most academic writing is done for little or no compensation. Academic books rarely make much money for the authors. The idea in academia, I think, is that one will gain social or cultural capital with which to garner speaking gigs, teaching posts, promotions,tenure, lectureships, grants and fellowships and the like. In this way, academic writing straddles the line between journalism, where one writes for pay, and the music/media industry where people try to get recognized in order to captialize on that recognition, to get discovered in some sense, albeit in a much smaller system.

Mark Bousquet has a good take on free labor in academia, and the trick of getting people to do more because the love their jobs. After all the salary comparisons in the first half of the article, he links the current jounralism crisis to long-standing prevailing practices in academia, including having students do a significant portion of the work, which then endangers their own survival after graduation. He looks at current academic trends of free and cheap labor not as a special casejust because we “love” our jobs, but as a typical of a growing tendency in other fields. Taken from this angle, it’s not free products that pose a problem, but the free labor that institutions extract and expect to run and profit.

(thanks to Melissa Gregg at Home Cooked Theory for link to and insightful discussion of Bousquet’s piece)

Getting started

erik — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:39:14 +0000

I find getting started to be the hardest thing about writing. On a larger scale, when beginning a project or chapter, sitting down, figuring it out, and starting to write is terribly difficult. On a more daily level, the same holds true. I know what I should write today, and have the research done. I get up extra early with most of the day in front of me. And I do something else. An hour goes by and I still haven’t started. Most of the time I simply get distracted and next thing I know it’s lunch time. One thing I have found about the dissertation process is that continuity is important. It is important to read, research, and, most importantly, write every day in order to keep momentum going. Otherwise, you lose the thread of the project and have to reacquaint yourself with it, wasting valuable time. But getting started remains difficult.

I do the right things. I have given up excessive teaching requirements. I have a quiet space dedicated to writing. I get up early. But I take a long time to get started, and then I lose it completely. Here are some of the things I have found get in my way, and what I know I should do about them, but often fail to do.

Social networking. The first thing I often do in the morning is check twitter, then facebook or RSS feeds, all of which lead to endless clicking and commenting and socializing. Solution: either save it for later, or put a firm deadline on it. Use these things as a reward.
Blog reading. I might argue that reading blogs in RSS is more important than the others to my work because of the number of blogs I read that relate to my research, but I should schedule that for a certain time after morning writing.
Cleaning or tweaking my workspace. When I sit down to write, nothing seems more important than making more coffee, doing dishes, or rearranging the desk. I need to resist this urge, or schedule 20 minutes in the afternoon for such things.
Teaching /other work stuff. Sometimes you simply have to grade, or respond to student emails or prep for class. I usually save this stuff for late afternoon, after I am burned out on other things. I also try to postpone responding to emails until a set time, and do them all at once, instead of as they come in.
Worrying about the rest of the day. Sometimes I obsessively schedule and reschedule the rest of my day, including social obligations, tutoring and other work. Again, this needs to be compartmentalized.
Napping. I’ve been really good about this lately, and there’s nothing wrong with a quick 20 minute nap. Problem is, I’ll bring a book with me and read for awhile (again, tricking myself into thinking I’m working by reading for pleasure), and the 20 min nap is really an hour.

Most of these are related, and I know other people share these and have others to add. The solution, it seems, is to come up with a strict schedule and keep to it, and turn off the Wifi while working. My laptop even has a little button for that, as shown at the top of the post.

Does anyone have any other ideas or just want to complain? I suspect a lot of people have this problem no matter what they do or what they are working on. What about those of you who don’t, who are always successfully juggling several projects? How do you do it?

Reseach tools

erik — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:31:55 +0000

Steven Johnson has a good essay on Boinboing detailing how he goes about writing a book, which is basically: reasearch like crazy, then sit down and write. One of the tools he mentions is Devonthink, which I’ve never used, and can’t because I don’t own a Mac.In the comments, someone posted a link to Windows alternatives, which is nice, but, like many people, I find myself working on different computers in different locations. I work mainly in Linux, but sometimes I boot into Windows on my laptop. I also occasionally have to use someone else’s computer. My research materials are terribly disorganized, residing in a folder in a file cabinet, a pile on the desk, a stack of books, snippets of text files scattered throughout my file system.So, the question is: is there a good research/writing tool that is platform independent, or, better, web-based?

I think Zotero has some promise. I used it a bit on my desktop, but didn’t delve too deeply. Some have suggested Evernote or Google Notebook. I like Evernote because it captures everything and you can use tags. I have begun uploading pdfs of articles I am using, but I could probably use it more extenisvely. Delicious might be another way to go. The one thing everyone talks about re Devonthink is a search function that finds connections, which the tools I’ve mentioned don’t have (I don’t think). Is there a way to get around this? Does anyone know any other tools, or ways in which I can use the tools I have?

Writing and Blogging

erik — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:49:43 +0000

I’ve been worrying that blogging has hurt my academic writing, and twitter has hurt my blogging. All my thoughts come, I’ve been afraid, in tiny 140 character chunks, instead of complex, well-articulated arguments. But that’s not true. It is more or less a matter of habit and attention, among other things.

This brings to mind some posts I’ve read and bookmarked over the last several months, as I struggle to maintain equilibrium. One consideration is that blogging is, in some respects, bundled together with other internet activities: facebook, twitter, RSS feeds, etc. I have found a useful way of looking at these is through Fred Stutzman’s idea of Information Budgeting. We basically have only a certain amount of attention to give, and it is important to budget our exposure to information, which for me means tweaking whose tweets get sent to my phone, how often I check twitter and facebook, and how I organize my RSS feeds. I have a lot of work to do there. Cory Doctorow has some interesting advice on writing, the most useful of which is to turn off realtime communications such as instant messaging and RSS alerts when you work. His suggestions of short, regular work schedule seems right on, but I wonder how it works for academics. The key, I think, is regular — the short is negotiable. He also recommends “killing your word processor,” which sounds ok, but I don’t know if simpler word processors handle footnoting well. Lastly but not leastly, the always wittily contrarian R. Scott Nokes muses about how NOT blogging is hurting his career.

The trick for me with this blog is to stay closer to my research interests, instead of treating it like twitter, basically musing and pointing (although that is also okay, so long as it’s not all I am doing). If I commit to updating more regularly, and on topics I am currently working on, I suspect both my dissertation and blog writing will improve.

WGA Strike

erik — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:33:11 +0000

So the much anticipated Writers Guild of America strike has started. I don’t have much to say about it right now, but there is a twitter feed that will keep you abreast of developments. That’s where I found this USA Today article featuring Tina Fey and Sth Meyers on a picket line.

Shockingly Lucid

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 23:00:35 +0000

In a review of Mark C. Taylor’s book Confidence Games, William Blaze writes:

Taylor is shockingly lucid for an academic writer, and clearly both and intelligent reader and gifted storyteller. All of which almost hides the severe lack of depth behind the vast facade constructed in Confidence Games.

I haven’t read the book, but I trust the characterization. It is the phrase “shockingly lucid for an academic writer” that gets me, because I sense the truth in it, that I too have been frustrated by the obtuse writing of academia, even as I particpate in it. On the other hand, the rest of this quote speaks to a counter-argument, that depth is difficult if not impossible when one writes lucidly. At the end of the review, Blaze further delineates the divide between academic and lucid by writing: “Take it out of an academic context and place it into the world of popular non fiction and it stands up quite nicely”. It bothers me that acadmic writing and popular non fiction have to be mutually exclusive. I am not picking on Blaze here, as I sense he’s right. Does popular non fiction get you hired? Tenure? Everyone sees the divide, too. Non-academics scoff at the dense prose of academia, and there seems to be an implicit rule in the academy as to which authors are quotable in a paper, which types of ideas are acceptable to cite in a publication, etc.

I know that dense prose does not guarantee depth, but does lucid writing always compromise it? Is it possible for clear, accessible writing to also stand up to academic scrutiny? Must it always be shocking when an academic is lucid?