first efforts

Writing reminders

On a tip from E., I recently picked up a copy of William Germano's From Dissertation to Book. While it was published about eight years too late for me, I figured it might offer me some tips to pass along to our local pack of dissertators, many of whom are already thinking about life beyond the diss. Germano does a great job of highlighting the differences between dissertations and scholarly books, explaining how editors work, and encouraging the new Ph.D. to revise thoughtfully but quickly. He also offers up some useful things about writing itself, including an especially humorous and lovely indictment of the evils of passive voice.

Turns out Germano offered me some helpful suggestions as well. Now that I've finally moved beyond a couple of deadlines that loomed for way too long (hence the obsessive posts about writing earlier this week), I'm back in more generative reading/writing mode. I need to draft the introduction to the book, but I have been anxious about it and putting it off. I'm not really sure why. But Germano's remarks about how an introduction should make clear its audience and establish the "throughline" or "plot" of the book resonated. I think I'm ready to tackle it now.

365 days, 256 posts

First Efforts began inauspiciously a year ago today, with this home owner's lament.

One year, 256 posts. It has not escaped my notice that, with that kind of output, I could probably have spent those words more wisely by writing another book.

But books are *so* old school.

A writer's haiku

Ouch! My tailbone hurts.

I sit. I write. It's all bad.

Why won't the words come?

Scattered worries

These days when I write I simply cannot focus and it's driving me crazy. Because I'm on sabbatical, I can't blame the constant interruptions of colleagues, students, or bureaucracy. I can't blame e-mail or web-surfing tendencies or YouTube (or blogging) either. Although these things can be time-sucks I know they aren't the real problem. The real problem is that when I sit down to do any individual task I can't stop thinking about everything else I have to do. Let me be clear: I don't mean that I'm so overwhelmed by the enormity of the work that I get paralyzed. To the contrary, I'm never paralyzed; I'm writing and reading and working all the time. But while I'm working on any one thing it's very, very hard for me to be fully present with the task at hand. I'm thinking instead about the whole list of obligations scattered across my desk and my brain: seminar readings to complete, various and sundry stuff to write or revise for conferences or publication, research and reading to do for my book project, writing/editing/e-mailing with co-editors on the anthology we're working on, letters of recommendation to write, dissertation chapters to read, meetings I need to set up, a grant proposal to draft, and on and on.

Looking for some inspiration, the other day I listened to a podcast on productivity from the folks at 43 Folders (a great site for anyone worried about life hacks; the guide to handling e-mail is gold). The Productivity Guru's observations on the podcast essentially confirmed my own sense of what is blocking my productivity. Then he uttered these magic words: "Don't worry about what you're not doing right now."

Simple and perhaps vague, but I like it. A little wake-up call. A gentle zen slap upside the head.

IPG

IPG is my writerly shorthand for "insert parenthetical graveyard." I use it when I'm writing the first draft of that sentence in an essay. You know which one I mean:

"Since the dawn of time, scholars have debated the function/meaning/force/truth/value of X" (IPG).

Then boom, I move on, not stopping to get bogged down in the particulars. Drop an IPG and come back later with the shovel (or backhoe) to dig the grave, dump the bodies, fill in the blanks. Maybe even leave some flowers.

I try not to use it this way, but sometimes the parenthetical graveyard amounts to exclusion by inclusion. Or damning with faint praise. Like the friend who says, "Well, he isn't my type, but I can see why you like him."

Paraphrase trouble

A poorly worded, not-so-hypothetical question: If you are working with a concept and have a hard time paraphrasing its definition so you quote it instead, and then you look at other sources and they also quote the concept instead of paraphrasing, does that mean: (a) all of you are stupid; (b) all of you are lazy; or (c) the originator of the concept probably had no idea what it means either?

How's yer moral muscle?

Good news for the slightly-less-than-exceedingly-brilliant among us: It turns out that self-discipline, not talent, determines our successes in life. Psychologists have discovered that the ability to delay gratification is a much better predictor of children's success in school than IQ. Okay, okay, I know, "studies show," all of that, we should be skeptical. But hang with me for a minute.

Cordelia Fine reports in The Australian that self-discipline, willpower, or what some call our "moral muscle"

powers all of the difficult and taxing mental tasks that you set yourself. It is the moral muscle that is flexing and straining as you keep attention focused on a dry academic article, bite back an angry retort to your boss, or decline a helping of your favourite dessert. And herein lies the problem: these acts of restraint all drain the same pool of mental reserves.

Yep, "studies show" that our moral muscle can get pooped out:

[I]f you draw on your reserves to achieve one unappealing goal - going for a jog, say - your moral muscle will be ineffective when you then call on it to help you switch off the television and start essay-writing.

...If you are about to embark on a big project you court disaster if at the same time your life is cluttered and demanding, or you also commit to draining attempts at self-enhancement. The would-be novelist whose taxing day job exhausts her moral muscle will find it harder to apply the seat of her trousers to the seat of her chair. The dieting philosopher will struggle to keep his attention on a tricky passage of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Fine suggests the best solution is to choose one thing to be really self-disciplined about and let most other things slide. For Sabbatical Girl I guess this means I should not plan to run a marathon, complete a scholarly book, finish writing a mystery story, stay off caffeine, and eat freakishly healthy meals all at the same time. Nice to have permission to cut myself some slack, but the article never tells me what to do with all the guilt and deep feelings of unworthiness that will surely result from lowering my expectations for myself. And don't tell me just to "let it go." I'm Scandinavian. That ain't an option.

Starting over

Coming home after vacation always requires a certain amount of starting over, especially with writing. I was plugging along on things before I left town but now it will take me a while to get back into the groove. I'm a big fan of the "park on the downhill" metaphor -- at the end of each writing session, leave things in such a way that you can easily get rolling again. But after 12 days that's hard to do; I think my emergency brake is stuck.

So my strategy for this morning seems to involve too casually re-reading what I was working on, blogging a little, drinking lots of black tea with cream, and listening to the new Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris album, "All the Roadrunning," which is so good that I don't even mind that I'm not writing.

BAM!

There is a giant hole where my campus parking lot used to be. The business school is building its "instructional facility" on the corner of Gregory and 6th and they tore up Lot E-12 to do it. (Has the business school not been in the business of instruction until now?)

I now park in a lot adjacent to the giant hole. Walking to my car last night, I watched intently while an excavator did its thing. Up would go the arm slowly, and then down would come the flat end of the shovel, BAM! Up slowly, down hard with a sharp metal BAM! Raise, lower, BAM, repeat. Only when enough dirt was loosened would the excavator actually get down to excavating; until then it had to be all BAM, all the time.

All I could think was, God, isn't that the perfect metaphor for my writing process. Right now I'm in the early stages of work on the talk I'll be giving at the Public Address conference in October. I need to have a good draft of it to my respondent by mid-August and the summer's already whizzing by. Much of my work up to this point has been of the BAM variety: take an idea and pound away at it until something loosens and gives way. During this morning's writing session I think I finally got past the BAM and into some real digging. Which makes this a good day.

Talk pretty to me

This week's Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that a professor of classics at Mississippi State asked his students to list words that they find the "most beautiful" or "ugliest." Here are excerpts from their lists:

Beautiful words: love, serendipity, lovely, luminous, melody, beautiful, lavender, lily, eloquent, euphoric, glorious, gorgeous, grace, happy, harmony, heaven, onomatopoeia, passion

Ugly words: pus, vomit, fungus, death, mucus, puke, ugly, cacophony, hate, mullet, phlegm, pimple

And here are a few of my choices:

Beautiful words: satisfied, boreal, feline, pleasure, giggle, sabbatical

Ugly words: hack, point, submarine, precious, entomb