prying open tautologies

My sister-in-law once had a cat named Harry. Harry was a prize Persian, belonging to her landlady, a cat breeder. Harry had an impeccable pedigree—one of those cats with a name like a latter day member of the house of Windsor. He was owlish and majestic, with unnerving yellow eyes and intimidating tufts of fur. His conduct, however, was neurotic in the extreme. Harry was supposed to be a stud but was unable to complete the act, hiding under the bed whenever he was put in the room with one of the female cats. The end of a noble line. I joked that we should have called him J. Alfred Purfrock.

The subject of today’s post is, believe it or not, writing. I am in the process of finishing my academic book on Kierkegaard, and so I have been doing a lot of it lately. Writers love to give writing advice, and within academia there is an entire industry of consultants who attempt to trick and cajole harried teachers into writing more. Maybe my experience here will not be totally irrelevant.

I had a period of three years, between 2013 and 2016, in which I did not write a single original word that made it to press. (I revised papers from grad school to maintain my meagre professional standing). Like Harry the cat, a promising start did not augur meaningful production.

When I look back on the period, it’s very easy to find ways to excuse myself. I was figuring out how to be a parent and teach full time, and was often so exhausted that when I had time to write, I simply wasted it. It’s always interesting to hear about what people with computer jobs do to procrastinate. You don’t hear about it so much because I think we (rightfully) feel ashamed because we know that some people have to work very hard, and don’t have the privilege of getting to waste time. I, for instance, spent more time than I’d care to admit reading wikis about the lore of anime I would never watch and video games I would never play.

I was also extraordinarily vain and had convinced myself that if I produced work of staggering and undeniable incandescence after all that time, I could deceive myself and the world into thinking I had been thoughtful and thorough instead of lazy and ineffectual. Productivity was recast, in my imagination, as a vice. I imagined that, like the Bourdeaux grape, I would be perceived as leaving aside my “dumb phase,” exploding into something mature and complex after a period of distillation.

I think a lot of writers of every sort go through something like this. The longer it goes on, the harder it becomes to produce, especially if you start to believe your own louche oenological delusions. The truth is I was a very bad writer. I had atrocious work habits—including a debilitating social media addiction—but I was also technically bad. I wrote long compound-complex sentences. I would labour over transitions that I would then find it impossible to alter, even if I changed my mind about the point I wanted to make. I did so much pre-writing that I would convince myself that it was not a big deal to “write up” my notes, which, of course, was not true.

You can be a bad writer but still a productive one. I was unproductive and I was bad. But in my case I think that I was unproductive in part because I knew I was bad, and I was ashamed of not being better.

Things got better after I read Helen Sword’s Air and Light and Time and Space and realized that I was totally missing the “social” element of writing that had been built into my formal education: what do you do when you no longer have a professor with clear expectations to write for? The classroom imposes a clear and obvious writerly persona if you want to get good grades.

When I scrutinized the work I admired, I realized it had always been presented multiple times as conference papers and talks, and these writers had long lists of acknowledgments. The work that I saw was the end of a process, not something that was already perfect and sent to colleagues who said: “wow, you’re so smart!” before returning the document without additional commentary. Despite the anecdote I used to open this piece, I’m a dog (read: sociable) not a cat (although I am a cat person—I am, personality-wise, a dog who loves cats), so conceiving of writing as another way to have conversations with friends was the necessary first step in writing again.

Eventually I talked to my pal

BDM

about writing a piece for The Hedgehog Review. I made a pitch, it was accepted, and then I realized that I had to produce something. The embarrassment of failure, and owing something to a friend were both powerful inducements for productivity.

I soon discovered that writing for an educated non-scholarly audience felt a lot more like teaching, something I did all the time. So I started trying to write more like I spoke. And being new at writing in this context allowed me, for whatever reason, to set aside my vanity and adopt something like a growth mindset. Somehow I was able to admit the truth to myself: I was new at this and had much to learn. So I committed to writing drafts and sharing them. I was edited, got feedback, practiced more, and improved. The habits I picked up as an essayist then helped me improve my scholarly writing because I realized I could just write that way—this way—in that context, too. Now I know the first crack I take at something will rarely be good, but is the necessary condition of getting to good. But those first cracks are also improving, which helps me write more, which helps me improve.

I seem to have gotten around to the tautology that writers write. But they do. And prying open tautologies just a little bit is not a terrible way to think about writing.