Category Archives: Writing

Good news — I got word that an article of mine will be published next year. This is an article I sent to another journal a year or two ago, which got rejected because they weren’t terribly impressed with the argument, and which I then sent out to another journal immediately without changing a single word. This journal asked me to revise and resubmit it, and, interestingly, the reader’s report didn’t say a word about the argument, but instead asked me to work on describing the argument more fully in the introduction and then revising the prose, cleaning up sentences and wording and such. I just needed to find the right place, apparently. I got word today that they’re accepting this revision, and the report included these marvelous sentences: “I think the author has done an admirable job of revising this essay,” and “I would like to congratulate the author for working so hard to revise the essay to bring it to its full potential.” Woo-hoo!

Actually, I should change the post title to “Sometimes revision pays off,” as I’m glad I didn’t revise the essay after the first journal rejected it but happy I revised it for the second journal.

Oh, if you’re interested, the article is on Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey.

I most likely will never write a novel or even a short story, but this post on Kate’s Book Blog tempts me just the tiniest bit to give it a try — not because I think I can write a good novel or story, but because it makes me realize just how much I’d learn from the attempt. If I did it (which I almost certainly won’t — I’m just playing with ideas here), I wouldn’t show it to anybody, but would do it solely for my own educational purposes. Because Kate’s post makes me realize how little I pay attention to the technical details of what I read. I’m aware of some things like plot structure, point of view, creating scenes, showing vs. telling, etc., but I don’t really get into the nitty-gritty of it. If I tried creating my own scenes, though, or if I had to worry about how to get characters from one place to another or had to choose what details to include and what ones not or if I had to struggle to get the point of view right, I’d be seeing the matter in another way entirely. I’m a believer in the value of learning by doing; don’t you think this would be a fabulous learning experience?

Kate is writing about Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, which I haven’t been interested in up until now, because I’m not that kind of a writer, but now I’m intrigued. Perhaps I’d learn a lot about reading even if I’m not exactly Prose’s intended audience, although Prose’s subtitle, “A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write them,” leaves open the issue of audience, implying that the two groups of people mentioned might not necessarily overlap completely.

The Hobgoblin is writing a novel, of course, and I’ve got a good friend who’s a novelist, and I read other bloggers who write fiction, and I’m interested in the insights they have into the craft of fiction and I find myself wanting those insights too.

And one more point about writing, unrelated to the above: I’ve been thinking about Litlove’s post on the way we compare ourselves to others and how easy it is to get jealous of what other writers can do. I don’t get jealous of fiction writers or poets, as I don’t write in those genres, and although I write academic criticism now and then, I don’t get jealous of other people’s ability to write that sort of thing, maybe because I don’t feel like that kind of writing is all that important to me, but I sometimes get jealous of what other bloggers can do. When I began blogging and spending a significant amount of time reading other people’s blogs, I’d get overwhelmed sometimes because I found so much good writing of the type I could never do myself. I really don’t understand those who think there’s no good writing on blogs, because if you look around just a little bit, you’ll find tons of it.

Blogging has been interesting for me because I’ve found I care about my writing in a way I haven’t before. I’ve had moments of feeling so inadequate as a writer that I’ve thought to myself, either you stop writing entirely to get rid of the bad feelings or you accept that you will never be able to do what those other people do and instead begin to enjoy their ability. And it’s possible, at least in moments, to accept that some people are just outrageously talented and to appreciate that rather than get jealous. As I wrote in a comment over at Litlove’s, surrounding oneself with fabulously talented people makes it easier to get to the point of no longer wanting to compete because the effort is just too exhausting. And it’s probably at that point that a person can do their best work.

Courtney has this great post on running and writing where she compares the two and concludes that they are more alike than she thought. She says, “Like writing the novel, running is all about showing up, going further than you think you could, under circumstances you previously never would have considered.” Now that strikes me as absolutely true. I don’t have experience writing a novel, but I do have experience writing a dissertation, and I learned from it that there’s nothing more important than just showing up every day. Or even just showing up most days.

I got through the dissertation one hour at a time. I realized fairly early on that I’m terrible at working long hours on an intellectual task as difficult as scholarly writing, and so I didn’t ask myself to work long hours. I just asked myself to work for one hour, or sometimes even for a half an hour. That worked. Even a pace as slow as 5-7 hours a week will get you a dissertation eventually, and the novelists will probably tell you it will get you a novel too. Now I wasn’t a stellar dissertation-writer, and I took longer to graduate than I should have (I never had to ask for an extension, but that still left me with years and years of time available), but I finished.

I expected that I would have to work long hours at the end; I have the impression that most dissertation-writers have to go through a crazy period where they are frantically making revisions and finishing up that last chapter and furiously hunting down references, but it wasn’t like that for me. I kept working an hour a day, a page or two a day, and I kept doing it and doing it until I reached a point where I didn’t have any more revisions to do and then I stopped. At that point my dissertation advisor and I set a defense date, and then I waited a month to give people time to read things, I defended, and that was that. I did have to add on a short conclusion, something like 8 pages, before I turned in the final copy, but that wasn’t difficult. It was rather anti-climactic, really. I was writing an hour a day and then I wasn’t. Simple as that.

Actually, what happened is that my hour of dissertation work a day became my hour of blogging a day.

As I was writing I kept cycling and backpacking metaphors in my head. Showing up at my computer for my hour of writing was like taking a ride. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but take enough rides, and at the end of the year, you’ll have ridden something extraordinary like thousands of miles. Or it’s like a day of backpacking. One day’s walk doesn’t get you very far. But walk every day, and you can walk the entire Appalachian Trail, from George to Maine, and you’ll finish in a matter of months. You’re not doing anything extraordinary each day; if you walk 10 miles a day, you can finish the Appalachian Trail in about 7 months. Healthy, able-bodied people can walk 10 miles a day without working too, too hard, especially once you’ve given yourself time to get used to it. Walk at a meager 2-mile-an-hour pace, and it’ll take you 5 hours. Do that every day, and you’ll have walked across a continent.

Similarly, write a page a day, and you’ll have something 365 pages long at the end of a year. And how long does it take to write a page?

Well, okay, sometimes it takes a while to get to the point where you can write a page; certainly I had to do an awful lot of reading before I was ready to write my pages, but even so, when it comes to dissertations if you do an hour of preparation a day, you’ll be ready before you know it. Or if, in writing your novel, you decide you need to discard half your pages, you’re still left with 180 at the end of the year.

So for me, writing is an endurance sport. How about other writers – what metaphors do you use?

For some reason, I have a block against writing narrative. I was reminded of this when Litlove wrote in a comment on her blog something about being able to write anecdotes and reminiscences but not “proper storytelling.” I won’t speak for what Litlove can and can’t do (and everyone who reads her blog knows not to underestimate her!), but that rang true to me — I feel that while I might manage an anecdote, a short story or a novel I could never do.

I’m not sure why this is. I remember having to write stories in high school and not succeeding all that well. I clearly remember one teacher wanting to know why I had some extraneous detail in a story of mine — although I don’t remember the story itself. I remember a lot of anxiety about her comment. As a junior in high school, I worked on another story, this time turning to something science fiction-like, as I’d been reading in the genre recently, and it got some rather odd reactions from classmates. I have no idea what the final thing I turned in was. And that’s it for my story-writing career. I had to write a few poems in my senior year of high school (and read them out loud in front of the class!), and I remember my teacher approving of what I wrote, but somehow I knew it wasn’t that good. I was good at following meter, but not particularly imaginative.

So I’m not sure if it was a lack of early practice and encouragement that turned me off story writing, or if I’m just genuinely not good at it. These days, I find that if I try to think of a story idea, my mind is blank. If I wanted to get serious about it, I could probably try some freewriting or other idea-getting technique and maybe come up with something, but the thought fills me with such anxiety that, since no one is making me write fiction, I won’t try it. And I don’t mean to imply that I think this is a failing of mine; I’m just interested in why I’m this way.

I think early on I got this idea in my head that I’m not creative. To some extent I still believe that, but I’m more inclined to think that it’s not that I’m not creative, but that I don’t show my creativity in traditional ways. And I’m interested in trying to get past whatever block I have when it comes to creativity and to let the creativity I do have out a little bit. Having a blog is a great way to do that, I think.

If I were ever to write a novel, or if, in some bizarre hypothetical situation where I’m forced to write one, or I’d get a million dollars if only I’d write one, or some such scenario, I would have to write something like what Nicholson Baker writes. By that I mean it wouldn’t be traditional narrative. It would have to be some mix of story and essay, like Baker’s story of the man riding up the escalator, which is the entire novel’s plot, with the rest of it made up of the narrator’s meditations. Something about the arc of a story eludes me, and this is where Baker is so brilliant — he replaces the metaphorical story line with the literal line of the escalator climbing from one floor to another, freeing up the novel to wander elsewhere.

I did have more success at personal essay writing; I took an advanced writing class in college where we worked on an essay over the course of half a semester, and I remember enjoying the process and getting really enthusiastic reactions from my teacher and classmates. I wonder if I’m drawn to this genre because that’s the way my brain works, drawn to an essayistic kind of logic or vision, or because with the essay I don’t have bad memories of anxiety and failure. Maybe the freedom of the genre frees up my imagination in a way traditional fiction doesn’t.

I got a lot of interesting comments on my post yesterday about how we define the term “writer” and whether we consider ourselves writers, which tells me that I’m not the only one interested in the problem. A lot of people (including me) said something along the lines of, “well, a writer is anyone who writes and cares about the quality of the writing, but even though I do those things, I still don’t call myself a writer.”

Two of the comments helped explain this phenomenon. Kate says, “we tend to think of being a writer as something more exalted than writing when in fact it’s the reverse.” I think this is absolutely true. I have an image of “the writer” as someone much smarter, much more creative, much more driven, and much more talented than I am, and so I will never live up to those standards and be a writer. And yet this is the wrong way to think about the situation; Kate says, “It’s the writing that’s important, not the standing back and taking credit for it. ‘Being a writer’ without the activity of writing is just a pose.”

Victoria explains the skittishness of many when it comes to calling themselves writers by asking, “Perhaps it’s because we want to distinguish ourselves from the authors whose books we read and who we come to idolise/idealise? For example, even if, when I pushed, I admitted that I ‘wrote’ I wouldn’t feel like I *wrote* in the same way that Ishiguro, McEwan and Rushdie do.” This gets to the point a lot of other people made, which is that everyone writes in one way or another, even if it’s just email or a grocery list, so there is a huge range of writing activity that goes on, and calling ourselves “writers” rather than “people who write” places us a little too close to the “writing genius” end of the spectrum that great novelists or poets occupy. Who wants to do that? I think we do, as Victoria says, want to keep some distance between ourselves and the writers we admire; we enjoy idolizing writers from afar and we maintain that hero worship by maintaining the distance. And we also preserve ourselves from accusations of pride and an unrealistically high self-image by maintaining that distance. A number of people said that even though they do get published, they still don’t call themselves writers. The label “writer” is, it seems, most comfortably bestowed upon someone else, not upon oneself.

I like, also, what Kate says about how “we give fiction the exalted place at the top of [the writing] hierarchy even though it is one of the least lucrative types of writing. Or poetry, which is less lucrative still. I’m not sure why that is — perhaps some sort of mystique around the typic of creativity that is involved in these forms.” I think we do privilege forms of creativity used in fiction or poetry and overlook the creativity involved in writing nonfiction and in other less lauded forms of writing such as blog posts. Students in my writing classes tell me sometimes that they hope to do “creative writing” in my class, and I tell them that the class isn’t “creative writing” in the sense of poetry or fiction, but that they can bring creativity to whatever they write, including academic essays. It’s easy to forget that most forms of writing (excluding things like grocery lists) require creativity. I have a strange block against writing poetry or fiction — I couldn’t do it if my life depended on it, I’m pretty sure — but I like nonfictional forms of writing because they allow me to draw on my creativity in a way that feels natural.

Danielle commented on writing in a chatty, informal way, and says that because of this she doesn’t feel she can call herself a writer. And yet it takes talent and creativity to write in a chatty, informal way, and not everyone can do it well. This makes me wonder about the role of hard work in writing. Just because someone can dash off a few paragraphs quickly doesn’t mean that person isn’t a writer, right? Some people we have no trouble calling writers claim that they write quickly and don’t revise (examples are eluding me now … but I know they exist).

Finally, Victoria says she’s a “reader” before a “writer.” Yes, I’d probably say the same thing about myself, but … aren’t the two linked? Don’t we, when we write about books, do our reading as we write? Don’t we, when we think critically about our books, do our writing as we read? That’s the fun of being a lit blogger — it’s a way of connecting the reading and writing we do more closely and deliberately.

So Danielle from A Work in Progress wrote this comment yesterday that intrigued me:

I have always been afraid to keep a diary. Either the contents would be so boring that anyone reading it would be bored to tears, or so private that I would hate for anyone to read it. Do you think diarists really do keep these journals only “for their own eyes”? Or do you think a part of them writes for some later unknown reader? And does that affect how they write and the contents?

I have tried a lot of times to keep a private journal. I’d succeed for a while, and then would write less and less and finally stop entirely. I always blamed my laziness for this. I was partly right, I suppose. Now that I think about it, I’m lazy about journal writing in the same way I’m lazy about cycling, which is to say, not lazy at all if I have the right motivation. If my husband didn’t ride, I probably wouldn’t either. I can consider this a failing, or I can just realize that riding my bike as much as I do is hard, and be thankful my husband rides too. And about the journal – I wonder if I didn’t keep it up because I had to do it by myself, and if, now that I’ve turned to blogging, I’m more likely to keep up the blogging because I have you all around to motive me. I admire people who can write journals regularly and not succumb to my kind of laziness, but I’m not like that.

But back to Danielle’s comment – I wonder if part of my problem with writing a journal came from an uncertainty about audience. Do diarists write for themselves alone? It seems to me that all diarists must have in the backs of their minds at least the possibility that people will read them, sneaking peaks while they are alive or reading them in some slightly more legitimate way after they are dead. I always knew – not that I’d become famous and people would read my diary wanting to understand the “real me” better – but that someone I knew might read the thing. That made any serious personal revelations difficult. If I tried to forget that and just write for myself, I would get self-conscious about it. It was me there, trying to put me on the page, with me as the reader, and that was just too much me around. Writing felt strained and awkward. And re-reading what I wrote was painful. I never found a way to be honest and never found a voice I was happy with, which is what I think I wanted from the journal. I’m curious what you real diarists out there make of this.

So I’m wondering if blogging might help me solve my audience problem. I mean, I’m not planning on writing anything all that personal (don’t worry!), so I won’t get that satisfaction out of the blog, but I will be able to write my thoughts on books and this and that and have an audience out there besides me. You all will help me legitimize my writing to myself. Isn’t this weird? One would think dealing with the issue of audience would be easier in a private journal than a public blog, right? I thought I would resolve what I thought about Danielle’s comment in this post, but I end up more uncertain. I guess what it comes down to is that for me, knowing there are readers out there does affect what and how I write, and I’m better off writing a blog where I can deal with that directly than a diary, where the audience issues overwhelm me.

Maybe this post is just a not-so-subtle way to guilt you into reading me?