Reflections On Writing Blog: Thoughts, Tips, and Suggestions

Obligation and motivation

Obligation and motivation have a complex relationship.  On one hand, obligation will lead us to do things that we don’t want to do. We don’t necessarily want to get up to go to work, but we do because of our obligation to do so, for example. On the other hand, obligation can turn pleasure into pain—the event we might have chosen from interest, suddenly becomes a burden when it is an obligation.

I think of this dynamic in the a writing practice and particularly in my relationship with writers with whom I work.  Writing is hard and requires a lot of effort. When it starts to feel like an obligation, that sense of burden can really start to weigh.

Psychologist Neil Fiore, who for many years worked (and perhaps still works) with graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that procrastination often arises from resentment—the sense that the research is an obligation keeping the writer from other things.

For people who have become writing-averse, especially for people who have started to struggle with writing anxiety after enjoying it earlier in their lives, this obligation-fueled distaste becomes a real problem.

Internal and external sources of obligation

Some obligations are external—the commands of parents, teachers, work superiors, etc.—are external obligations. A speed limit, for example, is an unwelcome external imposition on the impatient driver sure they can drive twice as fast and still be safe.  These external obligations are typically unpleasant and source of resentment.

Some obligations are internal. If, for example, I feel much better when I consistently practice yoga, I feel an internal obligation—it is only my own desire for long-term well being that I put up with the short-term discomfort of a yoga practice. These internal obligations may have a touch of unpleasantness, but they do not generate the same resentment because of their fully optional nature: I am not trapped by them in the same way that I am trapped by an external obligation.

Some obligations have a mixed provenance that can make them emotionally complex. For me, personal correspondence often falls into this category. There is an emotional residue from my childhood when I hated to write and was forced by my parents to write thank you notes—the unpleasant external obligation.  But there is also the more mature internal obligation stemming from gratitude that is only unpleasant in the sense that I will feel better for thanking people to whom I am sincerely grateful.

Discipline vs. obligation

There is a gap between discipline and obligation, especially between an external obligation and a personally chosen discipline.  Choice is a key factor—the emotional state related to the external obligation compared to the internal personal choice is huge—when one has made a choice, it’s much easier to feel enthusiastic about it.

To be sure, we can feel trapped by our choices.  We may choose a job or relationship and later find that we need to leave that job or relationship.  That can be true of a discipline, too.  A person who enjoyed eating meat might choose to become a vegetarian for personal convictions, maintain that discipline despite temptation, and then give up their decision a decade or more later.

We want to engage with writing and our work as a discipline, not an obligation. If our writing and work are both a discipline and an obligation, we can choose a perspective on which to focus.

Discipline and obligation

If you are in academia, it is likely that you are motivated by things like curiosity/the desire to gain knowledge and/or social service (perhaps while also getting rich/famous, as, e.g., inventor of a new technology both serves society and can also get wealth/fame).

Being in academia, however, creates obligations. You have to meet the expectations/demands of the institution in which you work. You have to satisfy professors when you’re a student. When you’re staff or faculty, you have to satisfy hiring committees, grant funders, journal editors and reviewers, etc.

The obligations make it too easy to lose sight of the internal motivation for the discipline. Unfortunately, this can really poison the experience of work in much the same way that negative feedback can kill motivation to work on a project.

Can you choose to focus on the discipline instead of the obligation?

This is not to suggest that you fail to meet obligations or ignore them, but, to the extent that they are overlapping, to focus on the aspects of them tht grow out of the personally chosen discipline rather than on the externally imposed obligations.

For example, there is pressure to publish on the scholar or researcher. On the one hand is the obligation of the publish-or-perish environment of academia. On the other hand is the desire to share valuable knowledge. The researcher who has evidence for evidence-based practices, or the scholar who identifies some important theory both do some sort of service to society by advancing the scholarly discourse. They can only do that by getting published through peer review.

Focusing on the potential help to society, or even just on selfish personal interest an curiosity, makes it easier to work than focusing on the demands of a peer reviewer or editor or professor or dean or whoever is making demands of you. If you see what you’re doing as helping people (or yourself), it’s easier to work as if you see your work as a response to someone else’s demands (especially if you feel their demands are unreasonable).

Choosing the positive focus

The world is complex. Things in the world are imperfect. The people we love appear to be imperfect at times. The activities we love or enjoy are sometimes disappointing or frustrating. So, too, is the work of writing or research or teaching, whichever it is of these that motivates us to work and write.

We have some choice in where to turn our attention. If your supervisor is yelling at you to meet a deadline, you can still remember that your work is going to serve society.

Try to avoid looking through the lens of obligation and remember, whenever possible, the lens of discipline.

Don’t let a sense of obligation poison an experience you would have otherwise enjoyed. That’s a challenge, but working on it can pay off in peace of mind.

It’s Never Too Early to Start Writing

The older I get and the more writers I work with, the more I become convinced that if you want to write, it’s never too early to start writing. 

In academia, which is most familiar to me, the main reasons people offer for why they aren’t writing is that they need to learn more—they need do more reading or they need to do more other research (e.g., gathering data; analyzing data; etc.). 

In the world of artistic writing, such excuses are perhaps less common, but still, looking at social media forums on writing, like on Reddit, there are people who ask “Have I read enough to start writing,” and people who assert “You will be a better writer if you read more, regardless of when you start writing,” which implies that you can improve as a writer just by reading, even if you don’t write. 

We can always learn more, so more reading/research always seems a viable, even necessary, next step. The greater the self-doubt, the more likely it is that a person will avoid writing in favor of trying to learn more before writing. But, because we can always learn more, there is no point at which it is too early to start writing: if we will never know “enough,” then waiting another day or week or month or year, and reading another article, or book, or entire library, will only leave us in much the same place: we won’t know everything; we won’t know enough.

But the writing we do on any given day does not inevitably commit us to some course of action.  I can start writing this morning, do some reading in the afternoon and decide to throw away the morning’s writing and start something new. Even if you throw away a draft, I assert that the time has been well spent and that you become a better writer by writing. For this reason, it’s never too early to start writing.

A Bad Letter Early Is Better than a Good Letter Late

It could be argued that a good idea must be incubated sufficiently before it can be presented in an effective form, and that writing too soon will damage or destroy the idea.  It’s possible that there is some abstract “idea” that the writer captures, and then somehow damages by writing poorly. This does not seem like a realistic explanation to me. Writers build and refine their ideas by writing. The idea is within the writer, and the writer must cultivate it by thinking about it and exploring it (including writing about it). 

Although we can stop writing too soon—we can be overconfident in our work and submit it to others while it is still a bad mess—starting to write early does not commit us to submitting our work to the scrutiny of others before it’s ready. It’s not as if a timer begins running when you first put words on the page. Starting writing early does not commit you to early submission. If there is an external deadline—a contract with a publisher, an assignment for school, even a Christmas card for your mom—that deadline doesn’t wait for you to start writing.  It might be weird to write your mom a Christmas card in August, but you don’t have to mail it until December and it will be fine (assuming it doesn’t contain news that you have otherwise communicated to her).

Starting writing enables early submission and reduces the chance of late submission.  There is absolutely no chance that you can submit your work before you have started writing. Starting early is unlikely to delay completion or submission.  It’s possible that a writer who gets too absorbed in writing neglects some work of importance.  But even such an error is unlikely to be missed during revision.

The sooner you start writing, the sooner you can finish a draft, and then the sooner you can start revising. If William Germano is correct in saying that revision is “the only writing that matters,” as the subtitle of his book On Revision claims, then we want to get to revision as soon as possible. The earlier we start writing, the sooner we can advance our project.

Generally, I think most writers would benefit from getting a bad manuscript out early in preference to delaying to work on the draft longer. Too many writers keep working on their manuscript, endlessly revising, when they should finish that work and move on to another. Academic writers are often tempted to get an extension on their work, but I discourage the practice.

As you write, you learn, and you make choices about which way to go

Writing alters our perception of the world.  We may start writing with a certain image of the world and of our message in mind, but this image is imperfectly related to what we can put on the page, and the attempt to put ideas on the page generally reveals perspectives we have not seen before.

The learning of the writer lies on multiple level. At the physical level, there is the basic development of neurophysiology that comes with working on any task or any set of ideas, including the neurophysiology for putting words on the pae (whether that be by typing, handwriting, or dictation).  At the purely intellectual level of writing, there are choices in many dimensions, including: 

  • word choice
  • sentence structure and style
  • narrative structure
  • authorial voice
  • which ideas to include and which to exclude

With each draft, if we reflect on our options for all these different dimensions, we learn abot our choices as a writer.

The learning can be a problem: as you learn, you can be tempted to change what you did in the past; you can be tempted by new projects.  We want to keep learning, of course; we don’t want to refuse learning because it maybe makes us dissatisfied with our earlier efforts. Despite the problems of learning, we want to learn, and writing enables more learning about writing than any other activity.

Note: Because of the “problem” of learning, I recommend trying to write quickly and to finish drafts quickly, but that’s a separate discussion.

Time Management

Our imaginations are essentially boundless. We can basically imagine anything, my mentor’s mentor, Horst Rittel argued: “there are no limits to the conceivable” (Universe p.129; p.172 “Reasoning of the Designer”). Knowledge, or at least the accumulated knowledge of academia and humanity, is practically boundless, at least within the capabilities of a human.

As humans, our time is limited.  There may be uncounted paths of interest—uncounted research projects, uncounted novels or poems—but there is very countable, limited time, as expressed over centuries, including “Time’s winged chariot” in Marvell’s “To a Coy Mistress,” and rock band Pink Floyd’s song “Time,” which laments: 

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines

We want our plans to come to something—they may start or incubate with half a page of scribbled lines—and it is for that reason that we want to start writing sooner than later. If we want to produce some good work, we have to be willing to produce our pages of scribbled lines that “come to naught.” If we want to achieve our plans, we benefit by writing sooner rather than later. The sooner we start, the better chance we have to improve our plans, and find people to support us as we try to realize them—particularly the professors, editors, reviewers, agents, publishers, and others who might facilitate our getting published or achieving other writing goals.

You are always making choices about what you do with your time.  If you want to be a writer, it’s valuable to practice writing. There is no better way to improve as a writer. Unless you’re writing, other activities—reading, course work, etc.—won’t help you become a better writer or finish your manuscripts.

If you want to be a writer, choose to spend time writing now so that you can finish your writing projects.

Book Review: The Midnight Disease by Alice W. Flaherty

Yesterday, I finished reading Alice W. Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. Generally, I do not write reviews because even my compliments can be pretty critical and I’m little inclined to give five-star reviews in this era when a four-star review is often taken as a grave insult. Also, a good review takes some effort, so I generally don’t review even books that I like a lot.

Disclaimer

To the best of my knowledge, I have no connection with the author, Flaherty, or the publisher, Houghton Mifflin. I am not being paid to write this review.

Flaherty’s Midnight Disease (2004, Houghton Mifflin)

Writer’s block interests me, so I bought this book.  I suppose that the biggest disappointment in this book is that it’s more about writing a lot (hypergraphia) than writer’s block.  This is not a self-help book to help you with your own writer’s block.

That being said, I wouldn’t be reviewing this book if I didn’t think it would be of interest to many. For this book to work well for you, you do really have to have some interest in neurophysiology. If you don’t want to hear about the different functions of different parts of the brain, then this book is not for you.

One of my favorite books in a while

As a writing coach, I am a firm believer in understanding the crucial role of our bodies, including our physiology and neurophysiology, in writing well. With my view of human cognition/intelligence as deriving both from our bodies (cf., e.g., by Lakoff and Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh, or Varela et al. in The Embodied Mind) and our environments (cf. Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild), this insight into the neurophysiology of writing, language, and more general neurological function helps me understand the writing process better.

The discussion of neurological conditions was fascinating with respect to understanding the vast diversity of human experience. Many of the stories felt so alien to my own experience as to almost be unbelievable (e.g., synesthesia–in which the hearer of a sound also sees color or shape).

If you’re generally interested in the process of writing, if you have any interest in a discussion of neurophysiology that is comprehensible to the average well-educated reader, then this is an excellent book. Five stars.

One of my favorite passages in a long time

There were times where I felt the author entertained some overly self-indulgent digressions. One of them, however, offered the best comic delivery and payoff that I have ever seen in a serious non-fiction book about writing. The author did something right when the sentence “Most of these people did not seek medical help quickly,” has you chuckling repeatedly for several days after you read it, and draws laughter from everyone with whom you share the excerpt. I’m tempted to give it five stars just on the basis of that one passage.

Principle and Partisanship: Team Truth

In my previous post, I considered the question of whether principle follows from partisan alignment, or, instead, partisan alignment follows from principle. And I said that if there is a “team” whose guiding principle is the search for truth, I want to be on that team.

Finding “team truth” would probably be easier if I believed in “truth.” Or, perhaps “believe” isn’t the right word because “believe” can mean accepting something is real or true, even if its reality cannot be proven. In this sense, I do believe in “truth,” even though I also accept the strength and validity of many arguments against the existence of truth.

“Truth” doesn’t exist

Many have argued that the idea of of an objective truth is impossible. If we are hoping for “THE Truth,” using the capitalization from William James’s Pragmatism, and looking for “one system that is right and EVERY other wrong” (Pragmatism, Lecture VII: “Pragmatism and Humanism”)–what Hilary Putnam would call a “God’s-eye-view”–we run into problems.

American Pragmatists like James and Putnam are not alone in arguing this: post-modern philosophy (e.g., Foucault), theories of embodied cognition (e.g., George Lakoff), and skepticism (e.g., Hume) reject objective truth. Philosophical results like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic demonstrate the impossibility of any logical system. Even Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge ends up describing a system in which the only objective knowledge we have is in regards to what is false; we never know if a hypothesis is true, only that it has not yet been proven false.

Jorge Luis Borges notes that infinity corrupts all ideas, including proof: any logical proof depends on on the truth of its premises, but how do we know a premise is true? We have to prove its truth, of course, which requires other premises. And these premises must then be proven–thus proof is stuck in an infinite regression: it can never set an absolutely “true” premise. Bertrand Russell notes this same regression in his Logical Atomism and decides that you have to start with something that is not true but rather “undeniable.” But that only begs the question.

Each of these arguments has merits that I cannot deny or refute.

Team Truth

Although I believe that there is no such thing in provable, demonstrable objective truth, and even believe it is illogical to speak of things being “true,” still I believe in truth. Not only do I believe in it, I am an ardent advocate for it. I think the search for truth is both socially valuable and personally rewarding.

This is a cognitive dissonance that bedevils me. But humans manage cognitive dissonance all the time. Although “truth” eludes logical definition, there is a difference between what fiction writers do and what scholars do–at least a difference in purpose: the fiction writer is inventing things that definitely did not happen, while the scholar is trying to identify things that actually do (or can) happen.

Even though I lack a logically defensible “truth,” still I recognize that somethings are real and true and some are not and are false. For example, this morning, I walked the dog (that’s true), and I did not walk the cat.

I’m rooting for team truth.

Principle and Partisanship

My uncle and I were once debating a political issue when he said to me something like “You support that position because of your partisan alignment.” I responded that he had it backwards: to the extent that I had a partisan alignment, it was shaped by my position on specific issues.

Separately, I had a friendly acquaintance who would regularly argue that scholarly work that disagreed with Republican positions was biased because the authors were Democrats. In that situation, too, I argued for the possibility that the authors were Democrats because their scholarly conclusions disagreed with Republican claims.

Certainly, there are people whose biases affect what they do and say in both conscious and unconscious ways. An economist, for example, who supports the Unnamed Party, might conceivably agree with Unnamed policy because of partisan alignment, and that alignment might influence their research, results, and policy recommendations.

But is there only partisanship? My uncle and my acquaintance both argued all views are shaped by partisan alignment. But that assumes that everyone feels allegiance to extent parties, when it’s pretty clear that many people don’t immediately choose an alignment–witness the millions of voters in the US who register without party affiliation. Additionally, it raises the question of why people choose partisan alignment: we can’t assume that everyone simply accepts the partisan affiliation of their parents.

Doesn’t it make sense that people would choose party affiliation because the principles of the person align with the principles of the party? Imagine a school teacher given a choice between the Schools-are-terrible Party and the Schools-are-great party? What about a member of a labor union given a choice between the Union-busting Party and the Union-supporting Party? What about a environmental biologist whose work suggests that climate change is real? Someone who has dedicated their life to scientific study of the environment and, as a result of that study, concluded that anthropegenic climate change is real? Won’t that person be tempted to align themselves with a party that respects their work rather than ridiculing it?

My uncle said to me: “every one wants to fit on their own team.” I said to my uncle: “what about people who don’t feel they fit on any team?” Personally, I’ve never fit in well with groups. But when a team is dedicated to a principle that is important to me, I like them for that reason (even if there may be other reasons I dislike that team).

Remembering Shared Principles We Take for Granted

Recently, I’ve seen several sources talking about how Republicans or former Republicans were putting aside ideological differences to endorse Kamala Harris for president. For example, the Heather Digby Parton at Salon writes:

the Never Trump faction…has set ideology aside for the moment in order to create a popular front to defeat Trump. (https://www.salon.com/2024/08/26/protection-racket-crumbles-now-have-cover-to-come-out-as-anti/)

Or, the retired lawyers from the Reagan and Bush administrations, who write:

we urge all patriotic Republicans, former Republicans, conservative and center-right citizens, and independent voters to place love of country above party and ideology and join us in supporting Kamala Harris. (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/white-house-lawyers-who-advised-reagan-bush-endorse-harris-over-trump-2024-showdown)

With all due respect, the reason these Republicans agree with Democrats is because of shared ideology: the idea that Democracy is good, and autocracy is bad; the idea that we should support the US Constitution; the idea that everybody should be equally bound by the laws; and other related beliefs–ideals about what the United States of America aspires to.

In my opinion, one reason the Democrats have long struggled to make their message heard is their failure to focus on these shared principles.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal.” We can get sidetracked from the general principle espoused by quibbling about Jefferson’s commitment to that principle, and his use of the gender-specific word “men” instead of “people.” Or we can set aside those historical details to focus on the principle implied: all people are created equal, and all people have rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it is that ideal of equality–that ideology–that is at the heart of what has made the United States of America great.

The history of the United States has many examples of the people and the government violating the noble principles espoused in the Constitution (“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”) and the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”). But those principles are still good principles. In these divisive times, let’s not lose sight of these principles–this ideology–that should bring us together.

Confidence and Publication: Comparing Russell and Wittenstein

Many writers get stuck with doubts, while other plow through. How you respond to doubt as a writer—the confidence with which you approach difficulties that you face—has a crucial impact on  your ability to write effectively.  In this post, I want to briefly compare two writers of high quality who faced similar issues and responded very differently. I can’t say with certainty that the difference between the two was purely a matter of confidence, but I believe the comparison is instructive. Perhaps it’s a reflection on perfectionism, not confidence, but I think the two are related: the more confident person is able to say “eh, it ain’t perfect, but it is good enough to move forward.

Russel and Wittgenstein

Bertrand Russell won a Nobel Prize for literature for his voluminous writings and was extremely widely published as a leading 20th-century philosopher. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was one of Russell’s students in the early 20th century, by contrast published only one book during his life, and that book (The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was dedicated to Russell) is not regarded as his most important work. In terms of their publication output during their lives, Russell was a giant, and Wittgenstein a shrimp. But from the current moment in history, however, their prestige as philosophers is equal, or perhaps Wittgenstein is given more respect.  

The Limits of Logic

In the 1910s, when Wittgenstein studied with Russell, their project was logic and, to some extent, the mathematization of logical thought.  The concern was how to prove (or disprove) the truth of a statement.

Russell’s book The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, published in 1914, is roughly contemporary with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, published in 1918, and their subject matter is quite similar—both are works of analytic philosophy discussing logical proof. The question of interest here is how they handle the boundaries of logic.

At the beginning of Logical Atomism, Russell acknowledges an inevitable and unavoidable subjectivity at the foundation of what he is doing. If we want to prove the truth of a statement, we need to have some starting place—some statements that we know are true. But how do we know if something is true without having proved it? And how can we start the project of proving the truth of any statement unless we have something that we have already proven true? His response is to say, approximately, “we start with something undeniable.” Not true, only undeniable. He discusses what he means by undeniable for a paragraph or two, and then he moves on to other issues. Essentially, he says, “well, we can’t follow the rules of proof for our first statement, so we’ll just ignore those rules and accept our first statement as true because it seems undeniable.”  Practically speaking, that makes perfect sense; logically speaking, it’s almost inexcusable. Emotionally speaking, I would say that this is the choice of a person who has confidence in the value of their work, despite some flaws.

In the penultimate sixth chapter of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein similarly struggles with what is either the same, or a very similar problem: he sees the logician as existing within the system being examined, creating the same sort of unavoidable subjectivity that concerned Russell. His response to this, however, quite different. In the sixth chapter, he discusses how one cannot get the necessary objectivity, and that lacking that, one has no grounds on which to speak.  And he concludes the book with his seventh chapter, which I reproduce in full here: “Of that whereof one can’t speak, one must remain silent.” That’s the whole seventh chapter. One sentence. And Wittgenstein never again published in his lifetime. Logically speaking, this is perfectly sound. Practically speaking, however, it leads to paralysis. Emotionally speaking, I would say this is the choice of a person who doubts the value of their work.

Perfectionism and Confidence

To me, this is a story about confidence and a willingness to accept a logical flaw.  Both Russell and Wittgenstein recognized a similar logical limit, but Russell said “I will still proceed” while Wittgenstein said “This project is meaningless.” To me, logically speaking, Wittgenstein is in the right here.  If you are interested in a system of building certain truth through proof, the whole structure of truth fails if it is built on something that is not provably true. Wittgenstein recognizes this and essentially says “this project isn’t worth the effort because it’s ultimately fruitless.”

Russell’s response is very different, and I view it as a manifestation of confidence or even arrogance. Russell says, “weak foundations be damned, I’m still going to pursue this project.”

I don’t know what emotions and thoughts swayed the two men, or whether the issue was really confidence.  But as a lesson for struggling writers, I think it can be instructive: the writer who pushes forward ignoring problems, produces work for publication, while the writer who takes those problems seriously gets stuck, and even is blocked from publishing.

Getting projects finished and published simply takes a willingness to push ahead, despite problems and weaknesses in your research.

This is not to excuse shoddy work, but rather to acknowledge the impossibility of creating perfection, and to prefer flawed productivity with inactivity brought on by doubts and imperfections.