Reflections On Writing Blog: Thoughts, Tips, and Suggestions

Recently, I’ve written a couple of times about missing targets, and I’m returning to that same theme from a slightly different angle after talking with a writer who is trying to get on track with his dissertation work.  We had been talking about setting up a regular practice of writing and he reported that he had missed a day during the prior week. That’s no big deal, but it had me thinking.

This man is in a professional program; he’s not going to be an academic, so he won’t be in a publish-or-perish career that will require public demonstration of his writing. In his situation, it makes good sense to focus his attention on the product he is trying to complete—his dissertation. But I was also thinking about the value of the practice—a subject I think and write about often.

Developing actual products of your work and your efforts is important—without actual products of your work, it’s hard to share anything with anyone.  All the same, each individual product is a one-shot thing (one shot, in the sense that’s only one step in a career, not in the sense that you only have one chance to get it right), while a career or a life is more of an on-going matter.

In the course of a life, which is more important, the products or the practice?  Asking about which is more important necessarily invokes questions of value that have uncertain answers (because different people have different values), but it’s an interesting question, I think.

There is no question that it’s good to have some sort of “product” to show for efforts—a graduate student quite naturally wants to produce the necessary dissertation.  Products are important.  Having something to show for your efforts is important.

Having something to show for your efforts is not the only important thing, however.  Living well and having rewarding experiences is also valuable, even if there is no product.  As a writer, I find that writing with the emphasis on the practice is not only more enjoyable than writing with an eye on the product, it is also more productive. When I am writing for the practice, my emphasis is on using my time well.  This emphasis does not preclude working on some product, but it does make the product secondary to engaging my practice effectively.  

When I focus on a product, I can see the many difficulties that surround me, and I see clearly the many limits of my work and my abilities.  The pieces that I want to be insightful and interesting, often seem trite.  The pieces that I have tried to edit carefully, still have errors. It is, in short, very easy to become frustrated with the product of my efforts.  And frustration is a good way to get stuck working.

When I focus on the practice, my attention is much more directed towards my own efforts: am I engaging in the practice?  Am I giving myself a chance to benefit from the practice? Have I put in enough effort that the practice will pay off?

For me, at least, the practice is more valuable than the product (admittedly, I might say differently if I had ever had a very successful book), because with the practice, I feel more likely to produce multiple products, and thus I’m less dependent on the outcome for any single product.   And realistically, pretty much every person in an intellectual field will have to produce multiple written products. For someone aiming at a professional career—the dissertation writer I mentioned above, for example—the dissertation may seem like the one big writing product, and once it’s done, there’s no need for a writing practice. But that is, I think, a false vision: people in professional careers have lots of things to write, even if never as big as a dissertation.  Professionals write to colleagues, to supervisors, to subordinates. They write to describe their decisions and to coordinate with the people with whom they work.  They write to communicate with other organizations.  

Writing is a skill that is generally used, so developing a practice that helps you improve your skill and feel more comfortable about the difficulty of writing may be one that helps you in many ways and in many contexts.  Although developing a practice is difficult, and it may seem more efficient to focus on finishing a single product, developing a writing practice is the best way to finish a large research/writing project.

It’s not that long since I wrote a previous post about missing targets, to talk about the lesser importance of missing a specific deadline or target when compared to the much greater importance of developing and maintaining a regular practice of writing.  I wrote that previous post in the context of being several days late on my planned schedule of posting to my blog each Monday.  But the last time I posted a new post was on October 3 (or October 4, if I count my repost from the TAAOnline blog), so I’ve missed my targets by a much greater mark—an even greater failure with respect to those targets.

The thing is, what do I do about it?  I can’t go back in time and post something on Monday, October 8 or Monday, October 15, as would be in accord with my plan of posting each Monday.  My answer–which will probably not be surprising—is that the best response I can have is to get back to my practice of writing to try to produce material for my next post, which, ideally, would be posted by Monday, October 22. As I am writing this on October 21, there’s a good chance that I will, in fact, get back on my planned schedule of posting each Monday.  And I am optimistic that I will be able to keep that schedule in the future, though perhaps with occasional interruptions.  Getting back on track after missing a target allows each individual failure to be washed out by the weight of each time I do meet a target.  Missing two targets feels bad. Missing two targets out of 20, for example, doesn’t feel as bad.

It happens that the cause of my missing my blog target was that I was working toward another target, that I also missed.  I was writing the index of a book that will be out this spring, and that happened to be a big enough and difficult enough task that I missed my target for it: I had said I would be done by the 17^th, and I didn’t finish and submit the index until the 19^th.  The stakes of that project are much higher than the stakes of my blog post, in the sense that there are people who really care that the index gets done on time: the book’s author and publisher. At the same time, however, the missed target needs to be kept in perspective: the author may have been disappointed, but he is more pleased to have it done—we went over the index together on Friday and he seemed generally pleased, despite its limitations.  I have no direct feedback on how the publisher views the delay, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not going to prevent publication by the planned release date (in February of 2019).

When I had missed my target, I was certainly upset that I had missed it. But I also kept my focus on the project: I did not let missing the target keep me from making progress, and that was key in limiting the scope of my failure.  As an amateur musician, I have been thinking about this in comparison to playing music: one key skill a musician needs to learn in order to sound good to other people is the skill of continuing to play despite a mistake.  A single note/chord that is misplayed—whether by playing the wrong note or by playing at the wrong time—can be almost invisible (inaudible) to an audience as long as the rhythm is kept steady. The skill that the performer needs is to be able to stay on rhythm after playing a wrong note. Skilled musicians—professionals far above my skill level—make mistakes, but they keep playing, and we, the audience, may never even notice that they made an error. Inexperienced musicians, on the other hand, often become flustered by an error and they stop playing. And that—the larger break in the rhythm—is obvious to everyone.  The inexperienced musician focuses on the error, and loses the rhythm as a result. The experienced musician keeps focused on what comes next, and as a result, continues playing and the single miss gets washed away.

So what do you do if you miss a target?  Keep focused on where you’re trying to go; keep focused on the ideas you need to express and the audience you want to reach.  One missed target is only one spot in the larger fabric of your life. Keep your attention on the fabric that you want to weave in the future, not the flaw that happened in the past.

Having just finished the index of a soon-to-be-published book, I want to mention that book, and promote it, because I think it’s an excellent book, and I’m really very proud that I was able to help create it.  It’s called American Sutra, and it was written by Professor Duncan Williams of the University of Southern California. I hope that it is received with the enthusiasm I think it deserves.  It’s a book about Japanese American Buddhists and the discrimination they faced during the World War II era, which bring up many issues of religious discrimination (and combined racial-religious discrimination) that are relevant in the present day. It will be released in February, 2019, on what is known as the “Day of Remembrance” in the Japanese American community—February, 19—the anniversary of President Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066, which created the legal framework for the incarceration without cause of over 100,000 American citizens and resident aliens (many of whom would have become citizens if not for laws that prevented Asians from gaining citizenship).

For many, writing is difficult and painful. And, when that difficulty and pain are combined with the obligation to write, the very idea of writing becomes wrapped up in the sense that there could be few activities less pleasurable or rewarding.  Given where most of us get most of our first writing experience—in school—where the only reward for writing well is a good grade, it’s easy to understand how people don’t think of writing as rewarding in any meaningful way.

Obviously there are some people who like to write, even when they’re just school students. When I was in high school, I couldn’t understand those people at all. But now, it seems much more reasonable to me.

Writing can be a rewarding experience. There are still difficulties in writing, of course.  But the rewards of writing are significant. Writing—the act—can be valuable, even if we set aside the possibility of some reward from having written well. Regardless of what happens when to your writing after you send it off to others—whether accepted or rejected, celebrated or vilified—the process of writing can itself be rewarding.

One angle to take on the rewards of writing is to look at it as a “flow activity”—one of the activities that suits the characteristics necessary to create the experience of “flow”, as described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  Csikszentmihalyi describes the experience of flow as being one of the best experiences in life. Flow activities are challenging activities.  They are activities where your skills are stretched to their limits, where you have a chance to grow, and also where you have a chance to fail.  The best experiences, according to Csikszentmihalyi, are not many of the things that we might think of as fun—watching TV or a movie,  enjoying a gourmet meal, or other more passive activities—precisely for the reason that they don’t challenge us, because there is no growth, and no development. 

(On a side note, I think even connoisseurs of something—wine, music, art—gain as much pleasure from the difficulties overcome to become a connoisseur as from the simple sensual experience of the good [wine/music/art]—the sense that one has refined taste, and the experiences of bad [wine/etc.] are part of the pleasure. Or at least I have heard many who liked to think of themselves as connoisseurs speak with enjoyment of the unpleasant things they have done that help them think of themselves as connoisseurs—bad wines tasted, unpleasant concerts attended, distasteful exhibits viewed. They may not have liked it at the time, but after the fact, they find value in it, and perhaps an anecdote they like to relate. Of course, as I describe it this way, connoisseurship starts to take on some of the characteristics of flow activities—the necessary effort, the occasional failures, the challenges and opportunities for growth—that the simple pleasurable experience—the wine, the movie, etc.—doesn’t, by itself, have. The act of tasting one wine—which might be pleasurable—gets placed in the matrix of developing connoisseurship, and is no longer judged just in terms of the pleasure of drinking, but as part of a fabric of knowledge.)

As a flow activity, writing does require effort and it does have the possibility of failure, and thus it’s not an activity that is guaranteed to deliver pleasure.  There are days when writing is more difficult and less pleasurable. There are days when it takes a lot of effort to get started writing.  But as a flow activity, writing can be absorbing and positive.  And when it is, then it can serve as a refuge of sorts from other problems—at least from emotional ones.

Writing requires skill, and it develops with practice. If you only know writing as an occasional task that you avoid, then, of course, it won’t become any sort of refuge—it will only remain distant and difficult.  But if you develop a practice of writing regularly—if you work on writing, and you regularly work through difficult patches in your writing practice—then the practice itself is more likely to have pleasurable moments—moments when you feel like writing is going well—and therefore it is more likely become a refuge.

There are plenty of activities that people use as a refuge. Hobbyists typically find refuge in their hobby. And realistically, many hobbies are flow activities—building models, artistic pursuits, athletic skills–all of these share the characteristic that they have difficulties, failures, and the possibility for growth.  Most people wouldn’t view writing as a hobby, but there are those for whom it is, of a sort.  Other activities that might not be considered “hobbies” might also be considered refuges, for example, mediation practices or yoga.

Writing, of course, can be part of a job or a set of responsibilities, not just a hobby. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be both hobby and work. Nor that it is impossible to mix a hobby with work—indeed, many people do mix a hobby with work by pursuing a passion that started as a hobby and turned into a career, for example, an artist who leaves a day job to make an art career, or an amateur cook who decides to open a restaurant.  And I think, on an emotional level, one can move in the opposite direction: if writing is a job, one can, with practice and the right attitude, turn it into something of a hobby.  It may be hard to imagine enjoying writing, especially if you’re required to write in your career, but it’s possible.  

Writing in any setting can be absorbing. It is challenging, and for all that reason, it can become some sort of refuge from other problems, if you focus your attention on overcoming the specific challenge of writing. If you get absorbed in the attempt to describe or discuss or reveal a certain issue, or the attempt to relate a certain narrative, it can take your attention away from other issues, at least temporarily.  And that is the refuge.  It is easier to find this refuge when you believe your ability is equal to the task—but that’s why practice is so important: practice improves your ability, and improves your understanding of how to apply your abilities successfully. 

For my own part, I have various issues that trigger me and create negative emotions when I focus on them—anything from the un-scooped dog poop in front of my house, to reckless drivers who endanger my life and those around, to political malfeasance, and other larger social or global ills. When I write, and I start to focus on putting a focused set of ideas on the page, on finding good ways to express those ideas in writing, and on trying to find a good way to reach an audience, all of those considerations may take my attention from the things that trigger me.  Sometimes I write about one of those things that trigger me, but even then writing can be a refuge if it directs my attention to actions that could be taken to resolve those difficulties.

I’m over 1,000 words, which has been my rough goal for these posts, and realistically, I’ve made my point and may be getting redundant.  Writing can take your mind from other problems—and that’s something that’s more likely to happen if you practice writing. Not everyone is going to become a writer, but if, for any reason, you have to write in your life, then turning it into a regular practice will help writing become less of an ordeal, and more of an opportunity to find refuge from problems.

For the last year or more, my plan for this blog has been to post something every Monday. For the most part, I’ve been good about that, but there have definitely been times when that Monday deadline has slipped.  Today is Thursday and I haven’t posted for this week, making me several days behind.  

The reasons for my delay are minor—nothing particularly bad prevented me from writing a blog post in the last several days.  On Sunday, I could have written a blog post, but I chose to spend my time writing fiction instead.  That was not necessarily the best choice–I’m not really a fiction writer, having chosen to (mostly) focus my efforts on non-fiction projects. (I generally try to focus my efforts so that I can finish projects, and I think my non-fiction projects are better in quality and more marketable than my fiction, so when it comes to trying to finish something, the non-ficiton gets priority.)

But the delay does give me a subject: what to do when you miss targets.  (I have plenty of other potential subjects, actually, but this one seems the most apt for a day when I’m behind schedule. It is necessary to choose a specific topic, and follow it, rather than vacillating between different possible topics.)

So, what do I do when I miss targets? Basically, I don’t do anything special.  And that’s really what I want to suggest as the main point of this post: don’t let missing a target throw you. Don’t let it stop you, and don’t let it slow you down.  If you miss a target, the thing to do is to focus your attention on the writing project and to get back to writing.  Realistically, if you miss a target, the only way to recover from that is to get back to work and to keep working to try to find a resolution for that miss. 

What you (and I) don’t want to do after missing a target, is to focus your (or my) attention on the fact that the target was missed.  Turning attention to the writing project, gets you back on course toward whatever larger target you had been aiming for. Turning attention to the missed target doesn’t focus on what you want to create, it focuses attention on other things. If your goal is to create a piece of writing, it is crucial to keep your attention focused on the ideas that you want to express. If you start thinking about missing a target, not only is your effort distracted from what you want to create, but there’s a good chance that you will also have negative thoughts about yourself and your own work patterns.

Writing, writing well, and finishing writing projects, all require a big investment of effort.  It’s much easier to apply that effort if you are in a more positive emotional state. And it’s much easier to apply that effort if your attention is focused on the thing you’re trying to create instead of some personal failing.

In a way, this recommendation (keep trying; keep focusing on your project, even if you miss a target) is little more than saying “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But it’s worth saying, I think, partly because the familiar aphorism is so familiar that it loses impact. And worth saying partly because the aphorism doesn’t contain any reasoning as to why it’s a good idea.

You might argue that my missing a self-imposed deadline for my own blog is very different from missing a target for a grant, for example, where that failure has significant impact. If I miss a blog post, nothing really happens to me.  Regular readers of my blog might be disappointed by the delay; they might even stop following my blog, but there is no clear and direct negative impact similar to what might occur if, for example, you miss a deadline for a grant proposal, for coursework, or for filing a dissertation or thesis.  There is certainly truth in such arguments, but that’s at a small scale: yes, the immediate impact of failing to meet some targets is greater than for others.  But on the large scale, the basic principle remains sound.  If you fail to get your grant proposal submitted on time, does that really change who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish? Or is that just a setback that makes it harder for you to pursue that goal?

There are times, of course, when failing to meet a target is a sign that you might want to find something else to pursue. But that’s a larger question, I think. It’s true that you want to use feedback about your performance to decide whether to pursue some course of action. But is missing a writing deadline a relevant reflection of your ability? I would argue that it is not.  If you submit something, and it gets rejected, then it’s totally appropriate to look at that feedback for guidance on whether to continue to pursue your goal—this is especially true where there are hard and fast criteria for judgement—a runner trying to make a national Olympic team whose best times are minutes short of qualifying should think carefully about whether they will be able to shave those minutes off their time in the future. But that’s a judgement based on reaching a target, at least in a certain way: the runner who completes a race too slowly has finished the race—so it’s a situation more akin to a writer who submits a paper that gets rejected than to the situation of a writer who misses a deadline and submits nothing. (And, it should be noted that getting a piece of writing rejected is not something that depends on clear criteria—judging writing is much more personal than comparing a runner’s time to some objective standard.)

In this post, I’m most concerned with the emotional impact of being late, of missing a deadline, not of missing a performance criterion.  In my experience, it’s pretty common for people who miss some sort of deadline to spend time and effort berating themselves for the failure to meet the deadline, and it’s really that dynamic that this post hopes to prevent.  Missing a deadline is not the end of the world. Missing a deadline is just a delay. I failed to post on Monday, and I planned, but I can still post today. I can still post another post next Monday.  If, for example, you missed a deadline to file your dissertation this month, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t make the next deadline to file it.  (Yes, for some people, there is a final chance to submit—some deadline set by a school that cannot be appealed—and such a deadline obviously is consequential in a different way from missing your target of filing this semester but them having to file next semester instead.) A lot of missed targets are not terminal issues, and for such targets, it’s best to focus attention on next steps and on continuing your project, regardless of having missed the target.  I think this especially true for people with big projects: if you miss some target in the course of working—you don’t finish a chapter on time, for example—it’s crucial not to let that miss keep you from working.