When I decided to “write every day” this semester I didn’t even think to make it make it explicit that I didn’t mean to include weekends. But I happen to be working a shift in library today, so I thought I would write just a few sentences about this.

Many scholars do, of course, write on the weekend, mainly because they are almost certainly not teaching or in meetings. But I always advise people to be very deliberate in the way they use their writing time on their days off. Don’t clear a whole day for writing. Reserve a few hours and make sure that your loved ones know which hours. Make them promise to leave you alone (or understand why you’re ignoring them) by promising to give them some time later.

This is generally a good principle: Begin something knowing when you’ll stop. Inform the people around when you can and when you can’t pay attention to their needs. With that bit of planning in place, by all means, sit down to write on a Saturday too. Work at it for a few hours. Then, do go outside.

“The notion of ontological commitment belongs to the theory of reference.”
Willard Van Orman Quine

Here’s a worry I’ve been expressing lately when talking about AI. When I was in school, certainly when I was at university, I understood the difference between “books” and “periodicals” as well as the difference between “fiction” and “non-fiction”. I recall being taught these things (or perhaps just reminded of them) by librarians who were also trying to teach me the Dewey decimal system and, like I say, by the time I was an undgraduate I understood that a library was a collection of materials, grouped into broad classes. Referencing was one place where the difference between these classes made a difference. You cited a book in one way and a journal article in another because finding a book or journal article in a library were subtly different processes.

That is, a “reference” was literally a way of pointing to a thing that existed in the library at a particular coordinate. A reference that got those coordinates wrong might still have named it correctly but made it harder to find the source. Knowing how to use a database, however, allowed you find a badly referenced source simply by hypothesizing errors in particular “fields”: maybe the writer got the date or wrong, or a title, or was citing a chapter rather than a whole book? But the writer could, in pricinple, also just “make up” a reference. One could construct something that looked like a source in the scholarly literature, a treatise or and article, and it might simply not exist. I’m not quite going with this where you think, but, yes, one of the main early complaints about language models were that they would “hallucinate” their references: they would construct plausible looking references that had, if you will, no referents.

Here’s the real worry I have. Now that our databases (like Scopus and JSTOR) are offering AI functions, our students (and we ourselves, yes, perhaps even we librarians) will increasingly interact with them, not by querying terms in data fields (author, date, title, volume, subject terms, etc.) but simply by asking them about facts and ideas in natural language. And they’ll give us fully referenced natural-language answers in return. Already today, I find that students, who do much of their reading on screens, are less clear about the difference between books and papers, treatises and articles, as kinds of text. In the future, we may come think that the facts — both of the world and of our scholarship — are “given” to us “immediately”. Our understanding of the ontology of the library will erode. Our view of what constitutes our knowledge will grow clouded. Our grip on reality will weaken.

Right after you’ve written a paragraph or drawn a picture, the struggle to get it right is still fresh in your mind. You can still remember the effort of putting every word and line on the page and you see the moves you are least sure of most clearly. They stand out. When drawing, you are looking at the picture from the same point of view that you were looking at the object and, since you probably didn’t get it perfectly right, its perspective seems distorted, wrong. When writing, you still have the same criticial reader in mind, trying to address exactly their difficulty, and it is painfully clear that you’ve only partially succeeded. Before you evaluate it, put the work away for a few hours, even a few days. Then look at it with fresh eyes.

Or maybe it’s your hands that need to relax. You need to get the feeling of making something out of your body so you can decide what you’ve made. Often, I find the hand looks fine the next day, perhaps just from a slightly different perspective. The paragraph is clear and strong, but makes a slightly different point in a slightly different way. Sure, ideally, I’d want to express my intention exactly, but the important thing is that my lines, my words, aren’t nearly as messy as I thought when I put the task away. You have to remember to enjoy what you have accomplished.

Just a quick one today. I spent the morning making sure my audio equipment was working for a lecture capture I was doing and it ended up taking up my writing time. As I said on Monday, under ordinary circumstances I would just let it go and not write at all today. But the whole point of this exercise (for me) is to loosen things up a bit. So I’m just going to jot down the little idea I had thought to write about. I may expand tomorrow.

In order to develop my empathy for people who are learning how to write effectively, I’ve given myself two things I’m not good at to do with my hands on a regular basis. I’m composing a short piece of music on the piano and practicing it, and I’m drawing a picture of my hand in various positions. I spend only a few minutes every day on each and, in addition to the little improvements I’m making, it is developing my sense of the difficulty people have when training their skills. Like I say, I’ll write some more about this later, but, today, I just want to say that it’s a good idea to work at a manual skill every day. It’s good, I think, for the brain too.

There must be some science that supports this somewhere. But for now I’m happy to assert it on the basis of a hunch.

One very popular approach to writing travels under the somewhat unattractive banner “shitty first drafts”. Jonathan Mayhew and I have tried to push back on it a little, but it has undeniable appeal for many students and scholars.

The idea is simply not to worry about quality in the early stages of a writing project. Instead, just set your mind to filling up pages with words and resolve to revise them later. Good writing, on this approach, emerges from editing bad writing. Jonathan and I object to this ethos because it doesn’t afford you the pleasure of writing a good sentence or a clear paragraph in a single moment. If you’re always writing “shitty” drafts and then editing them into shape, you never feel the joy that comes from putting a strong sentence together with your own hands, composing a solid a paragraph in your own mind. It really does mean you’ll be spending most of your time suffering through the badness of your writing as you edit it.

Anne Lamott, who is often credited with the idea, but of course did not invent it and should not be blamed for it, would probably object to my caricature of it. But it’s the caricature I’ against, not the very sensible idea of sometimes just letting your sentences flow out of you. This experiment of writing light, breezy prose every day can be taken as an example and, in fact, it could be argued that I recommend writing “shittily” for ten out the twenty-seven minutes it should ideally take you to compose a paragraph. My point, however, is that if you do this often then even your most careless sentences will feel like they mean something, like you are writing deliberately to say something you know. You’ll feel the (growing) confidence of your prose in every line.

Don’t denigrate your first efforts just to give yourself the freedom to write. Resolve to write as well as you can on a regular basis. You’ll get better at it.