“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” (Ernest Hemingway)

To know that tomorrow I will write is happiness. I don’t mean that thinking, or hoping, or wishing to write tomorrow is happiness. I mean really knowing that I will write. And to know that you will write you must know both what you will write and when you will write. To vaguely intend to write something, sometime tomorrow is not to know that you will write tomorrow. Knowing means knowing when you will start writing, on which paper, in defense of which claims, and when you will stop writing.

It’s a writer’s happiness, of course. But, then again, your happiness as a writer is periodically the greatest happiness that is available to you. There are periods when your unhappiness as a writer is the foundation of your mood in all things. A writer is someone who needs to write; and a scholar is sometimes more acutely a writer, whether writing or not, than any other thing. There are also periods when your writing has little to do with your happiness, when you are happy or unhappy regardless of whether you are writing. But those periods are not what I’m talking about this morning.

I felt this writer’s happiness last night. I had not yet decided what this morning’s blog post would be about and I was acutely aware of having to make that decision. I was not happy. Being back on a schedule means that I am writing, that I’m a writer, that my happiness depends on whether or not I write. I knew when I would write, but not yet what I would write. So I was not yet happy. I got ready for bed and got under the covers with Book I, Part III, of Williams’ Paterson. It begins: “How strange you are, idiot!” And ends: “Earth, the chatterer, father of all/speech . . . . .” And it has some sharp words along the way for “the university”. A good tonic. And then I knew what I would write about.

I got up and sat at the table with my notebook, jotting down a long and clumsy version of what is now my opening sentence and a few loose thoughts. Then I went to bed and slept. From the moment I closed the notebook, to the moment I fell asleep, I was happy.

When do you feel this happiness? How often? For how long? Happiness is not writing but knowing that tomorrow you will write. You may know, while you are writing today, that you will also write tomorrow. Or you may know at the moment you stop writing that you’ll write again tomorrow. Then you will be happy for the rest of the day. You, the writer. (Like I say, there are times in your life when nothing can make you miserable if the writer in you is happy and nothing can make you happy if the writer is miserable.) Sometimes, however, you will finish your writing for the day and you will have to wait until later in the day to know that you will write again tomorrow. Or you will know that you won’t write tomorrow, because you have planned not to write tomorrow. Why did you rob yourself of this happiness?

On Friday afternoon, I should mention, “tomorrow” means Monday. Consider the implications: a little bit of planning, a little bit of determination can make you happy all day long for weeks. Every day, you make a decision about when and what you will write tomorrow. You make that decision merely by looking at your writing plan. And you always do what your plan tells you to do. Or you change the plan for tomorrow, at the latest today. That is, you know you will not change your mind tomorrow morning when you are supposed to write. The writer in you has learned to trust the rest of you. When the writing is finished for the day, the rest of you takes over, first making a promise to bring you back to the desk tomorrow.

And that, again, is happiness.

_____

*I wrote this post back in 2011 on my old blog. This is a lightly edited repost.

Pace Eric Hayot

“Write from the center of your strength,” I often say. This usually amounts to picking your audience and your argument in a way that makes it easy for you, as a speaker, to strike a “rhetorical balance” between them. You should know both what you are talking about and who you are talking to, and you should have something on your mind to tell them. Importantly, you should be interested in what they think of your views. You should be ready to adjust your stance to theirs when they make it known. So you should begin in a determined but relaxed posture, feet apart, shoulders down. Set up your writing moment so that you start out feeling comfortable with the situation.

Now, someone has probably told you that it’s important to move “out of your comfort zone” every now and then. Sometimes we’re more or less forced to. We feel pressure to write about a topic that we haven’t yet made up our minds about, or we feel pressured into speaking to a particular audience. These sorts of exigencies are quite normal in school when we’re given assignment by a teacher. In such situations we begin “off balance” and we sometimes think that that’s the point. Sometimes, our teachers tell us that that was the point! But remember that the point, ultimately, is to teach to you regain your balance, to find your center again. The point is not to be be uncomfortable for long periods of time.

In fact, a good assignment will only push the unprepared mind seriously out of balance. If you haven’t been keeping up with your reading and attending class then, yes, reading the prompt can be a jarring experience. You have a vague sense that you should know what is being asked of you, but you simply don’t know what the words mean, what you’re supposed to be doing. If you are familiar with the subject, on the other hand, the assignment simply sets you up for a series of moves that you’ve already practiced during your “training”, i.e., while reading, thinking, and talking about the subject of the course, and while working on your own prose. A well-designed assignment will immediately make all that preparation seem worthwhile. “Let’s see how we do,” you say say to yourself.

Whether you’re practicing or performing, the trick is to pull whatever challenges you face towards the place where you have resources to deal with them. When writing, always decide the day before what you will say, and don’t make this decision on the basis of some external pressure to say some specific thing, as if there’s a right answer, something you must say. Make the decision on the basis of how well you understand something. Choose something you know well enough to write at least six sentences about, i.e., a paragraph. I recommend you choose something you knew already last week. And then give yourself half an hour the next morning to write that paragraph, calmly and deliberately from the center of your strength. Show yourself what you’re capable of when you’re at your best.

Just looking at your key sentence the day before should be a comfortable experience. The prospect of composing the paragraph after a good night’s sleep should be a pleasant one. If it isn’t, you should choose something else to write about. The idea that writing should always be a groping forward in the darkness at the edge of your abilities is not helpful. Writing should be a time of relative comfort, of comfortably knowing how smart you are. At least a great deal of the time.

I was about to tear into Hugh Kearns over a tweet of his, but then did what you should always do before engaging, and clicked through to the post at the LSE Impact Blog he had summarized. It turns out that his advice is entirely sensible. There’s a small point I’d like to take issue with, but I’ll leave that to the end.

“The write-up period is a delusion,” write Kearns and Gardiner (and tweeted Hugh), “People say ‘I’ve done all the other bits, I just have to write it up.’ Just have to write it up! Like it was just a minor task. Writing is probably the most intellectually challenging part of the process.” The point is that you should be writing from the beginning — there is no “write-up period” after the “research period”. Not having completed any one part of your research process is no reason not to be writing. There is always something you can be writing. And it’s certainly not a matter of “just” writing, as though it’s an insignificant part of the process of getting a PhD. “It’s hard work so you need to start writing as early as possible. Write as you go. Start writing now.”

The important thing here is to see writing as a part of your life, your day-to-day. It should be one of the many things you “show up for” on a regular basis. We don’t put off teaching until we know everything about a subject. And we don’t stay away from seminars just because we haven’t read the paper(s) being discussed as closely as we would have liked. We contribute continuously to the variety of functions that being an academic implicates us in. We do the best we can with the class on the day it is scheduled; we contribute to the seminar as best we can, or at least get as much out of it as we are able. And, anyway, our research, our learning process, is never really finished (as Kearns and Gardiner also point out), so if we’re waiting for a distinct “write-up period,” we could in principle be waiting forever.

How to decide what to write will depend a little on the sort of research you’re doing. On the classic approach, you’ll be developing your methods and procedures within the framework of a reigning theory. If that’s how you do things, you should be able to write much of your theory chapter while you’re collecting your data. After all, you couldn’t have worked out your method without knowing a great deal about the theories you’ll use to analyze the data after you have it. You should also be in a good position to write major portions of your background chapter. By a similar token, by the time you’re analyzing your data you should be able to write clearly and honestly about how you collected it, i.e., your methods chapter. The general point is that you’re not conducting your research in a vacuum of total ignorance that you at some point fill with air. In order to get into the doctoral program you had to demonstrate that you’re a knowledgeable person. You’ve got a lot of things on your mind already. You’re doing what you’re doing, seeing what you’re seeing, learning what you’re learning, on the basis of a vast amount of knowledge that you’ve already acquired.

My advice is to remind yourself that, however much you still have to learn, there are many things you already know. In fact, much of what you will know by the time you submit your thesis, you already knew last week. So just pick something you knew last week to write about tomorrow. Write at least one thing you know (and at most six) every day, five days a week, four times a year, eight weeks in a row. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing the rest of the day — reviewing the literature, collecting data, analyzing it, or thinking through its implications — or teaching a class or contributing to a research proposal or even planning your wedding. We’re just talking about a half hour of writing about something you know. Get it done. Get on with your day.

Don’t wait for “the writing-up period”. Don’t delude yourself into thinking it’ll all come together at the end. And don’t imagine you can’t concentrate on a single thing you know “with all this other stuff going on”. Pick one thing this evening. Write about it tomorrow. You’ll be surprised. What ultimately “comes together” is the three or four hundred paragraphs you managed to write while you were doing all those other things.

So far, I think Hugh, Maria and I agree. But there’s one thing in their post that doesn’t sit well with me. “Writing is probably the most intellectually challenging part of the whole process,” they say. “Writing is where you do the deep thinking; making sense of all the reading you’ve done; interpreting the data you’ve collected; and trying to communicate what it all means.” This is of course true for many researchers and especially those that leave the writing to the end. These are people who spend far too long not writing and hope to accomplish far too much in far too little time. (At the extreme, they’re waiting for a “secret miracle”.) Also, they believe Hugh and Maria (and many, many others before them) when they say that writing involves “deep thinking”, “making sense” and “communicating meaning”. So by the time they get to the writing they’re out of shape and way too demanding (of themselves). They want their writing to do the heavy lifting that should already be long behind them.

If you think about it, it can’t be right that writing is the “most intellectually challenging” aspect of research. Maybe a novelist can make this claim, but surely the hard part of research is actually making discoveries — reading difficult texts, collecting representative data, and carrying out complex analyses. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you think writing is the “hard part” maybe you’re not working hard enough at your research. (I’m sure Hugh and Maria don’t think their research is “easy” and, I suspect they meant it as hyperbole, so I hope neither they nor you take offense at this way of reminding you of the real difficulty.) There’s a difference between not putting your writing off until after your research is done and conflating your writing process with your research process.

The “write-up period” may well be a delusion, but there’s very definitely such a thing as “writing down” what you know. If you know what you’re talking about, and you’ve trained yourself, day by day, to write down things you know for the purpose of discussing them with other knowledge people, writing isn’t the hard part. It’s still hard, but it’s not the bulk of the challenge. I think that’s important to keep in mind.

Balance itself is always harder to describe than the clumsy poses that result when it is destroyed.

Wayne C. Booth, “The Rhetorical Stance,” CCC, 14(3), 1963.

For Booth, the “pedant’s stance” and the “advertiser’s stance” are “perversions” of the “rhetorical stance,” which is characterized by a “balance among speakers, audience, and argument.” Importantly, the rhetorician does not play the pedant and the advertiser off each other in order to achieve this balance. Those alternative stances are each unbalanced in different ways — perverted — by an overemphasis on, respectively, argument and audience. Speakers (i.e., writers) have to find their balance in themselves, not in between the pedant and the advertiser. How should academic writers approach this problem?

While Booth doesn’t put it quite this way, I would say that the speaker must appropriate the argument and identify with the audience. If you are writing about More’s Utopia you are really writing about your reading of More’s Utopia and you are writing for other readers of the same book. You are not simply telling people who have never read the book and will never read the book what it says. You are not just reading the book so someone else won’t have to. You are telling someone who has also been thinking about it what you think.

People sometimes misunderstand Orwell’s slogan “prose like a window pane” as an injunction to provide a clear view of “the facts,” as though a perfectly “objective” view of them is possible without any intrusion of “subjective” concerns. But he was really telling us to provide a clear view of our thoughts, our own images of the facts. The facts that may be adduced about More’s Utopia (the actual book) are as available to your reader as they are to you. But your image of More’s Utopia (the fictional place), which you have gleaned from the pages of his book, is of interest to a reader that has formed an image of their own, which they can then compare to yours. The purpose of your writing is not to tell the reader what they already know, or could find out by reading More themselves, but to get them to consider something they might otherwise not have noticed. It is to offer your reader an opportunity to engage.

Burke’s work on the Sublime and Beautiful is a relatively unimpassioned philosophical treatise, but one finds there again a delicate balance: though the implied author of this work is a far different person, far less obtrusive, far more objective, than the man who later cried sursum corda to the British Parliament, he permeates with his philosophical personality his philosophical work. And though the signs of his awareness of his audience are far more subdued, they are still here: every effort is made to involve the proper audience, the audience of philosophical minds, in a fundamentally interesting inquiry, and to lead them through to the end. In short, because he was a man engaged with men in the effort to solve a human problem, one could never call what he wrote dull, however difficult or abstruse. (Booth, 1963, p. 145)

By appropriating you argument (by making the subject your own) and by identifying with your reader (by making them one of your peers) you establish what we might call a “clearing” (in a vaguely Heideggerian sense) for your argument, a place for it to stand, some grounds on which we can see if it “holds up”. You are standing in that clearing, too, and you are standing there with your reader. The result may not always be exactly sublime, or even beautiful, but it should never be dull.

This perversion is probably in the long run a more serious threat in our society than the danger of ignoring the audience.

Wayne C. Booth, “The Rhetorical Stance,” CCC, 14(3), 1963.

Academics today are strongly encouraged ensure the “impact” of their research. They are told to measure their success, at least in part, by the effect they have on the public and the policy makers who represent it. For my part, I’ve long tried to push against this eagerness to “really matter”; I have, for example, urged academics to curb their romance with storytelling and focus on their peers and students. I think there is perfectly respectable work to be done entirely within the ivory tower and, like Wayne Booth, I fear that the desire for broader impact establishes some “perverse” incentives for scholars.

Booth tells the story of a dinner party where he was told that his book’s title (which included the word “rhetoric”) was not sufficiently gripping. He’d have been better off polling a few hundred “businessmen” and then settle on a title that would sell, said his tablemate, who happened to be an advertising consultant. Indeed, whether the title “fit the book” was not as important as we might think. “If the book is designed right, so that the first chapter pulls them in, and you keep them in, who’s going to gripe about a little inaccuracy in the title?”

When I read this I was reminded of exchange I had with Patrick Dunleavy. When he announced the publication of Maximizing the Impacts of Academic Research, I suggested that, given the “replication crisis”, perhaps we should also talk about minimizing the harms of academic research. That is, there sometimes seems to be an assumption among promoters of the “impact agenda” that all scientific results are true and their impact can therefore only be good. Maximizing the impact of research results means maximizing their spread in society, which means maximizing these positive effects. But that assumption doesn’t seem to hold. If half of all research results are wrong, maximing their impact doesn’t sound like such a great idea any longer. Perhaps we should talk of “optimizing,” I suggested.

Patrick and I agree on a lot of things, and this turned out to be one of them. In fact, he wanted to call the book Improving the Impact of Academic Research but his publisher insisted on Maximizing. They are no doubt right to assume that the book has been designed right and that no one is going to gripe too much about the title. In fact, while I suppose I did gripe, it was only a little and, as Booth’s advertising consultant predicted, I was immediately placated by the book’s more balanced content.

Nonetheless, by its mere existence, the book gives weight (not balance) to the slogan “Maximize Your Impact!” and that does leave me somewhat uneasy. Back in 1963, Booth put it as follows:

In the time of audience-reaction meters and pre-tested plays and novels, it is not easy to convince students of
the old Platonic truth that good persuasion is honest persuasion, or even of the old Aristotelian truth that the good rhetorician must be master of his subject, no matter how dishonest he may decide ultimately to be. Having told them that good writers always to some degree accommodate their arguments to the audience, it is hard to explain the difference between justified accommodation — say changing point one to the final position — and the kind of accommodation that fills our popular magazines, in which the very substance of what is said is accommodated to some preconception of what will sell.

The technology has changed since then — we’re more likely to speak of “metrics” and “focus groups” (not to mention “sensitivity readers”!) — but the problem is the same. There is an incentive to “accommodate” pressures that are entirely extrinsic to the author’s primary purpose. Booth rightly points out that it is difficult to convince students to stand firm against these pressures, developing and defending opinions of their own. “The advertiser’s stance,” he tells us, “comes from undervaluing the subject and overvaluing pure effect.” Of course, his students have long since graduated, some of them have become scholars, and many have probably even retired. Today, these extrinsic pressures have become altogether intrisic to the life of academics. It’s hard to find your balance when the “pure effect” of not publishing, of not having an “impact”, is to “perish”.

Update: Patrick detects signs of “the old stance of elitist diffidence & separation” in this post. I must partially cop to the charge, but it’s important to keep in mind that, like Booth, I strongly reject “the pedant’s stance” and my plea, like Patrick’s, is always for balance. Where we may differ is in our analysis of the current direction of imbalance. There will be at least one more post on Booth’s essay.