“In writing for a newspaper you told what happened aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if your stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it.” (Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1932, p. 10)

The ideal Hemingway story (perhaps simply the ideal story?) needs neither an explicit frame nor an explicit point. The story is just a “sequence of motion and fact” for which both the context and the consequences are obvious. The reader will understand what is happening because you are using ordinary words to refer to ordinary uses of ordinary things. Your reader will understand why you are telling the story because it involves a familiar predicament, with familiar moral stakes. It is our shared humanity that will imbue it with meaning.

This does, to be sure, make some assumptions about the reader, and in academic writing those assumptions often need to be made explicit. We can see how this works by imagining a somewhat bigger iceberg than the one I proposed in my last post. Instead of letting it be borne up only by your experiences, consider letting both your reading and your reasoning contribute to its mass. Scholars do a lot of reading; they normally stay abreast of current events and are also often interested in culture and literature. Being naturally reflective people, they also do a lot of thinking about the world around them, they ponder the state of the times, and worry about about the future. All of this shapes their interpretation of their experiences of the world. And this also shapes how they understand each other’s stories.

If we suppose your original anecdote consisted of 5-600 words we can think of it as the body of a five-paragraph essay. It can be organized into three moments or episodes (a beginning, a middle, an end), each presented in a single paragraph of at least six sentences and at most 200 words. Now add an introductory paragraph that frames your story with something you’ve read in the news or in a work of fiction and a concluding paragraph that sharpens its point in the bright light of reason (or the warm glow of common sense). If you want to follow the five-paragraph essay form strictly, make sure you state the point already in the first paragraph (after framing it) and invoke the frame again in the last paragraph (after making the point). You end up with two (nested) three-part structures: frame, story (beginning, middle, end), point.

Altogether you should have no more than 1000 words now. But, as before, you should be sure that you could say 7000 more if you need to. Your introductory paragraph about what you’ve read will be no more than 200 words, but there must be over a thousands words you could say about the same literature. The 200-word paragraph that states the moral of the tale will draw on lines of reasoning that could fill an essay of its own. It is this unsaid component of your story that gives it its depth, its dignity.

Our iceberg has gotten little more complex, but we’re still in the familiar territory of classical storytelling and scholarship. We might say we’re still considering the sort of writing (stories, essays) that can be found in the liberal arts. Our experience-based anecdote has been enriched with erudition and reflection, but all we have really done is to make explicit what was implicit in the story. Our iceberg has three layers, all of which have a component above and a component below the surface. (I’m working on some illustrations, but I encourage you to draw these icebergs as we go along.) In my next post I’ll suggest two additional layers, both of which come from splitting a layer we already have. Here our text will find another kind of dignity, another kind of authority. We will find out what it means to write a scientific paper.

(with apologies to David Hockney)

Let’s start small. Think of something that has happened to you recently. Think of an everyday occurrence with you at its center. It will be useful to approach it as an “experience” — a sequence of actions and events that affected you in some way. It happened to you, after all, so it can’t have left you completely unchanged. You may have helped someone or someone may have helped you; or you may have gained or lost something of a more material kind. Hopefully, you learned something in any case, of course.

Try to think of an experience that now exists mainly in your memory, not in some outward record or document of the process. If it had a product, that’s fine; you may have built something with your own hands or cut something down or bought something or sold it. But I just want it to be something small enough that there’s isn’t really anything to prove it happened other than your recollection of it.

Now imagine yourself telling the story — a story in which you are the protagonist. First, notice that I’ve set this up so that you are the ideal narrator; in fact, you’re the only true authority on what happened. Even if other people were involved, they are not witnesses to the whole event, and certainly not to your experience of it; they just played their little part in it. Because it is your experience, you alone are “authorized” to tell us what happened, how it felt to you.

This is a crucial component of what we mean by “author” since if you say something that someone else (or some document) can disprove then your credibility takes a hit. You’ve gone beyond your authority. Keep this in mind when choosing the episode you want to use in this exercise. By a similar token, don’t make it something so personal you can only talk about it with difficulty. All we need is a true story. An anecdote. It doesn’t have to be profound or even entertaining. It just has to have happened and have a reasonable amount of detail. It should take about five minutes to tell the story.

“The dignity of the movement of an iceberg,” said Hemingway, “is due to only one eighth of it being above water.” The words we write are only the tip of the iceberg of our experience. The simplest case, I want to argue, is the situation I’ve asked you to imagine. Your goal is to produce a sequence of words, one word after the other, let’s say around 500 in all, that get their “dignity” from your experience. “A writer’s problem does not change,” said Hemingway:

He himself changes, but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it and seems actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.

In Death in the Afternoon, he gives us a clearer sense of the problem:

…the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what your were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.

This is the difficulty I’m proposing that you face. But I want you to leave that even greater difficulty — of knowing what you really feel — on the side. I want you to pick something where that isn’t hard for you to decide. Pick an easy case and then take on the difficulty of putting down “the actual things” that made the experience what it was.

This is only a beginning. Next time, we’ll try something harder, something bigger. For now, I’m asking you write a tidy little anecdote that is borne up by a perfectly ordinary experience. Write a few hundred words, but leave a few thousand under the surface to give your writing dignity — to give them inertia when someone tries to push on them. These are the thousands of words you could say in elaboration if anyone asks, but that you have chosen to leave out in your first statement of the story. What remains should still make sense. The story doesn’t need you to say all those other things. It’s just that you could say them. They constitute a reserve strength, a kind of depth. Remember that what Hemingway says of icebergs is no less true of ice cubes. Even the smallest story has seven times more under the surface than what it says.

Everyone who has ever become good at something has had a healthy contempt for mediocrity. But a moment’s reflection will remind us that we are all mediocre (at best) in some ways, indeed, in most ways. We don’t actually expect everyone to pursue greatness in all things. We don’t even expect them to always do their best. Sometimes we see someone “dialing it in” and we’re sympathetic, we understand their attitude. Sometimes we, too, don’t give our full attention to a task. And in more areas of life than not, even when we’re doing our very best, we aren’t doing better than the average person.

When thinking about your writing, remember that this range of commitment and competence also applies. How well you are writing on a given day doesn’t tell us anything about how good a person you are. Whether or not you are a “writer”, let alone a “good” or “great” one, is not revealed in any particular experience. You can only know this by looking at the work you’ve done over a very long period of time. Being a writer isn’t an act. It’s a habit.

This is something that Eric Hayot writes compellingly about in his book The Elements of Academic Writing. I agree with the substance of his approach but there’s something about his attitude that sits uneasily with me. I like his practice but, as I said in my last post, I’m not sure about his theory. He suggests writing every day, which is simply great advice. I’m less sure that you should sit down every day in front of your machine and try to be “great”. I don’t think you should write with any anxiety about your mediocrity.

“Do not worry,” Hemingway says. “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.” Eric disagrees:

Writing as though you already know what you have to say hinders it as a medium for research and discovery; it blocks the possibilities — the openings — that appear at the intersection of an intention and an audience, and constitute themselves, there, as a larger, complete performance. Active writing should not involve saying things you already understand and know, but instead let you think new things. And that is why, this book will argue, you cannot know what your ideas are, mean, or do until you set theme down in sentences, whether on paper or on screen. It is also why the essay or the book you write will not be, if you are open and generous and unafraid, the essay or book you started with. (P. 1)

I think you should sit down and calmly face the fact that you’re not as good a writer as you’d like to be. This means you should always (or mostly or at least very often) be writing about things you already know, things you understand well enough that knowing isn’t going to be the main problem. Let writing be the problem you are facing. Eric, by contrast, says that confining yourself to writing what you know “hinders” and even “blocks” your process. But surely writing with the intention of being “great” can be debilitating too. Indeed, we don’t have to look further that Eric’s own process to see how this might happen:

What this means is that everything that is weak in me — everything that would have me sleep another hour, avoid working out, put off cleaning the house, or delay a necessary apology to a friend — struggles to keep me from writing, fights to have me give up and be satisfied with the sentences I already have or the essays I’ve already published. (P. 18)

Instead of normalizing our anxiety about writing I propose we embrace our mediocrity. But only long enough to make progress, of course. We want to use our writing time, not to discover whether or not we are great writers and thinkers, but simply to become better writers and better thinkers. The way to do this, I want to argue, is to remember that the whole point of academic writing is to expose the weaknesses in our thinking to our peers so that they can help us to overcome them. I’ll grant that that’s mainly a euphemism for letting them tell us we are wrong. And I will also grant, as I did in my first post on this subject, that the difference between Eric’s view of writing and mine is mainly one of emphasis, of attitude. Eric writes with what is no doubt a healthy fear of everything that is weak in him and, by the sound of it, I have the same things to fear in me. Still, I try to write from the center of my strength.

To bad practice he has prefixed the bad theory which made the practice bad; he has given us a false theory in his preface, and he has exemplified the bad effects of that false theory in his translation.

Matthew Arnold (On Translating Homer, II, §58)

Last week, I promised I’d write a bit more about Eric Hayot’s views on academic writing in continuation of my last post. Once again, I want to make clear that I admire Eric’s writing, and even many of his ideas about writing. My problem is that he seems to take a dim view of mine! While he suspects that we are at bottom in agreement about the essentials, I’m having a hard time seeing the common ground. After all, I conceive of academic writing quite explicitly as “the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people.” And here’s what Eric says on the first page of his book:

Conceiving of writing as the process whereby you put down thoughts you already have will give you a bad theory of what writing does and can do. As an idea of writing’s purpose it tends to make for mediocre writers and mediocre prose.

That’s pretty strong language, and I’m going to have to defend myself against the charge. But only by half. Obviously, I can’t grant that I have a “bad theory” of writing, but I can suggest that Eric has a bad theory of mediocre writing. He may have a perfectly good theory of “great” writing, but as he surely knows, and even partly concedes in his own case, most writers aren’t that great. Indeed, most aren’t even trying to be great. In my defense, then, I want to suggest that I have a pretty good (perhaps even great) theory of mediocre writing; more precisely, I have a theory about how mediocre writers can improve.

I think my tolerance for mediocrity is really what distinguishes my approach from Eric’s. We can see it in the way he talks about his own drama of composition:

Let’s start with fear. I am terrified — seriously terrified — of academic writing. Nothing that I do confronts me as strongly with a fear of total, consuming incompetency and inadequacy. The problem is that I’m trying to be great, and I am (quite reasonably, unfortunately) afraid that I am not great. (P. 17)

Again, let me grant that this may be a good theory of great writing. This may be how great writers feel and it may describe the mood in which they do their great writing. (There’s anecdotal evidence for and against the theory, I should say.) But, as he has learned even in his own case, it doesn’t apply to more ordinary kinds of writing.

When I write for Printculture, or when I worked as a journalist at the Associated Press, I never felt the anxiety I associate with scholarly writing. I also don’t feel it when writing e-mails, annual reports, grant applications, or grocery lists. Those kinds of writing can be boring or institutionally complicated, but they don’t involve a confrontation with the fear that I am not as good as I would like to be. (p. 18)

He presents this in a self-aware and critical tone. That is, he knows that some of his readers will suggest that he just relax a little and stop trying to be so great. Perhaps you could replace the fear you feel with the calm knowledge that you’re not as good as you’d like to be and that you will naturally improve as long as you work carefully and conscientiously at your tasks? But Eric explicitly rejects this strategy.

Unfortunately, at some level the ambition to do great work — to write something that matters not just to me but also to the community of peers I care most about, the people whose work I respect and admire most — is central to the ethos of why I write scholarship at all. I cannot imagine giving up on it, since to do so would be to settle for producing mediocre essays. As a matter of career survival, it is possible to get by on work one knows is mediocre, but, for me at least, such a thing would make it impossible to go on. I don’t have to be great, but I have to be trying for greatness. (p. 18)

There it is again: that underlying contempt for mediocrity. It is here coupled with his theory of greatness: you have to be trying to be great. I will leave it there for now and let you ponder the philosophical question of whether the surest way to become great is to intentionally pursue it as a goal. Need I say Zen in the Art of … ?

More later.

Eric Hayot, who writes lucidly about Ezra Pound and many other things, has written a book called The Elements of Academic Style (2014), which is also entirely worth reading. He pitches it explicitly to scholars and students in the humanities, but I have no doubt he’s right to think that his advice generalizes beyond that context. I’m not writing this post to praise Hayot’s book, however; you can take a look at it yourself and see what you think. I want to take issue with something he says on the very first page, something I think touches a vital nerve in writing instruction and, indeed, in practical scholarly writing. It goes to the very purpose of academic writing, the question of why we write.

“Writing is not the memorialization of ideas,” Hayot begins. “Writing distills, crafts, and pressure tests ideas — it creates ideas.” This has the important consequence, which he gets to a few sentences later, that “you cannot know what your ideas are, mean, or do until you set them down in sentences, whether on paper or on screen.” Hayot doesn’t hold back here: “Conceiving of writing as putting down thoughts you already have will give you a bad theory of what writing does and can do,” which, he argues will shape your practice. “As an idea of writing’s purpose, it tends to make for mediocre writers and mediocre prose.” If you want to rise above this mediocrity, he argues, you must be “open and generous and unafraid”, working at “the intersection of an intention and an audience” where new ideas emerge in “a larger, complete performance” of writing. It’s all very heady and inspiring stuff. And who wants to be a mediocre writer with a bad theory of his practice? Not me. Still, something about this conception of writing doesn’t feel right to me.

The view he opposes sees writing as “a necessary but tedious step in the distribution and fixation of ideas”. My view is that academic writing is the art of writing down what you (yes, already) know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. The goal of academic writing is not to distribute your ideas — something that is arguably better done in the classroom and at conferences — and certainly not to fixate your ideas — a hope I’ve never really heard scholars express. The current publish-or-perish regime in academia does leave many people with the impression that the purpose of academic writing is to document their ideas, i.e., to demonstrate to hiring and tenure committees that they actually have ideas, and, in that sense perhaps, to “memorialize” them, but I think we all still understand this to be a secondary function of academic writing, not its primary purpose. What I reject is the notion that we write in order to discover or create ideas. The purpose of academic writing is to expose ideas to criticism. And this requires that we write down what we already think, not that we wait to see what we think after the “larger, complete performance” of academic discourse has already begun.

Hayot suggests that this performance is constituted by “the openings that appear at the intersection of an intention and an audience”. I am also happy to specify a “here” of academic writing. When we write, we step into the clearing that has been prepared by our peers in the discourse, and there we expose ourselves to the possibility that we are wrong. I’m not sure it requires generosity of us, but it does require us to trust in the kindness of strangers, i.e., to presume that we will be read charitably. It takes courage, precisely because we may not be entirely unafraid. It certainly requires us to be open — mainly about the grounds we have for holding the beliefs we do. These, after all, are what we are presenting to our peers for critique. When we write with sincerity (as Pound noted through one of his famous mistranslations of Chinese writing) we “stand by” our ideas.

It can’t be true, I want to say, that you don’t know what you think until you write it down and that, when you do begin to write, you immediately open your thinking to a process in which it becomes something else. It must be possible for your reader to gain access to your (prior) intention through your writing so that, if you are wrong about something, the reader has an occasion to correct your thinking. I think the underlying misconception here — or at least my underlying disagreement with Hayot (for there is the possibility that I’m wrong about this, of course) — is that writing is a “performance” of our ideas rather than their representation. More seriously, Hayot seems to think that our ideas are always only whatever they mean in some “larger, complete performance”, that they have no individual dignity or integrity, that they are forever “emerging” before an audience, that they can’t be tested one at a time (as Pound, by the way, also hoped they could). I believe we can write down what we think, and that we can learn how to do this well through practice.

All this may just be a difference of emphasis. (I, too, sometimes discover what I think when I write; Hayot, no doubt often, writes something down he’s known for a while.) I agree with Hayot that academic writing is not merely the memorialization of ideas and certainly not the tedious business of distributing them. In fact, I worry that by conceiving of writing as the “creation” of ideas we merely conscript it into the tedium of “knowledge production”. We think of writing as something that is supposed to add something to culture (as if we need more of it!) rather than conserve what is of value and correct what is mistaken. Scholarship is the exposure of ideas to criticism from competent peers. At the intersection of that intention with that audience a possibility does indeed emerge — the possibility of scholarly discourse. We must remember that academia traces its origins back to a garden in ancient Athens and perhaps, then, we can give the last word to Ezra Pound himself: “We live in an age of science and abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ‘the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.”