How Teaching Has Helped My Writing

I'll never forget what Pulitzer-prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson said once during an interview at Calvin College's Festival of Faith & Writing. It boiled down to the fact that she doesn't do well when she can't teach along with her writing.

At the time, not having had much experience with teaching, I thought it was sort of a funny thing to say. But now, having had several more years of teaching experience under my belt, I'm beginning to get it. I'm not sure that teaching is quite as indispensable to me as it is to Marilynne. But then, right now I'm deep into a particular project, and quite enjoy the times when I can be fully absorbed in its world.

But I can also see that my experience with teaching--and I do love teaching--has definitely helped improve my writing, both that for academic audiences and creative projects. This semester I'm really seeing the fruits of teaching in these seemingly non-teaching-related tasks.

Take my academic writing task for this morning. Since I'm going to present at the Popular Culture Association conference in a few weeks, I had to take an aspect of my nearly-300 page dissertation and turn it into an 8 page paper to present in 15-20 minutes. The fact that the last few years of teaching has given me experience in just how much complex information I can translate for students in a short amount of time helped me to complete this task in a short amount of time. (And of course the fact that I regularly teach public speaking didn't hurt either: I've planned several spots where I hope to draw the audience into the presentation through asking them questions, for instance.)

But academic writing isn't the only way that my teaching experience has been useful. In my NaNoWriSpr novel manuscripting project, I've noticed that my practice in persuading students to be interested in learning subjects they see to be boring or difficult has helped me in writing my novel as well.

After all, one can't assume one's readership comes into a novel automatically liking it, and so you have to make a strong case for their attention both at the beginning but also throughout the story while dispensing the right kind of background information at the right times. Watching where my students' attention flags--and knowing the same material strikes different classes in different ways--has helped me to be aware that my reader is likely doing the same with my writing at times.

Unlike with my teaching, I don't have immediate non-verbal feedback with my writing. My teaching experience has taught me, therefore, to get feedback during my development process from as many readers as possible to see how different types of people respond to my story. This, like my students' faces, helps me to see how well I'm doing to engage a range of people without relying too much on a single reader experience. And when a theme pops up over time in my reader feedback--as it tends to both in students' faces and in student evaluations--I know I need to consider how to adjust to better engage my audience.

Yup, I'm beginning to get a sense of why Marilynne Robinson said what she said about the teaching. Without the feedback, the practice in translating things for others, the face-to-face interaction with others in a setting like teaching, the process in writing can become a little disconnected from these crucial concepts. Like Marilynne, I'm thankful for the teaching experience I've been granted so far.

Days 1& 2: Treading that Boundary between Good and Wimpy Self-Excuse

Huge...task...set for myself...this weekend, involving these Monday night deadlines. Which means yes, I'm significantly ahead as far as personal word count goes, but I have the great desire to manufacture several more days' worth of time between now and tomorrow night.

Anyway, let's focus on the positive here. As of the twittering-birds'-time when I went to bed this morning, I had written 3646 new words on 3 different projects, revised 3 pages and submitted one conference paper abstract. That means that as far as these personal goals for this contest I'm ahead by about 2000 words, which puts me on par with NaNoWriMo word counts after 2 days. But...lots to do yet for those pesky external Monday deadlines.

This having a word count and a goal is a fabulous way of pulling out and evaluating the success of my writing practices, as well as becoming intensely aware of all the things inside me that try to resist getting stuff out there on the page.

On Friday night I tried the "reading my notes right before I went to sleep thing" and that seemed to work well, as did the "keeping my notes in mind before jumping in the shower" thing. Caffeine also seemed to work well, and finally later in the evening, pulling out my classic paper-writing movie--Lord of the Rings--as a backdrop really kicked me back into gear.

But listening to music? Not so helpful yesterday. Neither was the 50% off Halloween candy (sugar high only followed by crash and guilt--not so pleasant). Playing piano helped quite a bit, but wasn't the thing yesterday that had me running back to the screen and back to plowing out more pages again. However much I hate it, I think I just needed a break in the middle of the day yesterday for my mind to think things over.

Sometimes I wish I could overcome such simmering times. I'd get so much more done more quickly. Sadly, sometimes they're needed, both for academic and creative projects. One can jump among the projects when one gets stuck, and therefore pick up some productivity that way, but at some point I tend to hit a wall on all projects so my mind can get one figured out. Thus it always has been.

Hm, I think it's good that I'm trying to push myself. It's helping me differentiate between what's a real barrier to getting work done and what's the kind of wimpy excuse I tend to buy from myself because that other part of myself's such an excellent rhetor. :) There's still a lot of gushy ground, though, maddeningly, between the two...

Declaration: 25,000 (New) Words by November 30

So for those of you that don't know, it's National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) beginning today. In past posts I've been feeling left out of these creative speedwriting events, but yesterday I made a command decision--I'm going to ride the wave of enthusiasm and slight insanity of NaNoWriMo, but in my own way.

No, I'm not going to plow out 50,000 words of novel draft by the end of the month, as NaNoWriMo participants will. My goal is more in keeping with the spirit of this blog, whose purpose is to knock down the partitions between the parts of my writing selves.

And so (drum roll please) I'm going to write 25,000 new words of significant writing (for the most part, blog entries don't count) by November 30. This averages out to, excluding Sundays and starting last night, an average of 1000 new words per day. This writing may be academic or creative in nature. It can be in any combination of projects. In fact, the work can involve revision--10 pages of revised text will substitute per 1000 words of my total.

The rule is only that it must not primarily be for my own use, but something that's intended to be sent out into the world for evaluation--either to be graded by my professors or for publication of some kind.

See, I'm a grad student, and I have lots of other writing responsibilities I would feel terrible about abdicating if I tried to spend a month doing NaNoWriMo with only creative work. This way I should make tons of progress on my academic writing (and yes, journals that I have to hand in for my archives class count) and, because of that, get some work done in the creative realm as well.

Oh, and query letters and cover letters count as well--I'll be counting up the number of items I actually submit places as well. I'm excited about using this month not only to produce, but also to focus on revising as many items as possible and getting 'em out there...

So hey, those of you out there doing NaNoWriMo, I'm with you guys. And those of you who don't feel you have a novel in you but want to ride the writing excitement with me, please feel free to join me in NaWriMo, using whatever rules you feel you can adhere to reasonably.

Of course, this said, my first night was unproductive. Today, however, I'm planning to write a good portion of a conference paper due on Monday, and revise another for the same deadline, and write a creative non-fic essay also due on Monday, so that will get me significantly ahead in word count.

So off into the intrepid adventure of plowing out the pages of text...I'm quite excited about it, actually...check out this blog's side bar for my word count and submission stats.

The Need for Non-Verbal Expression

I was tempted to make this post blank, but then I figured that was just a smart-aleck trick, since that wouldn't quite get across everything I was trying to say.

My thought, stemming from the musical solution to my recent reader's block, is that it's good to have a set of writing practices that don't involve verbalizing why you're blocked. Yes, I think it's good to journal stuff out, too, but things like music, exercise, and arts and crafts are good ways to not only get your brain moving, but to siphon off emotions without having to verbalize everything.

I think us word people--I know I do it--focus too much sometimes on the power of words to make things right. They can, it's true, and it's good to keep writing, for many many reasons, but it's also good sometimes to express things non-verbally, not necessarily to keep a 50-50 balance, but to make sure some of that is happening.

No one, after all, knows more than us that words have their limits.

A Bad News/Good News Scenario

Bad news: I'm quite tired, having stayed up until 4:30 a.m. finishing the load of homework due today, which I was finishing up after the load of homework due yesterday. And tonight I have to annotate the notes I put together for tomorrow night's presentation, so the wave's still washing over me, although the biggest part of it has past.

Good news: It turned out that an hour spent in near-pounding out tunes on my incredibly out-of-tune piano siphoned off enough psychic blockage to let me finish everything I was supposed to finish. On time, if not with a lot of time in there for sleeping. And now that the first wave of the semester has passed, I have time to scan the horizon (er, syllabi) for future waves, so as to see where I can plan for them. I also have time to actually get the piano tuned so that I can do less violence to my ear drums next time I hit reader's or writer's block.

Bad news: I got a negative response to my novel manuscript query in the mail today.

Good news: It was the nicest rejection I've ever gotten. Not only was it very timely (just over 2 weeks since I sent the original by mail) and handwritten, but it began with the word "Alas" (in the sense that "alas, he couldn't take it"). See, some agents can be nice. And now it's time to get back on that horse and get a few more back in the mail quickly, as national events have conspired to give me a window when the topic of my novel is more pertinent than ever.

Bad news: Because I have not yet passed my big nasty exams for my PhD, I may not be able to get a reader's permit to view manuscripts and letters (pertinent to my dissertation topic and my history-ish/archives classes this fall) I've been salivating over that are held at the prestigious Huntington Library in California, when I go there next month.

Good news: I've spoken to the archivist for the collection, and she told me the procedure for asking if I can get in despite not having passed my exams. And even if I don't get a permit, she's willing to meet with me the Monday I'm in the area and get me photocopies of the items I identify as important. This means that, provided the items actually have the exciting information I think is there, I'll be able to write a potentially important paper toward my dissertation this fall. Plus, I'm getting important experience with archives that will help me with future forays into them. Yeah! Good things to temper the bad-news elements of my week!

Reader's Block, Part 2

Okay, so I got curious as to whether others experienced reader's block, and found this lovely and still-relevant thread of discussion about it at LibraryThing, and another at the Guardian.

It seems that that statement the Jack character made in Shadowlands--"we read to know we are not alone"--applies to reading online threads about reader's block as well. I do feel thankful that this is not an isolated condition.

The only problem with these threads is that they refer to "reading" as spare time reading, which means that much of the advice revolves around telling people to wait out the reader's block or switch to reading something else. These are not options for me, since what I'm blocked toward is assigned reading with an imminent deadline. Although several people in the first thread said they really got blocked during grad school, they didn't say how they got around the problem.

Urgh.

By the way, the block is a little bit better, but still distressingly there, at least in part. I don't think the fall allergies are helping it much. Note to self: next year, wait until later in October, when the allergies ease up, to choose to make any class presentations. Except, well, I won't be in classes next fall (what a glorious thought!). I'll be studying for my big nasty exams instead, which task is big and nasty, but blessedly is more flexible in how one studies for it.

Oh, one more thing--there probably won't be any new posts until Wednesday-ish, as that's when my academic load lightens just a bit.

The Mysterious Case of Reader's Block

Here's the thing...so I'm expected to produce a ton of written and oral output of the academic type in the next week. The problem is that in order to do that, I have to shovel a large load of new material into my head, but after 3 years of grad school, it feels like I've reached capacity for new ingestion of written material.

That is to say, I have reader's block.

Anyone have suggestions for practices to get around this weird problem? And quickly? I really need to dig into this stuff tomorrow in a serious way...

The Quest for Balance: A Lament

The days are passing quickly now. Today I will be spending lots of hours on airplanes, returning from a mostly non-working vacation. Tomorrow I plow back into work and classes--it's hard to believe I'm starting my second year of classes for my PhD (it technically started yesterday). I'm excited about the classes I'm taking this semester. But I'm also aware that I'll be sucked into a hectic schedule again. I fear I may not be able to keep the balance I've been finally starting to regain in my writing life, as well as in my life in general.

As part of my mourning process, I'm taking a moment to say goodbye to the things I've enjoyed this summer.

Goodbye to long hours spent baking and cooking for friends, and hanging out with them. Goodbye, long hours spent journaling and brainstorming/working on creative projects. Goodbye, long unscheduled walks. Goodbye to hours that spent immersed in learning a new language. Goodbye to consumption of so much time by DVDs and fiction books.

Oh well, at least over the summer I've been getting energized about some of these things again, so I hope to be able to cycle through a variety of these activities (though in smaller quantities, of course) rather than getting sucked too much into just one of them, when I do have time.

And I have an eye on some creative writing projects that might be easier to slip into and out of this semester--I didn't have those last year. That will help. And this blog should help reminding me to keep things balanced as well.

Here's hoping it will be a healthier semester than the last one.

Mindgames; or, the Fine Art of Self-Management

The difficult part in being in occupations involving writing is that so often we are required to manage ourselves to get our stuff done. Many times, we don't even have anyone breathing down our necks to finish our novels except ourselves, and even when we are externally motivated, we still have difficulty getting past our internal roadblocks to getting the work done. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly as an at-times-procrastinatory graduate student with an interest in the workings of rhetoric/persuasion.

The art of self-management, I've been reflecting, is a bizarre one, involving a rhetorical situation that pits oneself against oneself, as both rhetor and audience. In order to convince oneself to do something one does not want to do, one has to:

1. Partition the part of oneself that wants to get something done from the part that really does not want to do whatever it is.
   
   
2. From the perspective of the part that wants to persuade the recalcitrant part, study the audience (i.e., the part that really does not want to do whatever it is). This is, perhaps not surprisingly, difficult, as a large part of one's mind will be resisting this process. Free-writing helps--I think this is why morning pages are so helpful.
   
   
3. Consider and try motivational strategies. Figuring out what has worked in the past helps with this. But also be creative in finding solutions. Collect these on paper or in your head for later use. Note: Being hostile to one's audience isn't such a good motivational ploy.
   
   
4. Lather, rinse, repeat. Only do this when needed. The way I look at it, there's no need to do this all the time, as one is not blocked or unmotivated all the time. When you've found a set of formulas that works, no need to muck with them for awhile, until one forgets again. One can get more done when one isn't always fiddling with one's self-motivation processes.
   

It feels weird, this process. Very strange. But a week's worth of morning pages certainly seems to have helped with this, and gotten me back into the game. The thing is, the morning pages get my creative side so jazzed up and productive that I think I should take a bit of a break from them for awhile, while I go and work on the things they've inspired me to do, and work out the finer points of the insights they've given me into the ways I work best.

Anyone else find their process to be similar to or different from this? Anyone have creative ideas for motivating oneself?

"Writing the Islands"

So my friend and fellow writer Brian Phipps is starting a blog in order to "write the islands" of a book he's been wanting to write for awhile, in hopes that a public place to post his ideas might keep him accountable for actually working on the rest of it.

This got me thinking about three things:

1. My old blog, which was started for a very similar reason. I was thinking about doing a communication PhD at some point, and knew I was roughly interested in the ideas of technology's interaction with communication, and creativity, so while I was working on my MA in English, the blog was a place to capture my reflections on the subject so I could figure out what I was really interested in about the subject.
   
   It helped a lot--I can't imagine having to write my admissions essays for PhD programs without that resource to paw through and figure out what I was most interested in. Of course, now that I've been taking courses and getting a chance to think about it all the time, and am writing full papers on the subject, I find I have no desire to continue. For me, then, it was a starting point--a place to capture ideas where others could see them and comment on them before I dug into the main task. Now it served its purpose, and so I was happy to move on to this blog, which I expect will help me and others in different ways.


2. The public-private tension with blogs.There's something about the liminality of cyberspace that makes it easy to disclose things, and yet stuff posted on blogs is a publication that anyone can see and respond to. This makes a blog a good place to capture ideas you want to write for an audience and polish a bit, but aren't quite as fully formed as you would make them for an article or a book you were writing.
   
   The liminality (or unfinished nature, as it were) of the blogosphere helps with this stage of the writing (helps one to get around the coherence and relevance censor in one's head), and its public nature helps both with finding people to give feedback and with keeping one accountable for writing the "islands you can see." It also helps to be able to "think things through out loud with others" when those interested in the topic don't happen to be geographically convenient.


3. It would not work for me for fiction. This kind of process, about "writing the islands" you can already see in hopes that the water of the rest of the work will surround them, only works for me in academic prose and other creative non-fiction. It works quite well there, in fact, but my fiction-writing only works if it's linear.
   
   My fiction research is about collecting islands of material, but the novel-writing process for me has to be done in order in the first draft--I can think ahead to the next parts and take notes, but, partly because I'm a "light of the headlights" style fiction writer who doesn't know the end until I see it slightly ahead of the characters, I can't write a new chapter until I'm done with a draft of the last one. I can write a few independent scenes to learn my characters, but they never end up in the draft. I find it fascinating, these differences between the two kinds of processes.

One final thing: writers wonder how to find time to blog when they have so many other things they want to write. It's, I think, at least partly about finding a way to fit it into your current process, and finding the right topic that feeds into your writing--the right topic that both energizes you to write and serves multiple purposes--and then letting yourself see the blogging as a legitimate priority within the writing domain. It's also important to remember, though, I think, that it's there for a specific purpose and therefore that it's okay to move on once it's done that.

I also think it's okay to let it lie fallow for a time or to be willing to shift its purpose if another project if another project comes to the forefront. There's a time when every good topic-based blog, like most TV series, may come to an end, despite its seemingly never-ending nature, because the writer must shift their attention to other projects.

Of course, if one can find a way to make a broadly-enough themed blog to capture one's ideas on many of one's projects, that would work too. One of the reasons I switched to a broader theme for this current blog is to make the blog more sustainable, as it were. In my other blog, I found that having a narrower topic helped me focus, but also was inhibiting at times when I wanted to use the blog for bordering topics.

Any thoughts from you bloggers out there on the ebbs and flows and purposes of blogging?

Getting Back into It

Considering how energized I was the morning after my 2-day monastery visit, it's perhaps not surprising that I lost all motivation a few hours later. Such is what often happens. The thing is that my monastery weekend, and in fact all my efforts to get into the writing groove during the last few weekends, were only a beginning. It takes an ongoing effort to really get back into the game.

And so I finally broke down and opened up the big guns again, by picking up my copy of The Artist's Way and reading through the first two chapters again.

Okay, so I know many many people sing its praises, but here's what I don't like about this book and why I dropped out of it 10 years ago when I started it then:

1. It makes you sign a contract at the beginning of the book. Okay, I'm a "dip my toes in the water" and try things out before I dive in sort of girl. I also don't like to overcommit. Which leads me to point 2:
2. It requires you to give 7-10 hours for 12 weeks.That's a lot of time. As much time as taking another course during the semester. I'm already busy this fall, and I'll be going away on vacation the end of next week. So I know that if I signed that contract, it would get broken in about 10 days. Not--simply not--going to happen

All the same, though, the book does have fabulous ideas, and right now, for these 10 days, I have a window in which I can be productive, both creatively and otherwise, if I can clear the cobwebs and clutter out of my head so I can get to work. And this book is a lovely thing, if I adjust it to my life rather than vice versa.

And so I decided that I could manage reading through some of it, and doing one of its primary practices--morning pages--for the next week or so, just to continue the good work I've been doing towards renewal.

And so far it's really working. I've been reclaiming my journaling practices lately, and they've helped, but this is a slightly different kind of journaling--the kind that isn't looking for just the right words, but instead acts as a dump of all your attitudes towards life and writing and creativity and work out on the page so you can hover them to the surface and then beat the bad ones up. It gives an opportunity for a sort of morning pep talk to oneself, and a place to become energized by being reminded that there is work to be done and that I really can get some of it done today.

So yeah, I won't be doing the whole book--well, maybe if I start it earlier, then next summer would be a good time--but I do suggest plowing out those 3 pages of nonsense first thing in the day for plowing through one's procrastination, ennui, and other unpleasant junk in one's head on a regular basis. I'll be trying it for the next 10 days, along with a few of the other exercises in this book and in Vinita's book, so I'll let you know how it goes in keeping me moving in everything I want to do...

Anyone else tried this before, or willing to try it with me for a few days? Let me know.

Scheduling my Headspace

Writing practices are fabulous things, and they definitely do help me to become creative and productive of writing. Potential problems with them, though, are the following:

1. They can take over, like crabgrass. I've noticed this with journaling, particularly, or blogging. Or even Facebook status writing. If I'm not careful, I can spend all my time working on the practices that are supposed to be there to help me write other things.
2. They tend to birth their own projects. These projects are happy things--evidences of creativity and writing productivity--but if you have other projects that are more urgent, it can lead to over-writing-commitment.
3. They can become ends in themselves. This is related to #1, but is a bit different. It refers to how one performs these practices. Practices can help lead into writing, or they can become escapes from writing.

All of these potential problems remind me how important it is that I allocate my headspace carefully. The practices, if they are to help me instead of diverting me, must be done with intentionality and an eye towards the project I need to work on most.

Journaling, for instance, is of utmost importance, but I've learned I need to keep an eye on the clock when it's there to clear my head to provide space for working on another project. And if I want great ideas in the shower regarding a certain project, it helps to look over my notes on that project before I jump in, or I'll spend the time thinking about other things.

There are, of course, other wonderful ideas that are bound to be inspired by the practices--my way of dealing with those is having a places to jot down ideas to be developed later. That way I've captured them, but don't feed the need to finish them then. Sometimes it's okay to be diverted for a time, I think, and too much strictness with myself can stifle my ability to get anything done, but if I want to proceed on certain projects, I have to provide myself with headspace for doing them.

That's why, on my wall next to my list of writing practices, I have a list of projects I want to allocate headspace to. Speaking of which, it's time now to re-allocate my headspace from blogging to that paper I'm supposed to be finishing up so I can move on to one of those other projects.

Anyone else have any tips on allocating headspace, or other issues relating to keeping one's thoughts on task? Please, add a comment to tell me about them.

Writing Practices

This summer, now that I've spent my year adjusting to being in a new place in a slightly different academic discipline, I've begun to work towards reclaiming some of the practices that have helped me stay sane and productive of various kinds of writing over the years. Here's how I did it:

1. Realized I was becoming unbearably grumpy (always the first step towards recovery).
2. Went to my creative neuroses books for help. Notably, I went to Anne Lamott's marvellously funny Bird by Bird and Vinita Hampton Wright's deeply insightful The Soul Tells a Story. A mini-writer's retreat at home with these books (all I could afford at the time) reminded me that all writers have neuroses, and that it's important to work through them and build up a series of helpful creative practices, or--surprise, surprise--the neuroses affect your productivity (as though it's not hard enough when you're doing everything you can to help).
3. On a visit to my old town, I stayed in my old apartment and remembered the things I did to help myself write the first draft of my novel while working long work weeks at a stressful job.
4. When I returned, I made a list of these practices, posted it on the wall above my bed, and started to work towards practicing them.

Since I know that by now you're unbearably curious to know what they are, the indispensable ones are:

• Regular journaling, which helps me regularly clear other issues out of my head so it's clear for its writing work; and
• Regular walks, which help me to sleep better, to notice things around me, to think through anything that hasn't been journalled, and to be an embodied human being instead of someone sitting in a chair all day every day.

Other helpful practices are:

• Breaking down all my big writing projects into smaller manageable chunks when I feel I'm not getting anything done on them (then planning what I can do),
• Showering and bathing (it's a cliche, but the best breakthroughs really do come then),
• Going to sleep if the chaos reigns in my head (often I wake up with a breakthrough), and
• Reading poetry, fiction, and other creative works.

These practices, and others, help me, an Artist's Way dropout, to stay creative and productive of a variety of styles of writing, and I'm determined to give them more priority in my life, both now and when the semester starts. They're already paying dividends in helping me to recover from what I'd begun to wonder would be irretrievable grumpiness and lack of a sense of humor, as well as helping me finish the 20 page paper I'm writing for my summer independent study. Here's hoping I can keep them up--I think it will be at least a tiny bit easier to do in the second year of my PhD work.

What about you? What practices do you have that help you write?