Fencing Bear at Prayer

It will be a week tomorrow morning since I started working on the annotations and corrections to my sample translation for the proposal that I am submitting.  Thus far, I have done five days' worth of brief, regular sessions on the sample, at least two and no more than four forty-five minute sessions per day.  I wish that I felt like I was making better progress. Which is itself my greatest problem: product orientation, as Prof. Boice would say.  I am too focused on "getting it done," and not enough on doing the work.  But I need to get it done (NB the "need") because I "need" to be working on my book.  But why?  I have been working on my translation for a good year and a half.  I have put hours and hours and hours of work into it, all in brief, regular sessions.  It is a major accomplishment already to have done so much, particularly given that I did the first draft of the transcription and translation over twenty years ago .  I know this ...

I had a bit of a glitch in my BDS* towards the end of last week when my new laptop came in and it took the College IT guys a good two days to get all of my old data and settings transferred.**  But I got back to my practice on Monday and have been making good progress this week on the cover letter for my proposal .  Excellent progress, in fact.  I have a good 2000 words on top of the 3000 or so words of notes that I took last week .  In real terms, I am romping along.  So why am I still feeling like I am not getting anything done? Patience, patience, I know.  But it's hard.  Why?  After all, I'm writing.  A good 500 or so words a day, which in academic prose is pretty amazing.  It's as much as I was ever able to write on my old schedule of "working" from 9am to 5 or 6pm every day (if I was in fact working that whole time, which I now very much doubt).  But now I finish around early to mid-afternoon (depending on how long of a br...

So it's been about a week since I started working on the proposal for my translation .  As per Prof. Boice's advice, I have been working in brief, regular sessions of forty-five minutes at a time , cumulatively no more than three or four hours a day.  I spent the first several days reading over the only other major study of the text that has been written in English (the other is in Italian; I haven't tackled that one yet) and taking notes about what I might want to say.  I started "writing" yesterday; rather, putting my notes into outline form.  By the end of the second day (i.e. today), I had a draft of some 2000 words, in part still notes, but at times already shaping itself into something approximating prose.  I can't quite say how long it will take to turn the outline into text, but curiously, I am not worried about it.  The ideas are there; I am making good progress taking notes from the scholarly literature and working them into my argument; and I can...

Okay, so in retrospect, that was more than a little bit manic last week.  Kinda like deciding to start exercising a little bit every day and then trying to work out four times a day and/or every chance you can get.  No wonder I crashed and burned.  And yet, oddly, I do think that the experiment worked.  Because, truth to tell, even in the midst of the flames, I did learn something.†  Several things.  One, and perhaps most importantly, it is possible to find a half hour a day for writing, even on what might otherwise feel like wholly impossible days.  And, two, doing so curiously means that the days themselves feel less impossible, less pressured .  But, three, and this is probably equally important as one and two, this does not necessarily mean trying to finish a piece of writing (no, not even a blog post) in any one segment of time that has somehow miraculously opened up.  What it means is allowing oneself to come back to the writing ev...

This is worse than not working.  This is a disaster.  I am not only not enjoying my writing (as per Prof. Boice 's promise I would if I worked in brief, daily sessions rather than in deadline-induced binges), I'm even more anxious than before.  I can't sleep, I spent another couple hours after last night's session watching yet more episodes of New Girl , I felt myself wanting to pig out--really pig out--for the first time in months.  It's hopeless.  It would have been better--much, much better--just spending this week feeling busy and writing the sermon in a single two-hour session on Saturday (which I could do if I thought of it as a blog post).  Instead of which, I've now spent nearly a week niggling at something that won't work and that will probably still need to be rewritten in a great binge on Saturday.  Or, if I don't try to rewrite it ( again ), will just make me feel even stupider because I actually worked at it over a couple of weeks and it ...

I'm not sure I like this exercise of writing just because I have a pocket of time that has opened up.  It was fun last week when I was testing whether such pockets exist , but now that I've found them , I'm not entirely sure what to do with them. I've been working on my sermon off and on since Thursday (at least, I think it was Thursday), but I am worried that part of my breakdown on Friday evening was owing to the stress of trying to write in such brief chunks.  Okay, so I managed to write a first draft of something in the course of two days, but it sucked (well, parts of it sucked) so much so that I lost it and ( as you may remember ) ended up in a binge.  I took a break from trying to write on Saturday and came back to the sermon on Sunday, but I really needed more than just twenty minutes to settle into the writing and be able to figure out what I wanted to say.  Sure, it was nice having a draft (however terrible) to work from, but what if I had just given m...

I'm so ashamed.  I did it.  I couldn't help it.  I fell off whatever wagon I was trying to ride this week by working in brief, daily sessions, counting carbs, trying everything I could not to fall back into my old patterns of working.  I binged.  Not, thank goodness, on carbs (although there was that third Atkins bar of the day at about 11pm, but I was still only at 25 carbs for the day even then).  And, okay, not on writing , although maybe I should have.  But on television .  Okay, technically, internet-streamed episodes of television on my iPad.  Eleven of them (not counting the one that I watched earlier in the afternoon).   Full confession?  I was up till 2 am watching eleven episodes of New Girl .†  I would have kept going, but the battery on my iPad gave out. And now, predictably enough, I feel like sh*t.  It would have been better if I had just tried to write that stupid sermon in one go.  I don't know why ...

I think that I understand better now the anxiety that I woke up with the other day , about wishing that I were able to write about something other than what I have read in books.  It's not just my perfectionism.  It is also my habit of noticing. I spend most of my waking life reading in one way or another.  Reading books and articles in my field, preparing for class, grading papers, reading applications for admissions or faculty hires.  Almost everything I do involves the written word. And I'm good at it.  In fact, I think that I am very, very good at it.  It is one of my principal skills: exegesis, reading a text for what it actually says, not for what I want it to say.  To my mind, it's what makes what I write as an academic distinctive: I actually read the texts. And not just read them in order to pluck out whatever bits of information (examples, ideas, arguments) I want to use in order to make some point or other that I have gleaned from read...

Okay, so I've proven to myself that there is actually time in the day for writing that I didn't believe I had.  Now, when does the brilliant prose start flowing?  'Cause, you know, I'm already getting a little tired of these meta-posts about writing.  For goodness' sake, it's already been two whole days.  Where's my Muse?  Where's my deathless prose? I'm waaaaaiiiiting!  Nope, not coming to me.  Nada.  I don't believe that this is going to work.  Anymore, let's be fair, than I was confident about cutting down on the carbs .  Sure, it sounded great in theory, but who had months and months and months to spend counting carbs?  Oh, right, me.  And, yes, guess what, it's working . Soooooo....  Do I give this writing thing enough time to start having an effect?  Or do I toy with it for a day or two, decide that, exhilarating as it is, it won't work, and simply go back to my cycle of procrastination and bingeing ? ...

This feels a little manic.  I probably shouldn't be trying to write again today.  Three posts in a day is more than enough.  But I have found yet another twenty minutes that I never knew I had, so here I am, writing again. It's like finding a treasure in your sofa when all you thought there was was loose change.  Suddenly, I have all the time in the world for writing.  More than enough.  An abundance!  I am overflowing with time, just like the Virgin Mary overflowing with graces.  It is as if I have stepped into a whole other life, one in which there is actually enough time to do everything I ever dreamed I might want to do. And then some.  I have not only written three (and counting) blog posts today.  I have walked into campus with the Dragon Baby (i.e. exercised--she walks fast on those little legs!  Especially when we go past the vet's).  I have spent two and half (or thereabouts) hours finishing preparing for class....

My head is dizzy with images.  Songs.  Thoughts.  Thoughts about the Virgin.  Thoughts about devotion.  About putting devotion into words when I am so filled with images and songs.  The Virgin and Child.  The Virgin of Rocamadour in a tub.  Tomie dePaola's illustrations of the story of the tumbler who juggled before the image of the Virgin.  Songs. I am tempted to start Googling for links.  But then I would get lost in the thicket again and lose the images.  The Virgin as a pillar of ivory.  The Virgin smiling at her Son.  The Virgin protecting her devotees.  A woman delivered of a dead child.  A child in a glass furnace.  A child murdered because he sang.  A woman who lost her pet bird and "went into a rage every bit as violent as if she were present at the funeral of one of her children."†  A knight who teased his pregnant wife that he had been unfaithful to her so that she stabbed herself in t...

I just spent ten minutes niggling about with my email when I could have been spending it writing. It occurs to me that this exercise, of practicing writing in brief, daily sessions, is the correlate I've been looking for to the decluttering that I've been doing in every other aspect of my life. What, after all, are carbs if not clutter ?  It is not that I need to eat fewer calories (although when I give into the temptation to check, particularly when I'm feeling rather hungry, I realize that I probably have cut significantly down).  Rather, I need to eat better food. Likewise, it is not that I do not have time in my life for writing, even quite significant amounts of writing.   Rather, I need to give it higher priority than the busywork in which I have been inclined to indulge at the expense of writing.  Which is hard.  Everyone knows that the first thing that you do when you have something to write is start cleaning the kitchen.  Or clearing out c...

I wonder what it would be like to trust my experience as a source of knowledge.  To know something other than what I read in books.  Because then I would have something to write about other than other people's ideas.  Something that I created.  Something that I understood. Why this anxiety?  Because everything I think to write about feels so forced.  Okay, so I'm trying to force this exercise, maybe it's just a part of the process of learning to write in brief, daily sessions.  Step one: start keeping a file of things that I observe that might turn into topics to write about.  What Prof. Boice calls "prewriting": reading, noticing, collecting, taking notes, organizing, filing, outlining. But for blog posts?  I've never needed any of that stuff before, I always just sat down to write when an idea (usually in the form of a title) crystallized and I knew what the gist of the argument was going to be.  And the few occasions when I have...

Are you as disturbed as I am by what I realized at the end of my last post ?  You should be, especially if you are one of my students.  Because if my (or anybody's) ability to write depends on being able to do something that, by definition, only the brilliant and/or hard-working can do, then what hope do you have that I am ever going to be able (not to mention, willing) to teach you how to do it yourself?  Answer: none . Which is yet another of Prof. Boice's destabilizing insights (or, rather, carefully tested hypotheses†) about why academics don't write, having to do with their operating assumptions about what it means to be able to write.   In short: they have themselves never been taught how to write; they have only ever been rewarded for demonstrating their ability to do so.  In consequence, they consider writing not only as something unteachable as such, but also something that to teach would diminish their capacity to recognize brilliance in their own st...

Writing isn't meant to be "comfortable" or, heaven forbid, " fluent ."  For goodness' sake, it isn't meant to be easy .  Writing is supposed to be soul-grindingly, spirit-churningly, mind-breakingly difficult.   If it were easy , just anybody could do it.  If it were easy , it wouldn't be work . Writing is my job , after all.   It's what professors (and geniuses) do.  It is supposed to take hours and hours and hours of one's day (except if you're a genius; in which case, it just magically happens, like breathing).  It's not supposed to be something you can do in the odd 20-minutes here and there .  It's supposed to take concentration in large blocks of time. My whole world falls apart if writing is easy.  See, being able to write fluently should be a secret talent, not something that can be learned, not something that can be taught, not something that can be accomplished in brief, daily sessions.  It is the only evidence t...

See, here is what I really don't believe .  I don't believe I can write a book in such brief, daily sessions.  Hundreds of blog posts?  Sure.  Thousands of lines in translation?  Working on it .*  But an actual, honest-to-goodness scholarly book?  Pull the other one, it's got bells on. Plus--and this is the thought that came to me yesterday as I was walking home after writing my first twenty-minute post (yes, I am going to try to make this a regular exercise, see how terrified I am, I can't even admit it to you, much less myself that I'm doing it)--as this very sentence demonstrates, I'm a butterfly.  I hate sticking to developing one thought day after day after day.  It's the main reason (among others) that I like blogging so much: each post is a complete thought in itself, I don't need to come back to it day after day after day, rereading what I've written the day before in order to get back into the mood that I had before.  I can j...

This is already a disaster.  I sat down at my MacBook a full five minutes ago, intending to spend twenty minutes just writing, as per Prof. Boice's advice on working in brief, daily sessions , and it took the stupid machine a full three minutes just to boot (what has my son been downloading onto my laptop?!!!).  And then I had the thought that I should check in iTunes for a recording of some of the songs that we have been talking about in my course on Mary , and while those were downloading, it took another two or three minutes for Blogger even to open.  How can I possibly write something effective in only twenty minutes under these conditions? Okay, now I've had to move so that I am sitting in a chair rather than at the dining room table, but I'm still not settled enough to start writing about what I wanted to say.  See, there seems to be a contradiction in the advice that Prof. Boice gives.  On the one hand, he says, and I do believe him, that we can write ...

Prof. Boice has something very illuminating (if embarrassing to admit) about how professors (like me) talk themselves out of having "enough" time to write.*  (Breathe.)  He says--and I'm trying to paraphrase here, following his instructions to allow writing to become something ordinary--that they procrastinate because they make writing too high a priority and thus convince themselves that it is only something that they can do in long, uninterrupted blocks.  It is for this reason (ironically enough) that they are always "too busy" to write: not because they don't have the time, but because the feeling of busyness is itself a direct consequence of having made writing such a high priority. In Prof. Boice's words: "The individual who constantly feels pressured about the noncompletion of an important task will describe himself or herself as busy."  Thus, although it is common for professors (like me) to have "small blocks of potentially open...