I'm All Written Out

Finally, for no reason that I can determine, my putative journal article has decided to stop resisting me and has fallen, more or less, into easy lines.

Is that a mixed metaphor? I don’t suppose it matters much here. At any rate, I’ve added today around three thousand words to what’s feeling as though it might be a passable draft.

I’ve come to terms, more or less, with the fluctuations of my writing process.

I know enough now to never resist those moments when everything suddenly falls into place and it’s simply a matter of whether you can get the words on the page before the inspiration passes—but those moments never do come regularly enough.

I know that there’s always a sticky place for me at the beginning of any project: a point where the words simply won’t come and the writing has no cohesion, where I can’t even see the shape of the argument in front of me.

I know, too, that that moment inevitably passes, but that I can never force it to pass. It’s not a sign that I haven’t done enough research; I can feel now when that’s the problem. It’s a different stumbling block—perhaps a form of writer’s block?—and I know neither what causes it nor anyway to get around it other than perseverance. But the perseverance is never a pleasure; it’s pushing against an immovable object or, if I can draw from mythology (or Albert Camus, perhaps) for a moment, endlessly trying to roll a boulder up a cliff face.

But then, the process has shifted so frequently in recent years that I can only assume that this, too, will pass.

I did two good things for my writing, neither of which was initially easy: first my Masters degree, then teaching academic and professional writing.

I don’t think, to be honest, that I was a poor writer before I began teaching those courses. I have a better opinion of my boss than to believe she would continue to hire me if that were the case.

But I’m a significantly better writer now than then.

(Don’t necessarily judge me on the quality of the blog. Unless you think it’s fabulous. In which case, judge away!)

But this is a new challenge. I’m not writing a journal article that feels from the start like a short, self-contained work. I’m boiling down a 17,000-word chapter into a shorter, tighter argument—and it was a pretty tight argument to begin with. (At least, I certainly could have blown it out in several areas, but restrained myself.)

No: it’s not even as simple as that. Because anyone reading that chapter would already have the background material from three preceding chapters and my literature review. (Oh, literature review. How I hated writing you! But we found a way to make you interesting, didn’t we? Thanks to a Jonathan Rose article.) So I’m selecting material from those, as well, where it’s necessary to the argument.

And the thesis itself was big enough; I did keep it as tight as I could, but with over one hundred works by my author, I had to exercise restraint in selection and take the fullest advantage of the word limit.

And, of course, I’m fretting constantly that I’m not providing enough context. That’s the downside to working on an unknown author: it would be much easier to work on an unusual aspect of Dickens’s career, though perhaps not as satisfying. (When was the last time an unknown Dickens work was added to the canon?)

So this has been a new challenge. Not a new challenge in the same sense as live-blogging, but hopefully one that will be more productive in the long run.

Unless there’s some way that I could make a living live-blogging Doctor Who.

I love my current job, but that would be, dare I say it, fantastic.