a quick thought on the Wolcott/Oates phrase

Incidentally, even if Wolcott were right that Oates is ultra-productive due to some sort of psychological disorder (and unless that’s deliberate comedy, it sounds to me like pure ressentiment) he could hardly have misfired more than calling it an “obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

Obsessive-compulsives are the ones who establish endless preparatory rituals that prevent anything from getting done. They’re not the ones who write truckloads of novels and story collections like Oates. If you wanted to give it a disorder-type name, I believe “hysteria” would be the word, but I don’t see the point of diagnosing Nobel-level work as a disorder, unless you want to make the usual sort of “all artists are struck by madness” claim. But that wouldn’t bear on Oates any more than it would on someone who earned a reputation based on very little writing, such as Cavafy. (He wrote a lot of poems, but destroyed all but the best of them.)

Anyway… I posted earlier that I’ve written a final version of the first 51 pages of the book in less than 20 hours.

It just occurred to me while walking home from a trip to the store that it took not 20 hours, but three years, to rewrite and revise the first 50 pages of my dissertation. Now that’s more deserving of the tag “obsessive-compulsive.” If I’d kept it up, I would be miserable today, and would surely have needed to find a different profession.

If you’re the same way, and you’re still a student, don’t worry– there’s time to fix it. But do start fixing it. Don’t lapse into some defensive myth about how, unlike others, you’re too committed to quality to speed up a bit. This attitude will not only slow down your progress, it will also encourage you to admire the wrong people, the ones whose behavior supports the myth. If there was one healthy thing about my mostly unhealthy graduate school psyche, it was that I always admired the producers, and never admired the stiff-arming big talkers who never delivered the goods. Loving and admiring the right people is at least half the secret to life. You’ll eventually become more like them.