possibly the *initial* advice post

possibly helpful remarks on writing productivity
by doctorzamalek
January 19, 2009

Since the last post I sat down and wrote a 7-page conclusion to the upcoming lecture on causation, and think that the pages are good. My point in announcing this is the opposite of what you might think– my point, namely, is to talk about the humble fragility of all productivity, and to reflect on some sheer practical accidents that helped a naturally self-destructive procrastinator like me become someone who can occasionally write 25 good pages in a single sitting, and usually half a dozen on demand with no trouble at all. A surprising number of readers wrote to thank me warmly (and sometimes even emotionally) for the previous tips about how to make effective notations in books. For this reason, I suspect that a large part of my readership is made up of Angst-ridden graduate students. I was there myself not so long ago. (March 17, 2009 will be the 10th anniversary of my doctoral defense.)

Why do I enter upon this topic, in a genre somewhere between confession and advice column? Because people in the intellectual sphere generally do not help each other enough. This blog has occasionally taken a personal turn, and may as well do so again here. Some of the most brilliant people I’ve met in academic life were unproductive for a time, and many of them remained thus forever without end. We’ve all seen the toxic strategies in play in such cases… an odd mix of insufficient focus, self-doubt, commitment to “perfect” work serving as an alibi for avoiding merely excellent work. (Along with the “getting away with” theory of ethics, alibis stand near the core of my thoughts on ethics. We all tend to self-destruct by creating alibis more than through any other means. This deserves a lengthy post of its own, and will receive one at a later date.)

The doctoral dissertation is almost designed to provoke catastrophes of this sort. Take a group of highly ambitious and intelligent young people, ask them to pull off a single gigantic piece of theoretical work as an initiation rite, and place them quite often in a competitive and unsupportive environment. What do you think will occur? (I happen to think it’s a necessary ritual, and am just conceding that it’s a very dangerous one.)

By no means would I give myself high marks for progress on my own dissertation. I’m still very happy with the quality of it (Tool-Being is it, except for stylistic revisions and the last-minute additions of the Zizek and Dreyfus sections two years later). It took me nearly 8 years to defend the dissertation from the time of the Master’s Degree, and though I left the Chicago area twice for various personal stuff, I wasn’t exactly “taking time off” either. The material was always on my mind, I was constantly reading Heidegger and other things in preparation for it, and though I suppose our graduate program was uncommonly warm and friendly on the whole, there was a general feeling of being in constant strife with all of those professors– much of which was probably sheer illusion. Those years now feel in retrospect like a tableau of thrilling intellectual discovery, and I guess they were, since they can be mapped almost month by month due to my diligent record-keeping. But the general emotional background radiation of the era, at least vis-à-vis the written work, was misery.

I do want to help, if you are one who needs it. It is painful to watch others postpone assignments, dump dissertations, lose faith in themselves, and not follow up the projects that would overjoy the rest of us if completed. Furthermore, those who do not get to where they meant to go can become not only suicidally melancholic (a wretched thing to observe or endure) but also sadistically aggressive and belittling toward the rest of us, which is simply unjust.

Having already spoken last night about the need to reverse weaknesses into strengths, let me give a bit more unsolicited advice, because I’m sure some people will want it even if we’ve never met. I’m trying to write the sort of thing I wish I could have read online some time during the mid-1990’s. Stonewall Jackson, the eerily effective Confederate general during the US Civil War, always said “be prepared for sudden opportunities to turn defeats into victories,” and though I like everyone still need help on plenty of fronts, writing productivity is no longer one of them– though it used to be the deepest smoldering crater of them all. I don’t remember ever writing a paper before the last minute until I was well over 30.

Now I’m going to change tone a bit and become ruthlessly practical, because that’s what worked for me. To repeat, whatever horrible hole you’ve dug for yourself with written work– whether it’s countless incompletes, a never-ending dissertation, a feeling that there is absolutely no one who will care about the work, I’ve been in all those places before. So, you can get out of it. And just as importantly– I and others *want* you to get out of it. I can’t read the work of every one of you, but some of that work may hit me or my friends on the right day and rock our worlds. The old cliché holds good: if these words help even one reader, then I don’t mind baring part of a soul in this fashion.

The following steps, I repeat, are purely practical. But that’s all you really need.

1. Seek models. You first have to want to be productive. I did want it; I was simply self-destructing by getting too tightly-wound about it. The best writer known to me was and is DR. ALPHONSO FRANK LINGIS, a haunting stylist and peerless correspondent. The questions I would ask him were about his daily routine. The Lingis Rule, which you need not follow (I don’t do it myself) is not to leave the house until he’s written a certain number of pages. In the early years he had to force himself, he says, but now it’s simply like breathing for him. Having split a few conference hotel rooms with Lingis over the years, it is always his quiet typewriter that awakens me after dawn in those rooms. In my own generation, not to embarrass him, Peter Hallward is shockingly productive, and once in awhile I’ll catch myself thinking that I can’t pack it in for the night, because he’s probably going to cut me down with a massive relational ontology one of these days. (Just like Bobby Kennedy turning around and going back to the office whenever he saw Jimmy Hoffa’s office light still on. I can’t see Hallward’s window from Egypt, but his “chess-piece” objections will ring forever in my ears.)

2. Try to hang out with productive people. I suppose this is like trying to break alcohol or drug addictions… You have to make a choice between hanging out with people who are looking for good alibis, and those who are really looking to close the deal. To repeat, everyone has times of life and areas in life where they are in “alibi” mode, so there is nothing arrogant or cruel about avoiding them for this reason. Maybe they are energy sources in other areas of life even if they are energy-suckers when it comes to intellectual work.

We all instinctively know the signs of the energy-sucker: procrastination, passive-aggressive changes of the subject of conversation without explanation, lukewarm contrarian rebukes to every idea you ever share with them, and a general feeling in their presence that they are trying to keep you on the defensive in tiny subliminal ways. You can avoid these people without condemning them to hell; it is your right– the right of survival. And you can even do so without guilt: they will still be your betters in some area or another, and you can learn from them in those areas, provided you’re able to linger in their presence without feeling like you have lymphoma. Just don’t deal with them on the level of intellectual work. If you’re sure that you want to be productive, then you must avoid the alibi-makers.

A few relevant quotes here… WIlliam S. Burroughs saying “if someone make you feel like you’re losing two pints of blood every time you speak with them– avoid that person.” And recently I was reading another classic author, I don’t remember which, who said that we already instinctively know who will give us energy and who will suck it, yet we seek out the energy-suckers anyway through a kind of “imprudent curiosity.” (Who said that? Anyone remember? I was reading it within the last few weeks.) It strikes me as well-put. There is an odd grain of masochism in the human character that prods us to seek the darkness that sucks the energy. Try to fight such inner masochism, which can be reduced to harmless trace elements with a bit of work.

3. Even more practically speaking…Write from an outline. I think I’ve mentioned this before in a different post. There is a kind of self-correcting tendency that spoils our writing… We often assume that our thoughts on a topic are the natural thoughts of any old human on that topic. Thus, it seems too obvious simply to put our thoughts down in order, given our natural assumption that we’ll simply be producing “clone” work in that case. So, you might start to jazz things up and overwrite, and the resulting product has lost its voice despite/because of the overwriting.

Like any rebellious high school student, I despised outlines. The first time I really used one was out of panic. I was nineteen years old and had my annual Sophomore Essay due the next day. I had 13 pages written and needed at least 20 total, and at that age 7 pages can feel like a mountainous task for a single day. It was getting late into the night and I was procrastinating. Ironically, the outline was an “alibi”, to the effect of: “actually, I can sleep after all– I’ll just outline the rest of the paper and write from it starting tomorrow morning.” But I wasn’t really sure if I believed it; it was a form of escapism in a way. However, I did stay up long enough to do the outline, with 3 points per paragraph covering the rest of my argument. And incredibly enough, I woke up early the next day and got an adrenaline rush from seeing all the points in the outline. I then had 18 additional pages written by 6 PM when the essay was due. In the end it was a 31-page paper, the longest I had ever written at that age, and it even won a prize. (The subject is Dante, read from sort of a Husserlian angle. Lots of Ortega y Gasset in there too; in fact, I aped his style a bit too much, but I still think it’s a hell of an essay for a kid.)

There have been even more surprising things of that kind in later years, such as writing the whole Zizek section in Tool-Being without leaving my chair, while waiting for a delayed Cairo visitor’s airplane to arrive. I’ve known others capable of far more than I am in this respect, but perhaps they didn’t start from such a deep pit.

But back to the main point… the outline is where the personality is. Your personality doesn’t come in through flourishes and clever words, but through the way each step of your thinking fits together with the next. There is nothing dry or abstract about logic. Each person’s methods of rhetorical transition and logical inference are almost bizarrely idiosyncratic; no one breaks the world into exactly the same parts as you do. Just stick to the outline and your personality will shine forth, and it will even be able to withstand bad sentences and paragraphs (which are the mere surface-qualities, where the style is the thing itself!). It is not always on the sentence-by-sentence level that we find good writing, but often on the level of structure.

Also… if you force yourself to do the outline, you are forced to confront your ideas in their nakedness, and will start to see the gaps where you don’t really have as much to say yet as you thought. It’s important to be aware of those moments, if possible.

4. If possible, you should also write in genres that are not the most important to you. You may have heard the story about how Borges primarily saw himself as a poet, and tried short fictions while recovering from illness, knowing that he would not be too traumatized if illness hindered his work in this less beloved genre. And now, how many people view Borges primarily as a poet?

In retrospect, my first taste of high productivity was my brief sportswriting career, from roughly ages 28-30. I love sports, and respect sports, but it’s not my real calling (despite a few flirtations with more permanent offers at the time), and hence there wasn’t too much at stake. In academic writing there is a feeling of having to overcraft each and every sentence, but you just can’t afford to do that when you’re writing for payment on time-sensitive topics such as the preview of tomorrow’s Cowboys-Packers playoff game. You have to do it quickly and colorfully so that people are willing to spend their time and money reading it– after all, no one owes you the time to read a damn thing you’ve written. There is so much to do in the world besides read someone’s article or book, so if you want people to read yours, make sure it’s interesting. None of us would dare bore anyone at a party or dinner or on a date, so why take the liberty of boring readers?

5. Once you’re past the potential catastrophe stage of life, it can also be good to fall by dumb luck into a high pressure situation. In my own case, my current employer initially had an utterly strangling tenure quota that had already been exceeded. I loved Egypt and wanted to stay, but had approximately 0% chance under normal conditions of being allowed to apply for tenure– without utterly blowing down the door on publications and thereby getting a special chance directly from the Provost. So that’s what I did, for the primary reason of staying longer in Egypt. If not for that unpleasant but lucky pressure… well, maybe I would have played the “perfectionist” game a bit more and tinkered with things too much. But now that game is on the floor in pieces, completely unmissed. No one does perfect work; excellent is the goal.

Also… don’t compare your productivity to that of established people in your field. There’s a reason that they’re doing 15 articles and 1 book every year, and it’s not because they’re working 20 times harder than you. It just means they’ve reached 20 times your reputation, and with reputation people start asking you to do stuff. No one ever asked me to write anything for them 5 years ago, and now every week someone is asking, and on paper it seems (falsely) as though I’m working much harder now than then. Writing articles or lectures because people asked you to do so is an absurdly effective prod, because you don’t want to let them down.

It’s no longer any mystery to me how the Zizeks and Derridas churn out three books per year. Not there myself; not enough time on my hands. But if you were that famous, and had that many requests for material, you’d get it done too.

But I don’t want to bore anyone now either, and hence will bring this to a close. There are many other possible hints for saving your life, but these are the first to come to mind. If you follow the spirit of these ideas seriously, or related ones, you will start seeing projects to the finish line, and you’ll start treating yourself and others much better than in the past.