another one on writing

People seem to like the “advice” posts a lot; I keep getting lots of email about them, so I guess I ought to keep producing them.

Here’s another, with the caveat that I’m bound to be somewhat repetitive here. I have a finite number of habits like everyone else, and there’s only so much you can say about the same habits.

*You need to put as much as possible on paper. You have to block the powerful internal critic and simply pour the ideas out into written form.

*Maybe it won’t be good at first. But it’s not really that hard to make something good, once it’s on paper. When you have it on paper you’ll be able to pinpoint finite problems with both your style and argument. Remember, the two main enemies of writing are zero and infinity: the zero of the blank paper, and the infinity of a measureless aspiration to do something really great. No one has ever written anything infinitely great, and neither will you. There are dozens of flat passages and unconvincing leaps even in Plato, Hegel, Shakespeare, etc. Don’t hold yourself to a higher standard than you’re willing to hold them to. You will make a finite contribution, and it will not be without problems. But it could still turn out to be exceptionally good: this is no “lower your aspirations and be happy with being average” sort of sermon. Quite the contrary. I urge you toward excellence. But you can’t be excellent unless you learn to forgive yourself for lack of perfection.

*Another good thing about having your ideas on paper is that paper is highly mobile. Diversity of work sites is an underrated stimulus to intellectual productivity. If you go slowly and try to perfect each paragraph before moving on, you’re going to be rooted to your computer, and that is sure to increase the amount of gloom in your life. But if you have certain work you can do with red ink on paper, you have increased your arena of possible work spaces to include buses, cafes, and randomly chosen restaurants at the end of long walks.

*It’s also important to remember the vast spaces of ignorance that exist in the human race. It’s quite likely that if your topic is specific enough, you may be one of the world’s greatest experts on whatever you’re writing about, or even a pioneer.

One of the things I was most surprised to hear in adolescence came from the father of a friend. I’m not from an academic family myself, and hence, much of the little I knew in my youth about how universities work came from this father of a friend. He had done his Ph.D. in Economics at Columbia, and was speaking one day about the stress of his Ph.D. defense. The primary stress for him came from waiting outside in the hall while they debated whether or not to pass him. When I asked him if he wasn’t also stressed to be grilled by such experts as Columbia University faculty, he replied: “Not at all. By the time of your dissertation, you know more about your topic than they do.” This came as a shock to me. I’d grown up thinking of university professors as almighty, all-knowing sages with absolute command of all truth in their field: as the Big Other, basically. It had never occurred to me at age 14, or whenever I heard that story, that there could ever be important gaps in the knowledge of the highly trained professoriate. But there are huge gaps, both in individuals and in the intellectual professions as a whole. You do have a contribution to make. But blank paper will not lead you there. You have to create finite (though possibly excellent) contributions that are guaranteed to have finite (but never infinite) vulnerabilities.