January | 2022 | Explorations of Style

Monthly Archives: January 2022

Writing as Yourself

Posted on January 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

After a recent one-on-one writing consultation, a student sent me a thoughtful reflection on what she had learned: ‘to acknowledge my writing style and learn how and where I can use my strength while I keep improving what I have’. I’m always glad when a writer leaves with a clear sense of their own strengths as well as areas for further development. As I thought about this further, I began to wonder about this tension: We all want to become better writers, but we can only be the writers that we are. The relationship between these two ideas is at the heart of the writing challenge. We all need to figure out how we can work within our own constraints while still finding pathways to improvement.

The student who sent me the above note, for instance, was a very detailed writer. Within the first paragraph, she had drilled down to a level of detail that was clearly premature. After agreeing that this tendency might be overwhelming for her reader, we talked about the benefits of having written this fine-grained material. I suggested that she create a series of topical headings that would allow her to ‘tag’ each of these sentences. Doing so would allow her to easily move this material out of her introduction, where it was obscuring the big picture. Moving these passages could give her a head start on constructing later sections, where the detail would be helpful. She had written things that weren’t serving the needs of the reader where they were, but that didn’t make it pointless to have written them. In the future, she will be able to recognize this tendency in her own writing and to use this strategy to build on her own strengths.

We all have particular tendencies when we sit down to write a first draft. For many writers, it’s more helpful to find ways to make those tendencies beneficial than to try to alter them. In my experience, how people write seems to be somewhat fixed; how they revise seems to be where much of the growth occurs.

If you look at early drafts of your own writing, what patterns do you typically find? Needless to say, self-diagnosis is far from a simple process; if you have institutional writing support, that feedback can be super helpful for building your understanding of your own writing tendencies. Identifying those tendencies makes finding a corresponding revision strategy easier. I’ve already talked about the student with the habit of providing too much detail too early. (You can find more on how this tendency manifest itself in thesis writing in this post on structuring thesis introductions.) Here are some other common tendencies that I see:

Branching out sideways: Instead of moving in a strictly linear manner, some early drafts branch out in multiple directions. If this happens in your writing, can you highlight the branching point? Once you’ve identified that point, you can decide if you want to follow that branch (adjusting earlier text as needed) or tag-and-move that material somewhere else. Those digressive moments can help you to clarify the optimal direction for your text, but the ability to do so starts with pinpointing the exact moment that you change direction.
Over-relying on the literature: Instead of focusing on the author’s own contribution, some early drafts move too quickly to detailed discussions of the scholarly literature. Doing so can inhibit the reader’s ability to see your work unfold. Try highlighting your use of sources in an early draft, possibly using different colours for different species of reference (e.g., a textual reference, a single-text citation, a multiple-text citation). Once your sources standout in this manner, you can choose the ones that are helpful (adapting their form as needed) and tag-and-move the others.
Building schemes: Instead of allowing an organic structure to emerge, some early drafts get caught up in building organizational schemes. If that scheme is inapt, it can then get in the way of finding a better one. Have a look in your drafts for places that you signal structure (this question has three dimensions; this insight leads to a dichotomy between … ; this issue should be examined in such-and-such a way). Once those structure markers are visible to you, you can decide if the framing seems helpful or if it’s getting in your way.

Do any of those tendencies seem familiar to you? Whatever you found, chances are you weren’t thrilled with your own early drafts. Dealing with the persistence of terrible first drafts can be made easier by remembering that the goal of the first draft is not meeting the needs of the reader; the goal of the first draft is laying the groundwork for eventually writing a final draft that will meet the needs of the reader. Your first drafts aren’t uniquely terrible–everyone writes terrible first drafts–but they may be terrible in ways that are unique to you. Becoming aware of those tendencies means that you may be able to find ways to improve your writing within your own writing practice. This drive for self-awareness can lead you to deepen your understanding of how you write first drafts and to develop strategies that work specifically with your own writerly inclinations. Thriving as a writer ultimately comes from learning to write as yourself, as the writer you are rather than the writer you wish you were.

Deadline Mindset

Posted on January 12, 2022 | 2 comments

To state the obvious, writing deadlines often feel different than other deadlines. I almost wrote, ‘writing deadlines often feel different than real deadlines’. Which probably tells you everything you need to know about how well I manage my writing deadlines. Thinking about my schedule for this book and my repeated failures to stick to that schedule, I’ve been struck again by the amount of latitude we tend to give ourselves while negotiating deadlines within a large-scale writing project.

I currently plan to be finished my manuscript by March 2022 (a full year past my original deadline). While I’m now in a good position, this is largely due to undeserved good fortune: a generous extension to my manuscript deadline and a fortuitously timed sabbatical. I do know how fortunate I am. In my many fruitless attempts to get this project back on track over the course of the pandemic, I’ve had the opportunity to think deeply about deadlines. I have argued that nobody should push themselves to work normally during this time, but it hasn’t been easy to grant myself that leeway. I tried everything to create a workflow in which I kept up with writing while simultaneously finding the energy required for online teaching, handling an unusual amount of administrative work, and managing the rest of my life.

During my many attempts to right this ship, I tried to envision a range of possible options:

Scenario One: In this scenario, the writer meets their deadline, no matter what, and does so with a fabulous piece of writing. This best-case scenario is obviously the one that anyone would choose, except that it may be genuinely unattainable. I’m including it–at the very real risk of annoying you–because it is instructive to imagine what it would actually mean to meet a particular deadline. This is the would-if-I-could option.

Scenario Two: Here we recognize that a deadline may be truly impossible, leading to a decision to postpone completion. This decision allows work to continue with a desirable intensity but without the unrealistic pressure of the first scenario. This is the what-I-can-actually-manage option.

Scenario Three: This scenario is, to me, the novel one. Imagine that we could treat writing deadlines as firm, meaning that we would meet them and do so by compromising on what it meant to be finished. This approach is somewhat akin to the way many of us treat non-writing deadlines. When such a deadline is firm, we generally meet it and–since we can’t manufacture time–we tend to make the necessary adjustments to the quality of our work. We accept the notion that we might have done a better job with more time; however, when time ran out, we made the best of what we had. This is the stick-to-the-plan option.

The first scenario was, for me in 2021, never going to happen. I kept building schedules to support the impossible deadline, but always with the suspicion that they wouldn’t work. Why even build a schedule that I couldn’t meet? We’ve all been enjoined over and over again to set realistic goals. That realism would make sense if we had reliable knowledge of what is and is-not realistic. In practice, we often don’t know how long a writing task will take. More importantly, our orientation to writing is such that we will often take advantage of a lenient schedule. In my experience, creating a generous schedule doesn’t lead to finishing writing projects early. Given all this, I generally recommend continuing to set ourselves challenging writing deadlines.

The potential hazard of these sorts of stretch goals is, of course, that they will make us feel bad all the time. Nobody needs that. One way to avoid that regret is to recognize the true nature of overly ambitious goals: they are designed to create space for writing that might otherwise go undone. However, in order to get the benefit of setting ambitious goals without the psychic costs, we need a sound default plan.

In my experience–both as a writer and as a close observer of other writers–most people default to scenario two. When the ambitious schedule fails, we choose to slow down and do what we can actually manage. It’s appealing to take a breath and ensure that at least some of the job is done right. This scenario simultaneously promises us more time and more quality, two things all writers want. But it can easily lead to endlessly deferred deadlines.

If scenario one is unlikely to succeed and scenario two is a recipe for repeated deferrals, what else can we do? This is where scenario three comes in, as a different type of fallback position when the ambitious schedule crashes into reality. By ‘sticking to’ your plan by compromising on quality (for now), you may find yourself farther ahead. If you can’t have five outstanding chapters, how would you feel about five so-so chapters? Might that be a better basis for revision than one-and-a-half outstanding chapters? This strategy is the one that I tried this past year, with some success. I wanted a full draft by the end of 2021; as long as you squint just so when you look at it, that’s what I have. No, you can’t see it–it’s terrible! But I tried to proportion my efforts so that I kept moving, resulting in a full set of flawed chapters. In each case, the chapter was roughly all done rather than only partially done.

I made this decision because I wanted to experiment with this deadline mindset. I see two reasons to try to import the notion of firmer deadlines into our writing lives. First, we are notoriously bad at knowing when something is good enough to move to the next stage. Given the rampant perfectionism among academic writers, it might make sense to replace that evaluative metric with a time commitment. Second, we all stand to gain from treating self-imposed deadlines as a little stricter. Writing deadlines are often flexible in the sense that the actual moment when we miss one is private; however, they matter because a writing schedule represents a larger commitment to ourselves and our professional plans. Experimenting with firmer deadlines in our writing lives might lessen our common tendency to defer writing in ways that are deleterious to our own well-being.

I’ve been speaking in this post about the type of interim deadlines that have the power to keep a writing project on track. Using this deadline mindset for the ultimate deadline of a writing project would obviously be much more challenging: letting go is hard! But so many of our writing deadlines necessarily represent the interim stages of a writing project. Indeed, creating and meeting interim deadlines is crucial to getting to the final stages of a writing project. By creating more efficacy in our writing schedules along the way, we put ourselves in the best possible position to handle the undeniable stress of submitting a final draft. I look forward to having the chance to reflect more on that challenge in the coming months!

♦

This post is the eighth in a series of book reflections posts. As I go through the writing process, I’m pausing to talk about my progress and my thoughts on the writing process itself. The progress reports are really just for me: I’m using the public nature of the blog to keep me accountable. The actual point of these posts is to reflect on what I’m learning about writing and how these insights connect to the topics covered here on the blog.

Status Update: As I said above, I’m in the home stretch. My work over the coming weeks will be a combination of tightening, supplementing, harmonizing, and jettisoning. Except for that last one, these activities are very satisfying. At times, it’s a bit confounding trying to use my own revision principles to revise what I’m saying about revision, but I hope my own struggles will ultimately make the book more humble and more helpful.