The Daily Routine of Writing

If you read this blog regularly, you’re aware that I’m writing a book on the culture wars. (It’s why “Culture Wars” is the number one label of this blog. If you’re a new reader, and you want to jump down that rabbit hole, scroll down and to the right and click on the label. Or, if you would like a brief synopsis of my generic thinking on the topic, and would like to hear my untrained radio voice, check out this interview I did recently with my local NPR affiliate.)

But this post is not about the culture wars. It’s about writing habits. As you all know, writing is hard. Writing a book is really, really hard. Many of you have written books and know this all too well. Many more of you will soon know how difficult it is.

Now that I am more than halfway finished writing my second book, I can reflect on what makes me tick as a writer. The most important thing for me is establishing a daily routine. In this way, writing is a job. It’s a grind. Yes, it’s sometimes exhilarating. In the end it’s extremely rewarding. But this does not change the fact that the process of writing is a struggle. Struggle. So let’s share how we deal with this struggle.

This set of quotes by famous writers makes clear that productive writers establish daily routines. Now, unlike those of us in academia whose daily lives are overloaded with all kinds of other professional duties, including teaching and service, these writers seem to have no responsibilities other than writing. (How wonderful for them that they can enjoy hours-long lunches with friends every day!) Still, I think the main message—that writers need a daily routine—is a good one.

With that, I will briefly describe my daily writing routine, if only to induce you to do the same. Take note that I am on sabbatical right now, so I’m able to dedicate a good chunk of my professional time to writing—in ways that I’m unable to do during typical semesters. I’m not necessarily a fast writer, but I’m reasonably productive because of my routine.

My routine: I try to write 6-8 hours per day, 5 days per week. So I treat writing like a 30- or 40-hour workweek. I do my best writing in the mornings, from 8 until noon. Then I write for an additional 2 to 4 hours after lunch, depending on how it’s going. If I’m not writing during my designated writing times I feel guilty. This is what it means to treat writing like a job. For me, it’s as simple as that.

I have friends who write in spurts, who stay up late at night when they feel inspired. That sounds great, but I’m not like that. Yes, I have better writing days than others, days when I’m more inspired than others, but mostly I just sit at my desk for my allotted time and grind out the pages. Nothing glamorous.

Where do I write? I mix up my environment so I don’t get bored. Sometimes I write at home. Sometimes I write in my office on campus. Often I write at a coffee shop, because I like white noise.

How do I write? I do everything on my computer, including taking all of my notes. When I begin a chapter, I take about a week or two to review and arrange my notes. I also read a few books to shore up my foundation and re-familiarize myself with the specific chapter topic. Then I write that chapter until it’s done. I start that process over again when I finish a chapter.

What helps me write? Living life normally. For me, this means daily exercise, spending a lot of time with my family, and drinking good beer. If this all sounds banal, that’s because it is. That’s the point. From my experience, productive writers weave writing into their daily lives.

(Also, I turn off the internet—email, facebook, twitter, USIH Blog—while writing. Easier said than done, but crucial.)

Of course, I realize everyone has different habits. So let’s hear them. I’m genuinely curious.

Intimate Space and Novelistic Style in Intellectual History

Guest post by Tom Cutterham

I'm writing this leaning on the fold-down tray in front of me, on a train going north through a mist at 9am. As the refreshment cart bustles by, the smell of coffee briefly overwhelms everything. Two guys in stripy Next jumpers are chatting about last night's big night out. On my laptop, the keyboard is smaller than my fingers are used to. And I'm wondering if any of this makes a difference, and how. What is determining the way I'm thinking and writing? Do space and place – or more importantly, the intimate spaces that are both transient and obscure – matter?

Let's say that all this does matter somehow; let's say that the environments in which we do our living and thinking impact on us in ways almost impossible to recognise; that we're bodies as well as minds; that people don't live on text alone. How would a historian capture and express the specificities of her subject's material, spatial experience? Given that it would be impossible to list and map each atom of physical context (and if it were, where would you put the borders?) what kind of selectivity should the historian employ? Perhaps she would have to write something like how a novelist writes.

Not all novelists are the same, and nor are all historians, obviously. But each group has its disciplinary, professional norms – and there's room for exchange between them. The starting-place for historians has to be a consideration of just what we're trying to do with our work. If our aim is to capture and distill a complete and accurate record of the past, I don't think we're going to get anywhere, with or without new techniques. We're butting our heads against the paradox of mimesis. If, on the other hand, we're writing to do something to our own lives and our readers' lives, to provoke ideological shifts, new and better ways of seeing the world, then we can fruitfully ask: aren't many novelists doing the same thing, and what can we learn from them?

On their surfaces at least, the way works of history try to persuade their readers is clearly distinct from the way works of fiction do. It's a disingenuous cliché that historians proceed purely by logical progression from objectively defined evidence. But let's say that a history book often reads that way. Historical realism involves an apparatus of citation and elaborate quellencritik, which serve to signal fidelity to a rigorous method. We should believe what a historian tells us because she has done the work. A novel's persuasive capacity relies on patterns of tone and mood. It succeeds when it alters the reader's subjectivity, makes her think in a different voice. The reader never becomes part of the history, but she must become part of the novel. To do that, she must see and feel its place, space, and time.

It's precisely that dissolution of distance between reader and text, which is so essential to a novel's function (and which authors have resisted and inverted in so many interesting ways), that presents ethical considerations to conscientious historians. Disciplinary norms demand that readers be given space to dispassionately assess the merits of an argument. Even phrasing it like that, though, helps unmask this attitude as a holdover from the days of hegemonic objectivity-discourse: of power speaking to ignorance. These ethics were always a sham. Inasmuch as it does so, history persuades where it collapses the author and reader's subjectivity in spite of – under the cover of – formalised argument.

If we grant that a more honest as well as a more effective way to proceed is to consider ourselves equal participants in a discursive community of persuasion, of negotiated subjectivities, what about a straightforwardly methodological rather than ethical question? Novelistic style may be applicable to certain historical problems, but hardly all of them. Who will write history of the longe duréeand the statistical abstract while we work on our intellectual biographies? I think that objection is mistaken too. One thing historians and novelists always share, as Hayden White long ago showed, is a sophisticated (if unconscious) manipulation of metaphor. The smallest thing may be at the same time the largest. Who thinks Middlemarch is only about its own characters and settings?

The content of history and fiction, to take up another of White's themes, is indistinguishable from its form. Metaphorical structures are as much a matter of what you write about as how you write about it. So in suggesting that historians take more from novelists, I'm doing more than asking for better writing (whatever that is). Historians can take intimate space and place more seriously, among their many other concerns, if they also learn from the ways novelists portray and integrate them. They can choose to care about these things if they also know how to write about them.

All this is as much as to say, I think historians and novelists share the same question. We share it because it haunts us all: what matters, and why, and how? I'm getting close to my destination, and my back is starting to cramp up from how I've been sitting with my laptop. Maybe historians have all long taken these problems and directions into consideration – there are certainly great examples of books that have done so. (1) But then, why does it feel so dangerous to write like this as a graduate student? Is it a privilege for which we have to qualify first?

Historians at all levels of the discipline worry about the distance, always apparently growing, between their work and audiences beyond the academy. Often the prescription is digital or multimedia; equally often, it’s a vacuous call for more stylish writing or a reinvigorated grand narrative. Now, it’s not as if fiction publishing is in any less of a downward curve than history. But if the historians who keep the gates of the discipline want to foster new ways of reaching readers and changing their lives, they should start at the dissertation, the workshop, the viva, and open up the potential for encounters with intimate space and novelistic style.

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(1) These are the examples mentioned at the seminar where this paper was under discussion: James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (Pantheon, 1994); James Brookes, Captives and Cousins (North Carolina, 2001); Jill Lepore, The Name of War (Knopf, 1998); the epilogue to William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (Norton, 1991); Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street (Knopf, 2010); Dan Sharftein, The Invisible Line (Penguin, 2011).

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

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It's nautical metaphor week here at the U.S. Intellectual History blog. 

Ray Haberski set the course with his brilliant, aptly lyrical piece on "The Albatross Concept."  Drawing from Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Ray explored how the language historians use to bring an elusive idea to ground can become both a mark of distinction and a source of frustration when those historians become forever, fatefully linked to their most well-aimed turns of phrase.  I will allude to some of Ray's ideas in greater detail below.  In the meantime, I would simply say that, as blog posts go -- and sometimes they go very well indeed -- Ray's most recent offering is a star to steer by. 

Mariners also made a brief but jaunty appearance in Ben Alpers's piece about the impact that Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolution may have had on the work of intellectual historians.  "History is sometimes said to be the pirate discipline," Ben wrote, "and I have no doubt that many intellectual historians have raided the Kuhnian castle in their efforts to understand the past."  The mental image these words evoked became a source of great amusement for me.  Just picture it: David Brion Davis, Linda Kerber, Bernard Bailyn, Jill Lepore, Daniel Rodgers, Lynn Hunt, Jesse Lemisch, Joyce Appleby, David Hollinger, Joan Scott, and a motley crew of elbow-patched accomplices, cuirasses clutched in their gritted teeth, swinging from the rigging to scale the castle walls.  "Look sharp, me hearties! There be paradigms within, and dead men will tell tales!" Sign me up.

Between those two seafaring metaphors, I offered up a tangentially nautical image in response to a comment on my own post.  My figure of speech was drawn from a well-worn folk saying: picture a grad student wracked with angst about writing, about words that either don't come at all or that don't work when they do, as someone caught "between the devil and the deep blue sea."*  And, oh my, is that sea deep, and is that devil daunting! But even in jest, I shouldn't have singled out anybody to serve as my honorary Mephisto-of-the-moment...especiallya fine scholar who paid me the high compliment of saying that I had hauled up an idea worth using. A kind word like that ought to serve as wind to my sails.  But here I sit, dead in the water, and not even an albatross to show for it.

And make no mistake:  I need an albatross.  In academe, we all do.  In fact, we need a whole brace of them:  dissertation, journal article, first book, tenure book, promotion book.  Bag 'em and tag 'em.  

I think this is why some of us balk sometimes at the blank page:  we see ideas almost as living things, and pinning them down can seem a bloody business.  I think the more conscious we are of the life and liveliness of ideas, the harder intellectual work becomes.  We know that ideas are "in the air" -- but not like some inert atmospheric substance that people breathe in unawares, nor even like some materialistic wind whose mechanical movement marks and makes a culture's or an era's will.  Instead, we see that ideas take wing and move with a will of their own.  And yet we believe that we must master them -- that we must, contra Jim Livingston, assert our "cognitive autonomy" as individual rational agents, as authorial selves.

As intellectual historians, we may very well need to think of authors and authorship as Foucault does, but we dare not see ourselves in such a light -- I dare not, anyhow.  I can only think of the "I" who writes as an after-effect of the text after I've already written the text.  Otherwise, it's water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink ideas, ideas everywhere, and not a thought to think. When I'm facing the blank page, I have to believe in the fiction of the independent authorial consciousness, or I won't be able to write one. damn. word.  (Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!)

Academic work depends upon this fiction of the thinker who precedes the thought, and we acknowledge amongst ourselves this professional trick of epistemic prestidigitation.  We are aware that we discover and develop our ideas in conversation -- this blog is one place where that can happen, at least for me. And we do in fact footnote each other, and gladly so.  The academy is social, associative, collaborative, and we affirm this community of discourse every time we credit another scholar for work that has informed our own.  But we do so knowing all the while that we can no more give credit than we can take credit.   Where does any thought begin?  For every time we dare to think that we have called some new thought into being by the power of language, we might end up recognizing that we are simply giving a name to something that was already there, and present in some way to all of us. We are the servants of each other's thoughts.

If, as Ray suggests, "civil religion" is an albatross around Bellah's neck, what makes the term so burdensome may be the expectation it confers upon Bellah to exemplify the necessary fiction of the individual thinker.  Ray notes that "Bellah's deployment of civil religion struck a particular chord with scholars because, it seems to me, he summarized ideas and sensibilities that were swirling around his era."  Similarly, Ray suggests that George Kennan's claim to fame -- "containment" -- reflects "his ability to bring together streams of thought that had been circulating throughout the upper levels of government and intellectual life; he provided eloquence and clarity to ideas that would have existed in disparate ways without him."   Ray is not saying that just anybody could have hit upon the term that Bellah used or that Kennan deployed.  We all aim to put thought into words, but not everyone is such an able marksman.  (At this point, I'd be glad to hit a bell jar with a river rock from five yards back.)  These two marksmen, Bellah and Kennan, took aim at some ideas that were "in the air" and brought them within our reach.  

As academics and as writers, that is our work:  to bring ideas within reach.  We do this so that other people can take those ideas up and shape them -- or be shaped by them -- in turn. As scholars, as the originators of texts, we get our work done by constantly asserting a proprietary -- an authorial -- claim that we know better than to really believe. Though we may write (or not!) in solitude, we do not sail the seas alone.  In some way, every idea we have comes to us from and through the company we keep.  We are all on the same ship, we are all looking up into the same bright sky filled with wondrous, winged things.

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*If you want to listen to the 1931 Harold Arlen song, I'd recommend this 1961 cover by Ella Fitzgerald. In fact, I'd recommend Ella Fitzgerald's cover of pretty much any song.