writing

Lately I've been in awe of the act of writing. I regularly ask myself (and nowadays my students) to do something very nearly miraculous. I don't know how it works, but I've developed an almost reckless trust that it does.

So, I've got a blank page and no idea what I'm going to say, but then I start saying something anyway, and sometimes it turns out to be something meaningful and exciting. And sure, it doesn't come out of nowhere -- I draw on lots of past experiences and thoughts to make it happen. But still, the sheer gall of thinking, "I now have no clue where I'm going with this, but 3 hours from now I absolutely am going to have a decent draft of whatever it is" is baffling when you think about it. How do we know it'll work? Yeah, there are deliberate things we can do to foster it -- brainstorming, associations, freewriting, whatever -- but what guarantees that anything will actually come together? Nothing I know of, and yet it happens every time. The quality of my writing definitely varies, but every single time professors have assigned me to write a paper, I've written one. And every time I decide to make myself write, I write something. It's crazy!

I have mixed feelings about how academia forces writing and ideas. When there's pressure to generate material, a lot of it is likely to be inauthentic and written just because we've got a deadline to meet even if we don't care about what we're saying. And the whole reification of ideas is weird -- who thought it was a good plan to assign complex and multidirectional expressions of thought a numeric value? or to use relatively arbitrary writing requirements as a barrier to achieving status? But one thing I'll say in favor of the academic writing situation: It does build faith in whatever miracle we rely on when we write. If I hadn't been required to write regularly, I might not even know that writing can happen on demand. I might be stuck writing only in the conjunction of propitious moods when I felt energetic and thoughtful at the same time. But (largely because of academic writing) I instead know that I can force writing under almost any psychological conditions. And sometimes forced writing can be dang good, too.

Writing is a weird hybrid of hard work and magic. More on that later, perhaps.