Welcome to My New Blog (reposted from my new blog)

This is reposted from my home site, www.thoughtclearing.com, where I will be hosting my blog in the future.

Over ten years ago, I started a blog on Blogger, using that service because I didn’t want to try to manage my own blog (WordPress was still young, and I was unfamiliar with it–I’m hardly at the cutting edge of tech).

I started with a modest post about developing “momentum” as a writer–developing a sense of progress, a sense of motion that helps make each new writing session move better. It aimed at helping others with their writing, and also at providing a practice that would help me improve my writing.

It’s been an on-and-off project. For over a year back near the beginning, I wrote a post every day, usually with a length of around 1,000 words.  That practice helped me improve my own writing, but I let it lapse to focus on other writing projects (two books completed: one as second author–Horst Rittel’s Universe of Design, and one all my own–Getting the Best of Your Dissertation, as well as a third currently in submission to publishers).  For many years, I posted rarely, if at all, but last year, I started posting on a weekly basis with an aim to improving my search engine visibility, which is also my motivation for moving both blog and website to a new WordPress platform.

My primary aim is to provide useful suggestions and guidance for writers, though I will likely write about other subjects as they suit me. I invite you to ask questions: do you have any questions or ideas about the process of writing?

On the incident with Jason Spencer and Sacha Baron Cohen

In an ideal world, people make rational decisions, right? They make decisions based on good reasons, on due consideration of potential outcomes, including bad ones, right? When people are driven by strong emotion, it is generally agreed that they don’t make good decisions. People do things when scared or angry that they would not do if they were calm and had time to reflect on the ramifications of their action.

With this in mind, it would be nice to think that our elected officials are making decisions based on good reasons, not reflexive fear reactions.  Whatever policy legislators  are going to propose, wouldn’t it nice to think that the deliberations leading to that policy were driven by due consideration of evidence and reason?

So, anyway, Jason Spencer is a Georgia state representative who just tendered his resignation as of July 31, 2018 because he did some stuff that was recorded for television, and after the fact he regretted having done these things. Putting aside any judgement of the people or actions involved, I want to focus on Spencer’s explanation (from the BBC):

[Spencer] said in a statement Baron Cohen had taken "advantage of my paralyzing fear that my family would be attacked". 

"My fears were so heightened at that time, I was not thinking clearly nor could I appreciate what I was agreeing to when I participated in his 'class'," he said.

His paralyzing fears were heightened.  Apparently, Spencer goes through life constantly fearing and expecting terrorist attacks from people of the Islamic faith. He’s far more likely to be killed in an automobile accident, or by any number of relatively innocuous causes, but for Spencer, apparently, the myth of constant threat from Islamic terrorists is constantly at work, and, thus “I was not thinking clearly nor could I appreciate what I was agreeing to.”

This is the problem with discourse that focuses on vivid dangers like terrorist attacks. It stops us from reasoning clearly; it stops us from making good decisions.

To some extent, the first bad decision is to focus on the vivid and emotional event that is a terrorist attack. Of course, such an attack deserves attention, and of course, the victims of such an attack are deserving of sympathy. But so, too, do all the people who have fallen victim to any of the sundry dangers of modern life. Well over 30,000 people die in automobile accidents in the U.S. each year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year), but Spencer doesn’t appear to be afraid of that very real and far more likely danger. The thing about terrorist attacks is that they are special. They are unusual. They make good news because they are special and different. We are shocked by them. With something like automobile fatalities, they are so common that we cannot be continuously outraged or distressed. Trying to report on automobile fatalities would be a bit like the body counts that were featured on the news during the Vietnam war: it becomes numbing. That numbing might be good if it lets emotions ebbs and allows higher order reasoning, but that same numbing is bad because it allows the problem to be ignored.

The vividness of the unusual event is precisely what makes it so psychologically powerful—so able to trigger the fears that overwhelm good reasoning.

Wouldn’t it be nice if political discourse was dominated by arguments based on good evidence and sound reasoning, rather than decisions dominated by fear where the person making the decision is “not thinking clearly nor [able to] appreciate what [he/she is] agreeing to”?

As someone with an explicit interest in clear thinking (or at least in “thought clearing”), I place a high value on trying to seek out the best reasoning and on trying to avoid situations where decisions are made on passion rather than reason.  I know that no significant decision is ever purely rational, but that doesn’t mean that one cannot strive for rationality. Horst Rittel, who shaped the program in which I studied, held that rationality was ultimately impossible, but that nonetheless, we ought to strive to use the tools of rationality as much as possible to guide our decision-making for the precise reason that the decisions we make can have vast consequences. We can’t eliminate the emotional elements of decision making. But we can—and should—make a concerted effort to avoid letting our thinking be constantly driven to a state of panic due to a threat that is, realistically speaking, incredibly small.

What is Writer's Block?

Recently, I read something that argued that there is no such thing as writer’s block, and that, in fact, writer’s block was essentially just an excuse for people who don’t want to work hard. That reminded me of one of the books about that I really dislike.  (Sources that I dislike will remain nameless because I’d rather not write bad things about people.) The idea that writer’s block doesn’t exist is something of a pet peeve of mine: I find it annoying beyond the scope of the claim’s significance. People who talk about experiencing "writer's block" are talking about something, and arguing that those people are just being lazy strikes me as facile and insulting. Plenty of people who struggle with writer's block are anything but lazy.  I'm not going to provide any set definition, but I want to consider a few issues related to writer's block.

It may be the case that the term "writer's block" is poorly chosen.  A book that I do like (Hjortshoj, Understanding Writing Blocks) argues that we should talk about “writing blocks” rather than “writer’s block” because that puts focus on the process and takes focus away from the idea that it is a personal problem.  From a strategic perspective—from the perspective of trying to help people get writing—I like Hjortshoj’s point.  But on another level, I don’t think that makes “writer’s block” an inaccurate term—in fact, in a way, it is completely accurate to focus on the personal nature of the problem.  Blocks in the writing process are intensely personal because the writing process is intensely personal, and losing focus on the personal element can interfere with attempts to understand how to work through individual writing problems.

Even if the term “writer’s block” is not poorly chosen, it is problematic because it is used to describe a wide variety of issues: one person’s block may have very different causes than another person’s.  We can generalize and say that these problems are psychological in nature.  We would not use “writer’s block” to describe, for example, someone who stopped writing after suffering a stroke, or a brain injury. And, indeed, we also want to say that “writer’s block” is only appropriate to describe someone who has a psychological issue of some significance. “Writer’s block” is not appropriate to describe someone who is just lazy. If you’re not writing because you’d rather do something else because the other thing seems more fun or more appealing, that’s not writer’s block, that’s just your choice about how to spend your time. By parallel, a person can choose to drink alcohol without having a drinking problem—it may not the best choice, but it’s a choice, not a real problem—so, too, can a person choose to avoid writing without having a problem writing (not counting the inherent difficulties of writing, that is).

But once I start to talk about motivation and intention, the discussion moves into slippery territory, and this may be part of what makes it difficult to define writer’s block (and also part of what makes otherwise seemingly intelligent authors write silly things like that there is no such thing as writer’s block because it’s just that people are being lazy).  At what point do we say that someone has moved from bad choices to actual dysfunction?  I’d rather not get into a debate about where the boundary lies.  It’s entirely possible to imagine someone who is supposed to write instead deciding “I’m going to go have fun with my friends.” It’s entirely possible to imagine that this choice was made simply because going to have fun with friends is fun, while writing is difficult (and often not fun at all). It’s also entirely possible to imagine that same choice being made by a repressed fear of writing that leads to avoidance.  One of these situations would not be writer’s block, but the other would be or could be.

If we start to think of writer’s block this way--as a pattern of not writing due to some psychological difficulty--we can see it in a variety of ways. In some cases it may be a symptom of some other psychological issue (e.g., depression). In others it might be a problem experienced only in the specific area of writing. Stage fright could be seen as a parallel, in the sense that some cases of stage fright are generally limited to fear of performing in front of others, while other cases are the manifestation of some larger issue, for example a more general social anxiety.

Another issue to consider is that the source of the problem does not always lie with the writer (or at least not with the writer entirely). I worked with a master’s candidate who was struggling because many previous drafts of work had been rejected by the thesis chair with the only feedback being to rewrite the entire thing. Someone who can produce several complete drafts definitely has the ability to write, and a history of producing writing is strong evidence that the writer is capable of writing. But none of that is a guarantee against getting stuck at some point. Repeated, unreasonably bad feedback could certainly cause an aversion to writing in the most reasonable of people. If you start to feel like your efforts are futile, it becomes harder to keep working. while it is true that the writer faced with such unreasonable feedback will need to find some solution somehow—but the best solutions that present (get a thesis chair who will actually try to help you learn! Quit the program and enroll elsewhere) are not writing solutions and my be pretty distasteful in themselves. Finding a solution is still problematic, but it’s useful to keep in mind that there are outside forces that can trigger problems with writing. Struggling against outside barriers can hardly be considered a personal weakness.

At its worst, writer’s block can become a severe and difficult self-reinforcing concern that contributes to other issues.  Someone who suffers from depression, for example, might struggle to write due to negative self-opinions or evaluations. In such a case, one bad writing session might lead to self-criticism, which makes the writer feel bad, and which then makes it harder to write the next time. And if writing goes poorly two times in a row, the negative feelings increase, causing problems in the third writing session, etc. A cycle like this a little self-perpetuating: it definitely takes effort to break that cycle. And if the writer starts to focus on the writer’s block as separate from the other issues, it can start to feel as if problems are compounding (“Not only am I depressed, but I have writer’s block, too!”).

To wrap this up, I’d like to note how much I like to avoid semantic debates: trying to precisely define “writer’s block” is just a problem that I don’t want engage. The issue isn’t whether “writer’s block” exists or what “writer’s block” is; the issue is how to get writing and how to write effectively. It seems silly to argue that all writers who are having trouble writing just aren’t trying hard enough. But it also seems silly to think that all writers who are having trouble writing have the same problem. For some, it’s this; for others, it’s that. The specific reasons that a person doesn’t write, and therefore might want to say that he or she has writer’s block, vary wildly from person to person. For some, it might be a mild aversion, for others, it might be related to or caused by significant emotional difficulties, such as depression. 

I have not directly answered the question “what is writer’s block?”  Nonetheless, I want to conclude by looking forward in the direction of a topic for a separate post: what does one do if one is not writing and suffering from that? What can you do if you are experiencing a writing block?  From one perspective, the answer to “writer’s block” is to view it as the symptom of some other problem and then to work on that problem. Focusing on writer’s block itself can distract from doing things that will benefit you. It is meaningful to talk about writer’s block, but only as a symptom of some other problem. From another perspective, the answer is simple, but not easy: develop a good practice. 

Perspective and telling your story

This is a follow-up to my previous post about writing from the heart and writing exercises, in which I argued that, while it is always important to be true to the story that you want to tell, sometimes it is a valuable exercise to try to tell that story in a way that suits a particular audience, especially an unfriendly audience.  This takes that same issue from a slightly different perspective—from the view that any story can be told in different ways. I’m not talking about there being two sides to every story, in the colloquial sense of different people viewing the same event in different lights—though that is closely related. I’m talking about how one person with one story can tell that one story in different ways and with different perspectives.

Consider, for example, this blog post and my previous one: both are telling my views on writing to varying audiences, including hostile ones, but the first focused on viewing the activity through the lens of a writing practice—a practice to develop your writing skills—and this through the lens of the variety of perspectives inherent in a given story.

Or consider, for example, a research analysis using a novel method: just from the start, one can focus on what the new method reveals about the subject or on how that particular analysis reveals insight into the method. Both of these are typically present in any research project that applies new research methodologies to old, established fields of study.

The perspective that you take in writing or telling your story can shift, even if the underlying story itself remains the same.  Now it may be that you are more interested in one perspective than the other, but that only makes it a little harder to shift to other perspectives. Because stories are complex, the other perspectives are always there.

The researcher who picks up a new method may be so fascinated with the method and learning the method that he/she tends to focus on the methodological issues despite matters of interest in the subject, or may be so focused on the research subject that he/she disregards matters of method.  And yet, in this generic situation—applying a new method of analysis to an old problem—both the perspectives are always there.  This can be most easily seen by imagining two separate audiences: one, the audience of people interested in the subject, the other, the audience of people interested in the development of the method.

The perspectives focused on theory and subject aren’t the only possible perspectives, of course. Any work that bridges disciplines will naturally have separate perspectives for each discipline. And then any study of literature or history or any social phenomenon could choose to focus on a variety of perspectives, including historical, economic, sociological, or technological concerns. A Jane Austen novel, for example, could be examined through all these lenses (and probably has been).  Or a building designed by Le Corbusier. These many lenses could be turned on almost anything related to humans.

How does this perspective (that every story can be told from multiple perspectives) affect your practice as a writer? In my previous post, I was talking about writing to a hostile audience while staying true to your own story, and I think there’s a similar opportunity there. In the previous post, I suggested using the attempt to write to a hostile audience, and to suit one’s words to the hostile audience, as an exercise to improve your skill as a writer. Now I’m suggesting a way to deepen your thinking about your work by imagining the different perspectives that different audiences are taking.  What perspective is your hostile audience taking?

By understanding the perspective of your audience, you can better craft your response so that you can reach them.  Understanding the perspective of your audience means understanding what they are going to focus on as important.  Now it is quite possible that what they want to focus on is not what you want to focus on. In the long run, of course, you do want to try to bring the discourse around to focus on what you want to focus on. But the starting place is to focus on what they want to focus on.

If you think of the different perspectives on your story as all being present in your own story, you can start to see how to tell the story you want to tell, even if the first things you need to talk about (write about) are not the things that you care about most.  Such shaping of your presentation to suit your audience is not a sell-out of your story: you can stay true to your story. It can be a very good learning experience as you try to imagine your work through someone else’s eyes. (But of course, try to imagine your work through reasonable eyes—you don’t want to get stuck asking yourself self-destructive questions about your work.) Imagining reasonable objections to your work is a good way to make it stronger—finding real weaknesses is the first step in fixing them. (But, again, be reasonable: all work has some limitations, so don’t throw your work away as soon as you see some weakness in it.)

Hostile audiences are often hostile because they see the world differently from you. Trying to understand their perspectives can help you gain some insight into your work by looking at it from angles you may not usually consider, and trying to communicate your understanding of their perspective can help reduce their hostility to your work. 

Trying to build such communicative bridges is not, in my view, an abdication of your story or any sort of selling out.  Communication need not be focused on and framed around a disagreement, even if that disagreement is central to the work being done.  The very fact that you are communicating with a given group means that there is some common ground—some place on which you stand along with your hostile audience.  That common ground is a good place place to start a discussion that will lead to a point of dispute. That shared perspective, however limited, is a tool to try to bridge the differences.

Writing from the heart and writing exercises

Last week I wrote about a scholar who does great work, but whose dissertation has not satisfied its reviewers. I am, to some extent, writing about that same or a tangential concern and a related idea that came up in my creative writer’s group. A poet in the group was talking about submitting work to various journals/e-journals and about his recognition of the tension between writing what he wanted to write and writing what would suit the journal/editor. This is a similar tension to that experienced by a scholar who is trying to please an audience that is in some way hostile to their work.  To what extent do you change what you say to please the audience? Especially when the audience has power—power to accept or reject your work? This is, in a way, one face of “selling out”: doing work that you don’t really believe in for financial gain.

To speak of “selling out” focuses on a sacrifice of integrity, and that’s not really where I want to go. I think there is a lot more to the dynamic between writer and audience than a simple, clear assumption that pleasing and audience is always a sacrifice of integrity. There is a balance that can be found between (1) writing for yourself and to be true to your own vision and (2) writing to please an audience, especially one that doesn’t want the same things you do. There’s a lot in this dynamic that I’m not going to discuss in this post. I want to focus on just one suggestion: view the task of writing to please a specific (possibly hostile) audience as an exercise in developing your ideas and your skill as a writer.

A scholar—or any writer—should be aiming to write about things that really matter personally. Write about things that you really care about and believe in. If you’re working on something that you care about and believe in, it’s much easier to do the work, and much more satisfying to work, and that generally means that there’s less danger of writer’s block or avoidance.

But what do you really care about? Is that something that can be expressed in only one way? To what extent can you shape your work to suit your audience without sacrificing your own integrity?

It seems to me that any idea can be expressed in many different ways.  It seems to me that most really substantive ideas have multiple dimensions that could be discussed in varying proportion to suit varying audiences.

To put this in terms of poetry, one might choose to express some thought—the transient nature of life, for example—in different poetic forms—sonnet, haiku, etc. Each form shapes how the idea is expressed, but none fundamentally change the underlying idea (or at least none need change the underlying idea—but most writers learn as they write, and learning does change ideas).

When writing to an audience that wants something other than what you want—if you really want to write haiku and your audience is expecting or demanding a sonnet, you can say “I’m not going to do it! I write haiku!”  That would lead to something of an impasse. What I am suggesting is that you approach such situations saying to yourself, “Maybe I can learn something from the exercise of writing a sonnet. Maybe I can learn something about my ideas and something about the craft of writing that will help me write better haiku in the future.”

Approach such situations is as an exercise—opportunities to stretch your communicative repertoire.  If you don’t want to write what the other person wants to read, and if you think of the task in those terms, you can easily feel resentment for having to work on something that you don’t want to work on. If you say “can I choose words that will satisfy my critical reviewer and also stay true to my purpose?”, then your challenge may not be flavored with resentment—and that’s worth a lot (especially if you are one of those people for whom resentment fuels procrastination).

There is a lot that can be done to shape a presentation of your ideas without sacrificing them or your integrity.  Let’s set aside extreme cases where you are called upon to make a statement that directly contradicts your beliefs—if the editor at the journal wants a poem on a subject you don’t want to write about, don’t write it. If your professor wants you to say “Marx was right about everything” and you don’t agree, don’t write it. But if you’re not being forced to a direct contradiction of your beliefs, then look for the challenge of writing your own ideas in a way that will reach the difficult audience. Look for the opportunity to develop your skill as a writer and the opportunity to find a new way to express a familiar idea.

You may need to (temporarily) abandon the ways in which you have previously tried to write about your work.  This can be frustrating and difficult, but it can be a great learning experience for a writer—both in terms of developing a greater discursive repertoire and skill as a writer.

Looking for new ways to communicate and old idea doesn’t change the underlying purposes, the underlying quality, or the underlying value of the work. It doesn’t stop the underlying message from being shared with others in other forms.  What it does do is stretch the scholar/writer’s ability to bridge communicative and intellectual gaps.

There is a problem in trying to write in a way that reaches people with whom you have fundamental disagreements—trying to write in their language often requires adopting some of the conceptual structures that they use.  This makes the exercise in trying to write across these communicative gaps quite difficult while still remaining true to your own vision.  But, if you remember to think of the exercise as an exercise—an attempt to develop the ability to write/speak to disparate audiences—then these dangers are challenges to be surmounted, rather than causes to abandon your beliefs.

Make Them Reject It!

At a certain point, it is necessary to trust yourself that your work is good enough and ought to be accepted. Some self-doubt is appropriate—after all, there is little logical certainty to be had, and no matter how much data you gather or how many books/articles you read, there are always more data to be gathered and more books/articles to read. But, as a matter of practicality, eventually you must believe in yourself and believe that the work you have done is good work. At that point, it’s necessary to challenge your readers to reject your work.  You don’t want to get rejected, of course. You want to take the attitude that your work should be accepted, and that if someone is going to reject it, they better have damn good reasons for rejecting it.

Eventually, it’s necessary to force the issue with your reviewers—professors, editors, grant reviewers or whoever. It’s necessary for your work to be reviewed, regardless of outcome. In this post, I frame that in terms of “make them reject you,” not “make them accept you,” because I want to focus on the common emotional dynamic that many authors face where expectation of a negative response starts to impede progress. If your progress is delayed by thinking “they’re going to reject it,” then you might benefit from thinking “I have done good work, and I believe that my work should be accepted, and if they don't accept it, they better have a good reason, not some overly general complaint.”

In this post, I am generally writing to people who have brought their project to a certain level of accomplishment—people who have been basically diligent in their research and writing. If you haven’t completed a first draft yet, it’s probably better to finish the first draft and solicit feedback, expecting a critique, rather than “making them reject you”—getting a first draft returned with feedback isn’t a rejection, it’s an opportunity to improve the work.  Still, even during the early stages of a project, it’s good to think “I am going to do good work, and when I’ve finished, they better have damn good reasons if they reject me,” because it’s easy to get hung up thinking “they’ll reject me” at any point in a project.

I’m writing this post because I was recently talking with a scholar at the very end of a dissertation who was trying to respond to unreasonable expectations. A complete draft had been provisionally accepted, and in my eyes, it easily surpassed the quality necessary for a doctoral dissertation.  But the scholar was getting hung up on comments from some of the reviewers—getting hung up trying to make plans to respond to unreasonable complaints. And what was really needed was that the scholar assert that the work in the dissertation was done responsibly and to a reasonable standard. No work is perfect; every work has limits. At a certain point complaints that are logically defensible in the abstract become completely unreasonable in the context of the real practice of research.

When I say unreasonable, I’m thinking of one comment this scholar had received, in particular. One professor had said: “You didn’t come up with these ideas. Where did you get them?” There are contexts in which this might be a reasonable complaint—if, for example, the professor is absolutely certain of a specific source that uses the idea in question—but it is not a generally reasonable complaint inasmuch as the expectation and primary criterion for scholarly success is to come up with something new. The presumption that the scholar did not come up with the ideas is problematic.

A complaint like that must be met with confidence. It must be met with “These are my ideas. I have not read them anywhere else or heard them anywhere else. If you know of someone who has used them, please tell me.”  This doesn’t work, of course, if you want to claim that some well-known, established idea as your own—“every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” for example—but if ideas are really yours, it’s necessary to claim it, and to force the other person to prove you wrong. Say: “I have never seen this before, and I looked for things like it. Have you ever seen it? If so, where? Because I would like to see that source.” Such a response: 1. claims that you have been diligent; 2. forces the reviewer to specify, thus revealing whether the complaint is reasonable (there’s a source you should have used and didn’t) or unreasonable (it’s just an excuse to complain); and 3. it presents you as wanting to use the information (i.e., you want their advice, and you avoid conflict). This kind of response can help defuse complaints that are driven by emotional rather than intellectual motivations. And remember, it’s perfectly possible to independently come up with an idea that someone else has also had (e.g., Newton, Leibniz, and calculus)—it’s not a crime to assert “I haven’t seen that source, and came up with the idea on my own.”

A similarly unreasonable complaint is an open ended “how do you know no one else has done this?” A good scholar takes steps to find all possible resources that touches on the issues in their work. But no scholar, no matter how good, can read everything written. There are simply too many publications for any one person to read or even review them all. A good scholar will take steps to know what has been published in the literature, and then, having taken those steps, should proceed to do his or her own work.  At some point the scholar has to leave previous publications behind.  It should be enough to take diligent action to survey the literature and then to say “I have taken appropriate steps to review the literature, but that does not guarantee that my search did not miss something.”  On a certain level, this problem is something like the more general problem of induction: no matter how many observations an empirical scientist may take, it is always possible that the next observation will not follow the pattern set by previous observations. No matter how many articles you may read on a subject, you cannot guarantee that there will not be some other article that you did not find in previous searches. New articles are published every day--even if you did all the work as of yesterday, that could have changed with new publications.

It must be admitted that it is appropriate for a professor to ask what you have done to ensure that you haven’t missed anything. And it’s not right to be unduly arrogant about the work you have done. But when complaints like “how do you know there isn’t some work you haven’t seen” is combined with a less reasonable complaint like “these ideas aren’t yours; where did they come from,” then it’s appropriate to start to read that complaint as being unreasonable rather than just reasonable.

Ever since David Hume elucidated the problem of induction in the 18th century, empirical science has struggled to negotiate the problem that the next observation may break the pattern of previous observations. You’ve only seen white swans and never a black one? That doesn’t prove that there are no black swans, but still…  You’ve only seen books/articles that address one aspect of an idea, but not another? It doesn’t prove that there are no works that address the other idea, but…

At a certain point—when work has been executed diligently and carefully—you have to ask whether their complaints are reasonable, and you have to assert that your work is worthy. You have to force their hands: make them either reject your work or accept it, but don’t let them implicitly reject it by getting you hung up on unanswerable and unreasonable questions.

At a certain point, you have to force them to take their own stand and explicate their concerns, and if they reject you, either they have good reasons (I mean reasons that seem good to you and worth responding to, as opposed to unanswerable, unreasonable questions like “how do you know you’ve read everything?”) or you challenge their rejection (with, of course, an explanation of why your work ought not respond to their complaint).