Too many ideas and writer's block

On his 1932-1933 work schedule, Henry Miller wrote a list of “commandments,” the first of which was: “Work on one thing at a time until finished.” In many ways, it’s not a commandment that is entirely practical, but in others, it’s crucial to having a successful experience as a writer.

In the long run, it’s good to have lots of ideas and to start lots of projects. That way, when a forced lull comes in the work on one project, there is another project to work on. This is especially true at the later stages of work. If, for example, you’ve just submitted a final draft of something and are waiting for page proofs to come back for proofreading, then there’s no work that you can do on that project.  It’s a time to start a new project, even though the current one isn’t finished.  And, from the other perspective, it’s good to have an active curiosity, which will suggest many projects of potential value. Exploring those projects can be good to some extent—so long as they don’t confound focused effort.

In the short run, however, having many projects demanding attention can be very counter-productive. Having a lot of ideas that demand attention can prevent giving any one idea sufficient focus.

Here’s what happens to me often:

I have a great idea!

I start to write about the great idea! and decide it’s flawed.

I have another great idea!

I start to write about that new great idea! And then I realize it’s flawed.

repeat ad nauseum

When an idea first comes to me, it’s not fully developed or fully thought out. Writing helps me develop it and work out the problems, but that’s the thing: in the process of working out an idea, I discover problems. Discovering problems can lead to frustration. Frustration can lead to avoidance.

If I have a lot of ideas, then frustration can lead me to briefly engage many different ideas and abandon them all in frustration.  But if I only have one idea—if I stay focused—then, when I hit a problem, I work to resolve the problem, or at least I work to find a resolution.

I can get stuck if I don’t stick to one idea because I can shift through a number of ideas, get frustrated with each, and then get frustrated with the whole process and stop working altogether. 

Working through an idea carefully can be time consuming and difficult. Working with an idea tends to reveal dimensions that I had not previously considered, and then it takes effort to deal with those dimensions. All of that requires focus on the one idea—thus the value of Miller’s “work on one thing.”

If you have a lot of different ideas, they can compete for attention, and each one will seem more exciting and viable from a distance, where the difficulties are less obvious. If you have writer’s block, cut down your focus. Pick one small thing to write about, and put aside all the other cool things that you could write about.

In Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there is an anecdote of a writing student who was having trouble writing about her town. The teacher told her to write about one street, then about one building, and she continued having trouble. Eventually she tried writing about one brick in one building, and from that point of focus, she was able to produce a lot of writing.

That anecdote captures the sort of writer’s block that a lot of writers face, I think: there is a torrent of ideas waiting to come out, and their competition to come out blocks the process.

Write one thing at a time until finished.

Don’t get blocked because you have too many ideas. If you think that you have nothing to write about, reconsider. Try finding one really small idea that you could write about and work on that idea, and that idea alone, until you’ve made progress.

I partly chose this subject today because I was having trouble finding something to write about—I had skipped over a number of possible ideas and was feeling frustrated. And I recognized that frustration as related to my unwillingness to put in the effort to make any of my ideas work.

Limiting Complexity to suit the scope of your efforts

What level of specificity is appropriate to the task at hand? What level of detail is it necessary to present for your argument to work? The answers are dependent on the situation in which you are working. But the questions need to be asked repeatedly. It's necessary to get a good fit--and in particular this is important in not allowing the writing to be dragged away from the story that you wish to tell.

What is your writing about? If it is academic writing, it is not about lyrical beauty of the words, nor about the ability to touch the emotions of the reader. Academic writing is about the expression of ideas, of theories, of discoveries, and interpretations; it is about new understandings and new knowledge.

Therefore, writing can be valued by its ability to succinctly express and defend the important ideas, and its ability to efficiently and cleanly develop the argument.

The well-known principle of Occam's Razor suggests that in choosing between theories, the one that is simpler is to be preferred.

But this same principle can usefully be applied to academic writing: writing that is simpler is to be preferred. Occam's Razor can be translated "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." Necessary complexity is not to be eliminated. But detail should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

But how, I hear you ask, do you determine what is necessary? Sadly it's a matter of judgment. Writing is about communicating with people, and communicating well and clearly is difficult and a matter of art rather than logic. But the principle can still guide you: "is this detail necessary to the argument?" If you can answer no, then you can cut something. And simply knowing that the principle suggests the importance of eliminating detail can itself do wonders in helping keep the work focused.

Feedback cycles

Recently I've been thinking a lot about writing in terms of iterated feedback cycles. Basically, the writing of a dissertation or thesis can be seen through the lens of the fundamental interaction between the writer and the committee, and especially the advisor/chair.

The committee chair is expected (required, really) to give the writer feedback and guidance in the move towards completion. It doesn't always work out so well. Even so, I recommend working under the assumption that what you want to do is to create a useful feedback loop.

This can be done by the simple expedient of turning work that is basically complete. I don't necessarily mean completely edited and proofread and formatted, nor do I even mean with all problems resolved and no questions of how to develop the material. I really mean complete in terms of the structure of the paper.

A structurally complete paper has an introduction and a conclusion. It dedicates space to defining the basic terms and premises. It presents an idea to be discussed and a purpose for discussing it.

Minor digression here: I often think about the basic five-paragraph essay that everyone (of my generation, at least) was taught to write in elementary school or junior high. There was an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. It's a structure that is pretty roundly dismissed, I think, by composition teachers now. But I think it's elegant, and provides a basic model for what all writing is trying to accomplish.

All writing--fiction, speech writing, essays, etc.--starts with something that is supposed to draw the reader in and orient them in some way. A writer of fiction tries to draw the reader in differently than does the speech writer or the essayist, but still the writer of fiction wishesthe reader to know what the book is about. (aside: for any who believe that "different/differently" must always be paired with "from", I disagree. As I write to be understood, and as I seriously doubt that the sentence is hard to understand, I pooh-pooh the scorn of any prescriptive grammarian who thinks it "wrong." I could continue this digression with references, but really...back to our main story.) "Call me Ishmael," opens Moby Dick, thus informing the reader that the whole book will somehow be about this person Ishmael. Fiction writers don't always want their reader to understand the full import of the orientation, but yet their words orient the reader, nonetheless. Brave New World opens with the sentence fragment: "A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories." The sentence orients the reader to the fundamental oppressive dystopian vision. (and a big raspberry to all the petty grammarians out there who are appalled by such casual use of language as Huxley's incomplete sentence.)

Similarly, all pieces of writing have some ending, something that wraps up the work and leaves the reader with some sense of what the work was about. In the case of expository writing, this tends to be some statement of what you have shown and the conclusions that you draw from it--the moral of the story, if you will.

And, of course, there's something in between the beginning and the end.
A complete piece will have all of these.
If, then, you submit a work that is structurally complete, your reader can read it and has to be able to explain why it's not complete, and thus give you feedback on the content and other aspects of the writing. If it is complete, you're begging to have your reader say "it's not complete."

I'm maybe going to say more about this later, but I got off on digressions and now have to run off...

Wabi-Sabi and Silver Linings

Wabi-Sabi is a general philosophy associated with an aesthetic which, according to Wikipedia, "is sometimes described as one of beauty that is 'imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete' (according to Leonard Koren in his book Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers)."

As a writer and philosopher, I cannot help but look at this aesthetic except as an extension of a more general philosophy (partly because the relationship between the Modernist aesthetic and philosophical positions--which are, after all, reflections of a general way of looking at the world--was an issue I considered at length in my dissertation)--please excuse the long digression--as I was saying Wabi-Sabi, as a philosophy, suits much of what I am see in the world
around and in the discourse of philosophy. In particular, notions of imperfection and incompleteness are of particular interest with respect to matters of logic, such as the ideas brought up by, among other things, Goedel's proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic (which has been interestingly and approachably covered in Hofstadter's "Goedel, Escher, Bach").

But I digress--What seems important to me, with respect to the problems facing the academic writer, is that our logic, our reasoning, and our work seem--from a logical perspective--to be fraught with imperfections completely independent of how hard we work on the problem. This is a very important logical issue for writers to recognize--especially if they're hung up on perfectionism: if it can't be perfect, then does that change how you react to it?

Beyond that, though, we see in Wabi-Sabi an aesthetic that valorizes the imperfection. And this aesthetic principle is also translatable to the idea of building an academic argument: academic arguments cannot be logically perfect. Wabi-Sabi allows us to see the beauty of these imperfections--which may help with our writing a limitations section in the results, or a representation of opposing views in the literature review. There is beauty (and strength) in an argument that recognizes its own weaknesses.

Seeing imperfection as something beautiful, or at least as part of a beautiful thing, is a matter of perspective and focus. It is something that we have some control over. And this is what brings me to silver linings: every cloud has a silver lining, so the saying goes, and Wabi-Sabi says that everything beautiful has an imperfection. We can see the beauty if we look for it--the "sri vision" that I wrote about a few days ago--or we can focus our attention on the things that are ugly and imperfect, and on how that ugliness and imperfection are problems.

Writer's block, and dissatisfaction with one's own work, often rely on our ability to focus on the dark cloud, or our ability to see the imperfection as detracting from our work.

"Sri Vision"

This is going to be quick.

Today my yoga teacher was talking about "sri vision"--which, I suspect, but do not know, may be her own use of the idea of "sri".
In any event she was speaking of it as a way of looking at things that notices their beauty and their goodness--an all-encompassing vision that looks at the whole, rather than analyzing and breaking the vision down into little parts.

It is very easy, she was saying, to focus in on details, on pieces, and to lose sight of the larger picture, and thus to lose sight of the beauty in that larger picture.

While the notion of "sri vision" is relevant in a number of different ways in the context of academic writing, I was thinking of it particularly in terms of the loss of enthusiasm and the loss of the sense of significance that can occur, especially if your ideas--or your presentation or ideas--is treated harshly and subjected to destructive criticism.

Which reminds me that my yoga teacher specifically mentioned constructive vs. destructive criticism--something that had slipped my mind until I wrote the phrase "destructive criticism"--the difference between the two, she suggested, was the presence of "sri vision"--a sense or and appreciation of the whole, and the beauty that is inherent in the work.

I don't know if one has a choice, but it seems to me that it would be better to use sri vision, and remain passionate about a project than it would be to become jaded and cynical. Wherever we look, we can see problems if we look closely enough. Can we see the beauty in things as well?

What's the point?

What is the point that you're trying to make?
It seems that this is the place to start. Without this there is no focus to the work.

A writer said to me: "I want to say all sorts of things, but I have been told I have to show them, not state them." Well, my response is to say that the place to start is still to understand what it is that you believe and what it is that you want to say. If you know that, then you can ask yourself why you believe that, and what evidence you could present to help others see why you believe it.

I speak of belief due to my skeptical heritage: following Hume, I don't believe that we really "know" things--that is know them with certainty. But even so, I think the responsibility of a philosopher--which is what those who aspire to the Ph.D. ought to all be--is to explore ideas with care: the philosopher explores and examines ideas and challenges them; the philosopher does not just accept whatever idea is suggested by others.

If we believe that something exists, then, as philosophers, we want to have reasons for believing; we want to understand why we have chosen that idea over other alternatives. If we believe that something exists: then we should be able to share with others the specific reasons that we believe the idea. And as philosophers, those reasons are usually developed by the "love of wisdom" (the etymological root of "philosophy"): our willingness to examine ideas because we are interested in understanding.

If we know the point we want to make, then we can begin to set up our communication of that point to others.

No use crying over spilled milk

I lost my glasses yesterday. It was an inconvenience, but I got a new pair. It had been too long since I had a new, so it was no great loss. But it was a good opportunity to reflect on patterns of thought.

The last time I got new glasses, I worried about everything. I went to different stores. I dithered and vacillated about frames and costs. It took me an entire day to make a decision and who knows--perhaps I saved some money.

Yesterday I just went to the store that said they could give me glasses the same day. I probably spent more money, but I didn't fret. I enjoyed the day. I didn't fret about making the right decision and I didn't fret over the mistake that had put me in the position of needing new glasses right away. And that gave me the emotional energy to work and to focus on things much more productive than worrying about my glasses.

Some things are beyond our control. Once the milk has spilled, there's no putting it back into the bottle.

The question, then, is what we do once the milk has spilled. Or once the glasses have been lost. Or the draft rejected.

Working yourself into a tizzy over the bad outcome doesn't help. One might argue that we don't have control over our emotions. And there is no question that in the moment emotions can be overwhelming. But in the long run we can control our emotions. We all do--it is necessary to our socialization. And there are theories--like cognitive behavioral therapy--that argue that in the long run we can even change the emotional patterns that we may not be able to control in the moment.

I have been reading Dale Carnegie's "How to Start Worrying and Start Living." I know that it's basically no more than a pop-psychology self-help book--except, perhaps, that it doesn't really even use psychology--or at least not any psychological theory. But, as far as I can tell, the basic message of the book is that worrying is a matter of where you are focused, and if you train yourself to focus your attention on things that you can change, then you won't have time to worry about things (and vice versa--the more you stop paying attention to worry or regret, the more you can focus on taking action).

The Everyday and the Unusual

When I say that we can find, on an everyday basis, deep significance in our work--as I did yesterday--it would seem like the argument would be better built on a foundation of everyday experience rather than exceptional circumstance.

But the question is whether that moment was specially good. Yes, it is easier to ride a bike on a balmy night than a cold, windy night with the fog starting to roll in, but there is beauty there, too, if one is inclined to look for it. I think the difference is that it is easier to see the beauty when there are no problems clouding the view. When the night is warm, it is comfortable to sit and admire the night sky. When it's cold and windy, it's not comfortable. But in the right circumstances I think everyone has had the opportunity to enjoy the beauty of a rain storm or a foggy night.

It's easier to appreciate the importance of your thesis when you are looking at the strongest points of the thesis, and everything is comfortable. But when the cold winds of doubt start to blow--whether from within yourself or from your professors or others--it's not so easy to sit and appreciate the beauty of your idea--you need, instead, to take action to support the idea, and to test it to make sure that it is really worthy of the effort you are investing in it.

It's easier, too, to appreciate beauty when it is new to us. We can become used to things. If we were forced to eat our favorite food for every meal, we would soon be sick of it. Our thesis might have seemed that much more exciting at first. Is that because, as we live with that thesis we come to see its blemishes more clearly? I think that's only part of it: we don't get sick of a food because the food has a problem, but only because we are forced to repeat the meal over and over. In a way, it may be the case that the only real difference between the everyday and the unusual, is just that: one is everyday, the other is unusual. And we respond differently to the everyday than we do to the unusual.

And if we can remember that, we can look again for the beauty that we saw before we had become jaded.

What is the purpose?

I had a writer pass on an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled the "So What Problem."

It's a big problem. I find that I often read academic work that is just reporting--that is nothing but a collection of facts. While I recognize the value of compiling data, it's what we do with the data that matters.

We should be able to describe our work in a way that people don't ask "so what?" when we describe it to them. Obviously there are some people that you're not trying to reach, and some people who won't care. If, for example, you've been studying historical antecedents to Shakespeare, do you really care if some semi-literate person asks you why it's important?

And yet, there is a level at which the "so what" question can be answered that should reach anyone and everyone. Q: "So What?" A: "I'm interested in it." We might not always have a better reason for our interest in a project.

Now the "I'm interested" response may serve for many, it probably won't serve for a dissertation committee who wants a work that is a contribution to the literature. Of course, when describing something to your committee you don't have the same kind of "so what" problem as with a non-academic, or an academic from a distant field. Your committee probably has done work similar to the work you're doing--so the perspective of what is important is not the same.

But the most important person for whom we want to answer the "so what" question is ourself. We want to be able to say to ourselves, "It is important because of _reasonX_."

I was talking with a writer who said to me approximately "my committee is conservative and they think my topic is frivolous." The first level of response to this has to be to find your own understanding. do you think it is frivolous? If you do, it will be a hard project to sustain for the effort that a dissertation will take. But note well that someone telling you a project is frivolous does not mean that the project is worthless. As Ira Gershwin wrote:
"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly
They told Marconi wireless was a phony, it's the same old cry."

As an academic, it's not enough to have an emotional conviction that a work is important. But that's a damn good place to start. You want to be able to follow it up with good arguments, that support your conviction.

It's important to have a sense of the purpose, because that guides what to write, and when the purpose can shine out, the reader can gather the sense of what is important to you the writer. The reader may not agree, but at least the reader can respond. If your sense of purpose is clouded and your reader asks "so what?", then the reader won't bother to look closely or read further. By contrast, if your reader strongly disagrees, your reader may well read for the purpose of finding weaknesses in your argument. Now I'm not recommending writing something that your committee will strongly disagree with, but I think that's better than writing something that your committee can't see any reason behind.

Give the reader something to grab onto. Wear your purpose on your sleeve. If you can frame that purpose in good academic terms, that's great, but even without that academic framework, a sense of purpose can go a long way towards helping guide you in your writing, and can also help guide your reader in the reading.

I repeat myself. I think that I have written similar things about sense of purpose. But it's a recurring problem. I think that academics lose their sense of purpose when they get too deep into the details--or rather, when you get too deep in the details, then it is easy to develop a a sense that the purpose is to get all the relevant information, rather than that gathering the data was to serve some other purpose.