Embrace frustration

Doing things well is difficult. As a general rule, if you want to excel, it’s necessary to work hard for it. Talent helps, of course, but to perform any task at a really high level, talent alone is not enough. (If there are any exceptions to this rule, they are few and far between.) To excel, it’s necessary to practice and to learn and work to improve your results, no matter how good they may already be. And that means looking for the things that you did poorly (or relatively poorly) and for the mistakes that you made.  And a focus on things that you did poorly can be very frustrating.

Emotionally speaking, it’s much more pleasant to when things are going well, but at the same time, things that come too easily are often less worth while.  If psychologist Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi is right, the best experiences in our lives occur in realms of experience where we face challenges—and facing challenges means facing failure—if there’s no chance of failure, then there’s no challenge.

Failure is frustrating. It’s not the only kind of frustration, but maybe all kinds of frustration stem from some sort of failure on a small scale: frustrating things are things that don’t go well—they don’t go the way you want, which could be viewed as a failure. The frustration, for example, of dealing with customer service, is that not only do you fail to get the product or service for which you initially hoped when you bought the product or service, but then you have to spend your time trying to get the thing you initially paid for.

There is nothing fun about frustration. But, it does feel good when you break through. Dealing with the frustration of a difficulty often leads to a breakthrough that really does lead to some sort of desirable improvement.

If you’re struggling with a writing project, pushing through the difficulties can lead to finishing the project. It may not be fun to proofread or to edit, or to rewrite sections that had taken a lot of effort the first time. Or to rewrite the whole thing, if that is necessary.

The difficulty of pushing against the frustration of a work is often tinged with the resentment of some sort of rejection: rewriting and revision generally follow on having someone suggest the need for revision! Or, perhaps better, perhaps worse, rewriting follows a work being ignored.

When a work is not accepted—after all the hours of effort—it is no fun. And going back at that project to change it—to try to make it better, when it likely feels like the best you have to offer—is frustrating.  Still, in that frustration, and in a positive, persistent response—one in which you keep working and trying to move forward—is the opportunity for growth and new opportunities. And possibility—the pursuit of happiness—is itself important and feels good.   

Many years ago, I got a fortune cookie fortune that said something like “your strengths grow out of your weaknesses,” and I have long considered how there is an interplay between strength and weakness—how an ability in some area may become a handicap in another—and how, at the same time, in facing a weakness, one has the opportunity to develop new strengths. Frustration arises in dealing with issues where one is not effective (or not effective enough), and that’s a form of weakness. And an opportunity to build strength.

Personally, I tend to avoid frustration. Even though I know that frustration is a sign of an opportunity. But when I can push through the frustration—if I keep working on the thing that is frustrating—I create a better piece of writing and become a better writer.

Celebrate rejection, celebrate acceptance, and be careful what you ask for

Back in February, after sending a query to a literary agent, I wrote about celebrating rejection.  The agency website says, “If you don’t hear from us in six weeks, assume we’re not interested.” I didn’t hear after six weeks, so I assumed that I had been rejected. After the sixth week passed, I tried to celebrate my rejection. 

And then I began working on a query letter for a publisher (my book is the kind of thing that is at the edge of being mass-market enough for one of the commercial publishing houses—there are several different commercial houses that have related books, and the commercial publishers don’t accept unsolicited queries—if I want to publish at a commercial publisher, I need an agent—but it’s also suitable for academic publisher, who do accept queries from authors). I decided to try a query letter (“would you like to see a proposal for a book” rather than “would you like to see a manuscript of a book”), thinking that a shorter, simpler query might get a quicker response.  I sent my first (and only) query letter to a publisher on the seventh week after sending my previous proposal, preparing to (try to) celebrate rejection yet again.

Celebrating rejection is not the easiest thing. It’s silly to argue that rejection is all good—the central part of rejection is that someone rejected your request, and presumably you didn’t make a request for something you didn’t either want or need (or both).  The possibility of celebrating rejection comes from the complexity of rejection: rejection does force one to consider new opportunities or new avenues of exploration, and those opportunities can be celebrated. It takes effort and focus, but as the saying goes, “if you get lemons, make lemonade.”

This past Monday (eight weeks after sending the proposal), I did, in fact, receive a formal rejection from the agent, which gave me a second opportunity to “celebrate” my rejection. A double helping of rejection to celebrate!

Of course, as I had already sent off a new query letter, my attention and interest were elsewhere, despite the renewed sting of rejection. As it happens, my query letter to the publisher had received a positive response—the acquisitions editor had expressed interest in seeing a proposal and in setting a time to talk with me.

Naturally, I was thrilled that my query had received a positive response. In many ways, celebrating acceptance is much easier than celebrating rejection.

But one does need to be careful what one asks for, because sometimes the request is accepted! Because of the acceptance of the query letter, I spent the last week writing and rewriting a proposal for the publisher. There are elements of book proposals that can be re-used, but different publishers have different interests and different book lists, and that leads to a need for some differences. And once the process of rewriting has started, it can take on its own life, as previous choices come under examination.

Last week, I wrote about compromise and how even when things are going well, you can expect someone to ask you to compromise. And I guess this is in that same vein: things could be going well (by being accepted, for example), and still there is more work to do, there are compromises to make.  I’m pretty darn happy that my query letter received a positive response, but life doesn’t end there. Resting on laurels is rarely possible. I have a next step (a proposal), which could lead to rejection, and then, possibly, a next step (manuscript submission), which could lead to rejection. And if that is accepted, then there are the steps of revising, editing, possibly indexing, promoting, etc.

Since this post is about celebrating things, I’ll wrap by noting that we have some choice over where we direct our attention. And especially, that there are always concerns for looking forward to the future: regardless of whether you were accepted or rejected, you can choose where to direct your attention, and looking at the road ahead, seeing difficulties, one can still choose to focus attention on the positive goals, too. It would be nice to have some laurels to rest upon, even if that rest might be uneasy.

Celebrate rejection

My biggest difficulty as a writer is not producing material, but in giving material to other people. Right now I have a book draft and a book proposal, and the next step is to send it to someone. I can do that now—sending it to publishers or agents—or I can put that off and self-publish. But even self-publishing involves trying to get someone to read your work, and risks rejection. (Update: the proposal was sent before posting.)

I don’t relish rejection, and I assume that you don’t either. But sometimes it’s necessary to take a chance, and if you are uncomfortable with rejection, as I am, it can be useful to look at what there is to celebrate about rejection.

As a writer, rejection presupposes an accomplishment: I can’t have a work rejected without finishing that work--without making a commitment to giving a draft to someone else (and thus a commitment to stop working on the darn thing). I absolutely should celebrate finishing both the draft and the proposal. Writing an entire book draft is a real accomplishment for me—something I’ve managed to do only twice before on my own (counting my dissertation in addition my book on dissertation writing)—and so, finishing a draft of a new book is something to celebrate, and finishing a book proposal even more so, because I find the book proposal much harder to write than the book. The proposal is all about acceptance/rejection. When I’m working on the book, it’s about helping people, which feels good. When I’m working on the proposal, it’s about getting my book accepted which doesn't feel nearly as good. Anyway, the proposal is finished (and now sent). I’m not going to rework it any more. It’s going to fly or crash on the merit of what is there now.

The well-known principle “you can’t win if you don’t play,” is important here. But the principle presupposes that you can play: in the metaphorical poker game of manuscript submission, I have something to ante into the pot.  I certainly ought to celebrate that good fortune (not really good fortune, but the product of a lot of consistent effort over several years). I already believe in the value of working hard, so I don’t begrudge that past effort, but rather view the effort with some pride, even if no one ever reads my book.

I don’t entirely look forward to reworking my proposal for a new agent or publisher, so that aspect of possible rejection is not awesome. But the book process would hardly be over, even if I had a great response on my proposal. Getting accepted would almost certainly carry with it some specific requests for revision and for other information. The publication process would eventually require proofreading, too. So rejection doesn’t radically change the necessary effort. And, realistically, I like writing as work: it’s often frustrating, but I feel that the more I work at it, the greater are the rewards in proportion to the effort.

Submitting a proposal—whether accepted or rejected—is not the end of the process, but it is a real landmark. If bringing a book to publication is a road race, this is a significant milepost—it’s the halfway point, at least. And just as I would celebrate the halfway point in a road race, I can celebrate hitting this mark.

If you worry about how your work will be accepted, I understand. I worry about how my work is accepted, too. It’s natural. But rejection is only part of a larger picture, and in that larger picture—the picture of a person working on a piece of writing—the rejection is a real sign of accomplishment. That’s what I told myself as I geared up to hit “send” on my proposal. 

Now that I have sent the e-mail, a difficult period of waiting for a response begins. To help support my mood through that wait, I’m going to celebrate my accomplishments so far.

Losing its Luster

When we have something that we're working on for a long time, it can begin to lose its luster. What seemed interesting when it was new, becomes less interesting as its familiarity increases.
I've been facing that with this blog recently; I just haven't felt like I had something new to say that I really wanted to say. and I haven't felt like I had anything that I really wanted to say that I wanted to try saying again in a new way...or at least not in a new way in this blog.

But what to do when it's your dissertation project?
The key, it seems, is to keep the project seeming new by learning constantly. That may not seem to be likely or possible with something that you have been working on consistently for a long time, but realistically, we can learn something new, even about the familiar if we are seeking new insight and new wisdom.

When you're an academic and a writer, there are any new things to learn. The do not always lie in the plane that one expects: when writing a large project, for example, one can learn about the subject itself (as expected), but one can also learn about managing projects and about writing, not to mention the possibility that we can learn about ourselves and learn to better control our emotions and our thoughts so that we can be more productive, and so that we can gain the greatest value from those abilities that we have.

None of these things are easy to learn. Indeed, learning is usually associated with some level of difficulty--without difficulty are we really learning, or are we just storing a little bit of new information? But it is in the learning that we can see the project in a new way, and through that new vision, we can find a new spark of interest--or even we can begin to find some of the luster that was lost as the project became familiar.

In a way the academic writer should have an easy time learning new things--that is, in fact, the purpose of research--to learn. What a shame, then, that so many academic writers have lost sight of the reasons that they began their projects.

I got a card from a writer recently that said "we've been working together for a year now; thank you!" There was a part of me that was a little embarrassed, because I thought when we started working together that she had a good chance of finishing within a year, and she thought that there was no way that she could bear to work on the project for more than six months longer. But that's an incomplete story, too. Her aim is now finishing in the spring, and she's confident that she will. Because the project has regained the luster that she had once seen. Instead of facing the project with resentment for the work that needs to be done, as she did when we began working together, now she is excited about the project, and almost every time we speak she tells me about some additional work that she wants to integrate into the project. To grossly simplify, I attribute this to the fact that she has come to find a deeper appreciation for the value of her own work--not just for what she hoped to accomplish with it, but also she sees the depth of her analysis and how that analysis fits into a larger academic discourse that connects her with other writers. One key during the process was that she found (at least) two writers whose work helped her see a new value in her own work--a value that was new to her.

Projects lose their luster; that's natural. As the saying goes: variety is the spice of life. And where there is little variety, there is bland boredom. With a large project like a dissertation, we cannot introduce variety into the project by changing the project itself, so we have to seek a finer-grain of variety--we can see the change of our own ideas as we develop in our sophistication of both thought and expression (the two are not unrelated).

Stuckness and Persistence

I preach persistence a lot. It's important to be able to push through difficulties to get beyond them. But that doesn't mean that one wants to be blindly persistent at all times.

I was talking recently with a writer who was stuck, and not writing. In our meeting, I was stressing the importance of trying to write, and of starting to write. He wanted a method by which he could organize his collection of articles. "There are many different ways to organize materials," I said, "but none is definitive. What's important is to start writing." This answer was unsatisfactory to him, and he insisted on talking about how to organize his articles. I told him that had never seen a book on writing dissertations that talked about how to organize the research materials, and that every book on writing dissertations that I have seen talks about how important it is to start writing, and how starting writing begins a learning process that allows you to organize your thoughts and your ideas about material. This too was unsatisfactory. "I want a simple solution to organizing my material," he insisted.

A week later he wrote to me. "I'm still stuck. I haven't been able to organize my material, so I haven't written." I suggested again trying to start writing--however imperfect that writing might be. Again that suggestion was dismissed.

I know that everyone has a different way of working, and I recognize that having well-organized research at your fingertips can be helpful. But I also recognize that if you're stuck, trying something new can be very effective and very useful to helping move forward.

Albert Einstein reputedly defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If you keep working on a project and you keep getting stuck on a specific task, isn't it worth trying to approach that project from a different perspective? Doesn't it make sense to try a new angle from which to look at the project?

Persistence need not manifest as blind repetition of the same attempt. That may be simply stubbornness. We need to be able to learn and adapt--which are, in fact, some of the primary characteristics of basic intelligence--to be able to learn and adapt.

Edison was persistent, but he also knew that he had to try something new each time. Each failed lightbulb was a way not to do things. Maybe the tasks and methods of writing that lead you into stuckness are ways not to write.

When you're learning to play a musical instrument, or when you're trying to master an athletic skill, blind repetition is often necessary, and the repetition will lead to different results: you just get better and better at the skill you're trying to develop, if you're practicing diligently and your muscles and brain start to wire together new skills. The body learns to perform an action more smoothly and easily. I was giving a friend a guitar lesson yesterday, and I was stressing the importance of playing a given chord change over and over until the motions became smooth and even. With practicing a guitar, this works: playing the chords over and over, leads to different results over time; the practice leads our playing to become smoother and more facile. If repetition is leading to different results and you can feel those differences, then it hardly fits Einstein's definition of insanity, because the change comes, and so it is reasonable to expect--at least for a while--that doing the same thing over and over again will lead to different results.

But then again, those learning curves have their terminus as well. One does not infinitely improve as a musician or athlete, and the practices and exercises that get one to a given level of skill will not necessarily take one beyond that level.

A summary of my thoughts: persistence is important, but one needs to differentiate between persistence that is building skill and ability--useful practice and repetition--and persistence that is stubbornness--an unproductive practice in which one is stuck and not developing. One needs to be persistent, but one also needs to be able to change the angle by which a given project is approached, so that one is learning and adapting, rather than simply trying the same thing again and again, expecting different results.

Three hundred posts

This is actually my 301st post on this blog. That strikes me as a big number. And for the most part, all of it has been done in easy, convenient moments when I didn't have to sacrifice anything except a few minutes of sleep to write.

It's a worthy testament to how volume naturally results from a regular practice. I grant, of course, that the 301 pieces that I've written don't cohere like a good single large work should, but the principle is similar. Over the course of 10.5 months, I've probably written something on the order of 300 pages in my blog, and I imagine that I could take those pieces and fit them together into some sort of larger work, just because they were all part of my general desire to think about writing.

If you want to write--if you have a writing project that you want to complete--then writing regularly will get you there in good time. If you keep at it day after day, the pages start to add up, and you suddenly have good volume. If you're working each day to contribute to a coherent piece, you might not write as much as if your efforts were unconstrained, but then a dissertation (or book) has no need to be 300 pages--some dissertations, maybe, have such a need, but many do not.

Incremental writing and getting overwhelmed

Writing is detailed work. In academic writing the details can be overwhelming.
First of all there is the whole intellectual/theoretical aspect--and that is rife with details: on any particular point of theory there are probably a number of different points expressing different ideas about different aspects of the theory. Then there is the whole presentational aspect: the written work. There's punctuation; there are style rules and manuals, and so on. And all those rules have to be checked against every sentence that you write.

In short, writing requires attention to detail. The great difficulty in managing all the detail is one of the motivations for the existence of editors. If you have been looking at a written work for too long, then it is hard to see the work clearly. Editors come to a project with a fresh eye. Granting that editors may have valuable skills and insights that may assist an author, much of what the editor does can be done by the writer: it may be easier for an editor to check spelling, but the author can do that. Similarly dealing with rules, etc.

If you're not going to get an editor to help, the many details can begin to become overwhelming. Indeed, even if you do have someone edit you work, they may give you so much detailed feedback that it is hard to process.

The good thing about writing, however, is that it basically stays still. All those details that need to be attended to? They're waiting, and they will wait patiently for their chance. One need not try to figure out how to deal with all the details; it's enough to figure out what detail to work on next and how to deal with that detail. All the other details will be there later.

By keeping it simple, it's easier to deal with the task at hand. By breaking the work down into the natural increments demanded by the details, you can get in a habit of making progress.

Just to have written something...

A common theme in my blog, and in books on writing, is to just write something.

Laurence Sterne, the author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, once wrote that it is better to send a bad letter in good time than a good letter in bad time (or something to that effect; I can't find the citation anymore.)

I missed posting last night and neither my head nor my heart are really in it tonight, but, just to have written something...

Sucked In

How easy is it to get sucked in?
How does it happen that one gets sucked in?

We usually think of getting sucked in to things that we don't want to do, but that are tempting. How does it happen? We get sucked in to watching TV and we get up an hour or four later feeling worse for it, usually. We get sucked into one too many drinks, perhaps, or one too many hands at the blackjack table, or too many bon bons, or books or whatever kind of temptation we fall into.

But do we only get sucked in to things that are bad for us? My experience is that I can be sucked into many activities. Some days it's hard to get started writing or to get started on an editing project, but I find that once I'm involved in the work, it's not nearly as difficult as I anticipate. The interest inherent in the work will take over if only I give it enough chance.
Part of making it happen, I think, is having low expectations (which is very different, of course, from having low standards) for the moment. I don't expect to solve all my problems, or even to solve one big problem; I expect only that I will give it an honest effort for a little while. Often I can get started on writing something by saying "I'll just jot down quick notes." That, indeed, is the case with today's blog: I was resisting writing it--telling myself I would do it later--after all, writing a whole blog entry might take thirty minutes, or an hour even, if I get caught up in it. But "I'll just jot some quick notes so I won't forget what I was thinking about," and here I am, a couple of paragraphs in.

I read an article recently (sadly, I have no link and no citation) that described a recent study that showed that people were poor at anticipating how much they would enjoy things, finding both that people often enjoyed things they anticipated disliking, and that they disliked things they anticipated enjoying. I think work is something that we often anticipate disliking, and so we avoid it. But we often enjoy it, once we start.

Recently I decided that I wanted to work on reading music (which I do a very poorly and slowly), and decided to spend fifteen minutes a day practicing reading music with a metronome. I do have a trouble starting, but when I do start, I often find myself working for longer than I planned, just because the challenge of working on it sucks me in: I want to master it, or at least get better at it--mastery, I think, would take several hours of practice a day--a friend who was a professional musician told me once that he had to practice six hours a day to be able to play what he needed for his gigs. This is a worthy comparison: the writer can productively spend fifteen minutes writing--especially with practice. But to master a project, it will take the writer hours every day, for weeks or months.

Another important factor in getting sucked in is to feel that the process in which you engage is one that serves a purpose for you. And is not one that you feel you are doing out of some externally imposed obligation. If you feel that a task is worthy, then engaging in that ask will actually have a self-reinforcing factor: you'll feel good for having accomplished something, and that will be conducive to working more. On the other hand, if you are feeling that a task is only an external obligation, there is a constant resistance due to your sense that the task is not meaningful, but is only being done for someone else.

Anger at having to do the task probably isn't helpful in getting sucked in; anger is draining. In the long run it would be nice for the writer to have the experience of getting sucked in and of having the task of writing and research be so fascinating that you do not only get sucked in on the small scale (where you start working for a short moment and that stretches to several minutes or hours) but you can get sucked in on the large scale (where you start to view the opportunity to work as an actual temptation).

Don't feel like working?

What do you do when you don't feel like working?

I'm struggling with that a little today--in particular with respect to writing this blog.
I know it's worth it to get in there to do just a little.

When I'm resisting work and procrastinating, I often find it useful to simply tell myself that I'm going to make an absolute minimum effort. And then, being free to do as little as I wish, I often find it possible to engage in the project in a way that I couldn't if I were thinking about how much work I had to do.

Tonight, for example, I didn't feel like writing the blog. But I thought I'd just say a few words about not wanting to work, and suddenly here I am. It's no novel, but it is a handful of sentences and growing.

A sense of obligation, in and of itself, is an emotional burden. If we can enter the work space without the sense of obligation engendered by saying "I have to work on this for the next three hours," then we may actually be able to get more done than if we procrastinated due to our sense of obligation.

Often I follow the suggestion of Joan Bolker and suggest to writers to work on something for fifteen minutes, with no judgment about having done something "good enough." I was wondering tonight whether that even might be too much obligation for the writer to be able to enter the process without a sense of obligation.

Anyway, if you don't feel like working, it can often be worth it to say to yourself that you're going to sit down for just a minute on some minor task.

And that actually brings to mind another thought: if we can start with some very simple task--cleaning the desk, fixing a sentence that we didn't like, adding a reference, or checking a reference to find the page number for a quote--that can often help us to get into the flow of working and to get our focus to move to the project.
The simple little task is minor, but it shifts us to thinking about our project, and may even clear away some sort of minor administrative nuisance that was bothering your when you were concentrating on larger issues during your previous session of work.

Why work every day?

I was ready to blow off writing my blog this evening. I was tired--a touch too much sun, a bit of dehydration and a little headache. But there it was 11:30pm and I felt like just dropping in a few words.

Thinking about the Tour de France a bit more. The announcers talk a lot about embracing the pain of the ride. I think the Tour de France is a decent parallel for writing a dissertation in some ways--or more generally, athletic endeavor is--especially when it involve endurance.

I was writing about the curtains of misery and the sense that the work of the dissertation writer is painful. If there is pain in writing a dissertation, I wonder whether it ought not be like the pain of one of those riders. There is pain in working through the difficult spots, and there will be difficult spots. Life is like that generally. I have no doubt in my mind that the riders in the Tour de France love riding in general. The pain comes from pushing their limits--but they're pushing their limits doing something they love. This is a far cry from the sense of misery that I have heard reported from many writers. Many writers come to hate their project.

Ok, sure, when you're riding in a race, you probably don't have your team leader telling you how inadequate your work is--and when you're a dissertation writer there's a great chance that you do--at least I know lots of writers who have gotten that general message from their faculty committee.

I wonder how many writers really love both their project and the general work of writing academic writing before they run into the dissertation project and an aggressive, insulting, or negative faculty committee.

It seems to me that embracing the pain of the difficult spots in the task is much easier if you generally enjoy what you're doing.

The thing about constant practice, and persisting in your practice against whatever obstacles you may face, is that it can become easier. At 10:30pm tonight I was ready to go to sleep, and I lay back in bed to do a little reading to drop off to sleep. But I felt that writing was worth the effort--because I know that writing is not painful in itself; it's only painful to me when I try to force through the difficult spots. And I know that what seems difficult seems less difficult with greater practice.

This, I think, occurs on many levels--whether your practice is simply to write with greater ease, or your practice is to find focus for your project, by practicing and by repeating the effort, your work will improve.

Little Pieces of Work

I was thinking about how we can break down tasks.
One of the things that I have heard reported by many writers is that they are daunted by the size of the project that lies before them. "Overwhelmed" is a word I hear a lot.

I know what it's like to feel overwhelmed by a project--a sense that the project is this massive monolith that cannot be moved. We have to learn to chip away at it.

Every big project is composed of little projects. As the saying foes: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Not only does it begin with a single step, but it is carried to its completion by always taking one more step, until the journey is over.

Every big piece of work is made of simply taking he work one step at a time. It can be daunting to sit down in the morning and say "ok, now I'm going to work on my dissertation for the next three hours." But if we can see that three hour period as made up of a number of smaller tasks--a few fifteen minute tasks, maybe a few thirty minute tasks--then it may often be easier to engage in the work.

It's great to make optimistic plans. It's great to assume that you're going to be extremely productive. But it's also great to take reality into account. It's fine to make a plan that you're going to work on your dissertation for eight hours on Saturday--but if the reality is that on Saturday after Saturday you don't work eight hours, then you need to reconsider the plans you're making. So for me, instead of making big plans, I like to make small plans--or at least, I like to make small plans that break apart my big plans. This analytical process--this process of dividing a project--can be problematic in many ways, but I find that it really helps me get moving.

If I can set myself a task for fifteen minutes--that's easy. If I can see the need to write one paragraph on a specific subject, well, writing one paragraph is not a daunting task. If I can get myself to take action for fifteen minutes, that's better than planning on working three hours and getting nothing done. But even better is that if I can do the one thing in fifteen minutes, then I feel good about myself, and I feel good about working, and I can try something else for the next fifteen minutes, and if I get something done in that fifteen minutes I feel even better about myself.

If we keep our goals really small and really focused, then they are not overwhelming. It's not surprising that someone would be overwhelmed if they were thinking "I have to work on my dissertation." It would be a lot more surprising if someone got overwhelmed saying "I have to write one paragraph on subject X."

Of course if someone did get overwhelmed just trying to write one paragraph, we could break the task of writing that paragraph into different steps.

Back in the day when I still was relatively current on computers, I was a teaching assistant for a basic programming course. This was maybe 1993 or 1994--the course taught the computer language "pascal", which I knew fairly well, and was, for the first time, integrating html into the course material. As a programmer, it's easy to get used to thinking about the very small steps that make up a process. The more so, the more primitive the language. Html and Pascal both are high level languages in which single commands get translated to many different little commands for a given computer (actually, html isn't really that kind of language at all, but rather specific programs use html as sets of intstructions--but that's kind of beside the point).
In the class for which I was a TA, we had on one exam a question that asked the students to write pseudo-code for boiling water.
Most students answered something like this:
Fill a pot with water
put it on the stove
turn on the stove

Well, that is fine, but it leaves out a lot of detail. Take that first step, for example: "fill a pot with water." Where does the pot come from? where does the water come from? how does the pot get filled with water? If we wanted, we could break this step down into smaller steps:
Find a pot
pick it up
carry the pot to the sink
place the pot beneath the faucet
turn on the faucet
wait for the pot to fill

We might have to break some of those steps down, too.
There is complexity that we take for granted--we know where we keep pots in our kitchen, and we know how to fill them with water, so we take those little steps for granted.

But in writing a dissertation, we are not so familiar with the terrain. We need to be willing to take the project even the simplest, smallest step at a time. We need to be able to exploit that way of looking at the project: if we are feeling overwhelmed, just take the smallest task that we can find and work on it.

My one caveat: don't let that one next task always be to read something else--because there's always something else to read, but if you don't write, you won't get finished writing. That being said, the writing tasks can be broken up into very small pieces--write a paragraph on one subject, a page on another, two sentences on yet another. Whatever the size, it is more important to do a little work, than it is to make a big plan and do less. By breaking your project up into little pieces of work, you can focus your efforts.

Tour de France

I was watching the Tour de France on TV and at one point there was some discussion of when it was most efficient to work the hardest. The speaker--whose qualifications I forget--said that the riders got the most benefit by working the hardest when the situation was most difficult--riding uphill or into a headwind.

I was thinking about whether this has a parallel for writers. Are we going to get the most benefit by working the hardest when things are not going well? Or are we going to get the most benefit by resting a bit when things are going poorly, and then working hard when things start to flow?

We can't do wind tunnel tests to determine this.

I could argue both ways. A dissertation isn't a bike race, so the metaphor is obviously not going to translate without some difficulties.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the curtain of misery; and I think that working hardest when the difficulty is greatest is liable to create the greatest pain when working--you'll be putting in the most effort at exactly that time the work is the least promising.

On the other hand, if you're stuck--if you're discouraged, frustrated, then that might be a moment when you can gain the greatest value from the work because, for one, you need to keep working consistently, even through difficulty, to finish a dissertation; and for two, it is often the case that the moment of frustration and difficulty is the moment at which the greatest change and growth comes. My yoga teacher was recently talking about how at the moment of difficulty something beautiful is waiting to burst out into growth.

I listed this post under the headings of consistency, persistence, and momentum. I don't think that there is a clear answer to what tactic is going to work best on writing a dissertation. The dissertation writing journey and progress through it are not so easily measured as speed and energy output are. But I do think that generally we want to be consistent in working, and persistent in the face of difficulties because there is momentum to projects and to writing: by keeping the project alive and moving in your mind, and on paper, you increase the ease with which you can work on it, and you keep your mind and body in the rhythm and habit of working on the project and thinking about the ideas.

When is the best time to work the hardest? I don't have an answer to that. It partly depends on you and what works best for you. But, in the long run, it is the tortoise that you should emulate: stick at it in a regular pace. What is key is to keep the progress and the writing piling up.

Trusting Yourself

I was talking with a friend, a guitarist, and we were discussing his music. Mostly I like his music, but I think that he doesn't stay with his ideas long enough--I think he's got good idea that just need to be given more time in their expression. I suggested this to him and he said (paraphrase) "well, yeah, I should develop the ideas more but, I can't."

I think a lot of us are like this as writers: we have an idea and we give up on the idea saying "I can't develop this idea more."

But for my friend the guitarist, and for many of us as writers, the problem is that we don't stay with the idea long enough. We don't work it and rework it. Instead we play the wrong note, or we lose track of our place in the progression, and having hit that first failure we say "I blew it; this ain't gonna work." But a lot of time it's really that we didn't trust our ability to push through the place of difficulty. It's not that we need to do anything different; we just need to stick with what we are doing longer. We need to trust in our abilities.

Sometimes I think of this situation in terms of two binary variables:
whether we trust ourselves (yes or no)
and
whether we have the ability we need (yes or no)
What combination of these variables will lead to success? There are 4 possibilities:
1. obviously, if we don't have trust and we don't have ability, we're not too likely to succeed.
2. If we don't have ability but we do believe, our chances are better, but still....
3. If we do have ability, but we don't believe, then we have some chance, but we're also likely to hold ourself back.
and
4. If we do have ability and we trust that ability, then we are most likely to succeed.

What is important to note here is that whether or not we have the ability we need, our chance of getting a good outcome is improved by trusting ourself, while there is no increase in risk.
OK, there is a simplification operating here, and there are situations where our risks increase by (unjustly) believing about ourself. But here's the question: are there any situations in which a dissertation writer benefits by doubting his or her ability to do the work? And if there are no such situations, or if those situations are rare, isn't it worth acting on the assumption that your abilities will be up to the effort?

Writing is a Choice (2)

You have to be willing to make mistakes. You have to be willing to put something out there that won't be loved by others. And you have to be willing to put something out there that you may not even like yourself. So much of writing is just the willingness to get it wrong--the willingness to get it wrong and to try again.

I didn't really plan my day today and suddenly I find that if I do want to post today, I need to squeeze in a quickie before I go out. To be able to do that, I have to choose to make the time--even if it is only a ten or fifteen minute stretch in which I can write just a few lines while I wait for my friend. It's really easy to say "I don't have enough time to write something good." The truth, though, is that you can write something good in a short time--and even more importantly, if you practice writing regularly, and you choose to risk mistake or rejection, and you choose to make the time, then you will make the best possible progress in your writing practice.

Writing is a choice

I was talking with a blocked writer and I suggested the possibility of getting writerly flow by practicing writing--by writing a little everyday. This is basically the premise of Bolker's Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. Just write--something, anything, abut your dissertation--even just write the problems you're having writing. Anything just so that you write a little. The idea is that by practicing your familiarity with the writing process improves, and thus your ease of writing improves. One is to write anything at all--even "I have nothing to write"--just to get into the habit of putting ideas on paper. There is no right or wrong in such a scheme--or at least no right and wrong with respect to what you've written. You can write anything.

When I suggested this to the writer I was working with she said "But what if I don't write anything?" Writing is a choice. It is hard to write specific things, but if you can write anything at all with no prejudice as to what is written and no judgment about what is written, then writing is a choice and nothing more.

You, the writer, must sit down to the project. And you must choose to write something. But if anything written is a success, then there is nothing but the choice as to whether you will put pen to paper.

Yes, you have to choose what to write, but if you're writing for the sake of writing and practicing writing then anything that you do write is right. If you can't think of anything else to write, you can always write "I can't think of anything to write." That's where it start--by writing anything at all, by recording your thoughts--whatever they are--on the page.

If you practice that and the process of writing becomes more familiar, you'll think of other things to write as you go. But you have to start by choosing to write.

Strengths and weaknesses

One of my favorite little bits of philosophy I got from the fortune in a fortune cookie. "Your strengths are your weaknesses," it said. I have no doubt that there is some more noble source for this piece of wisdom, though I've not chosen to find a deeper source.

The nice thing about a simple aphorism like this is that it can resonate on deeper levels if you seek to find that deeper understanding. Like a zen koan, the exploration triggered by an aphorism can be more interesting than the first order level of meaning.

I didn't actually start this because I wanted to talk about that one aphorism, and so I won't explore it any further. I titled this post thinking about the habit of worry--a habit with which I certainly have a great deal of familiarity from my own personal experience. I also have a fair amount of experience talking about it with other writers.

One writer I've been working with recently always has a story about what cannot be done. The responses always focus on what cannot be done and what the weaknesses are. No matter how much is accomplished, or how much I ask to hear about what is working well, no strengths or successes are reported. If I throw a handful of suggestions out and say "use any that you find useful," the response I get back will almost always be about which ones cannot be handled.

In order to have any sense of optimism and any sense of progress, we need to realistically assess our progress and our abilities--which means acknowledging our strengths as well as our weaknesses. We cannot be blind to our abilities. Indeed, if one wishes to maintain that he or she has no ability whatsoever, then why is that person even attempting to work on a writing project of any sort--much less a dissertation.

I work less frequently with people who can see only their strengths and not their weaknesses. Such people are much less inclined to seek help. But that too can be problematic. We need some balance--ignoring our weaknesses will cause problems just as will ignoring our strengths.

I suppose to wrap this up by winding back to the aphorism: if we remember that our strengths and weaknesses are intimately intertwined, it's easier to remember that we have both.

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).

Ups and Downs

We all have cycles. Some days we're up; some we're down. It's just the nature of things.

However, I also believe that we can influence the ups and downs. We want to be sure to create patterns that are going to generate ups and not patterns that will generate downs.

What I had to say about pacing was about looking for that point at which the pattern is generating an up. By treating myself easily, while still pushing, I created an up. Push too hard, get injured, and I'm generating a down.

We can focus on the downs or on the ups. This focus tends to create more of the same. If we focus on what's wrong, it's easy to feel worse. If we focus on what is good, then it's easy to feel better. And that's not got to be a matter of turning a blind eye--but rather a question of how long the seeing eye remains focused, and on what. I really enjoyed the movie "What the bleep do we know;" I think it expresses these ideas well.

There will be ups and downs. But can we shift the baseline? I believe so.

Pacing

I went for a run today. Ten miles. I run usually three times a week, usually about 6 miles. Today I let a friend talk me into running in a ten-mile race. I wasn't really sure what running 10 miles was like. He warned me that the route was hard and harder on the return than on the way out.

I took it easy, keeping my pace steady. I finished the race feeling fine. Most of the racers finished before me but I was happy to finish feeling fine and with energy left for the day.

The race is a decent metaphor for a dissertation: you don't necessarily finish by being very fast at any point. You finish by sticking with it. Step after step after step. This idea of persistence leading to successful dissertation writing is nothing new. I've said it many times, and I don't think I've ever seen a book on writing that didn't suggest the primacy of developing a repetitive routine.

But I was thinking about feeling good. I felt good running today because I paced myself well. In the last few miles I passed several people who didn't look so happy. They were working hard and not looking like they felt very good. I didn't set any records for finishing quickly, but I finished. I don't know about "leaving it all on the field". That would have led to a different kind of accomplishment--running as hard as I could, and running faster, but feeling bad after, because I had pushed myself to the limits of what I could do.

We get to make choices about this kind of stuff. There's no doubt that there's a lot to be said for striving for your limits. On the other hand, it's not like you can't work hard and push yourself without hitting burnout. The dissertation can take a long time; if you burn yourself out, or work to the point of exhaustion before the race is over, you have to drag yourself to the finish line in a state of exhaustion. And that is no fun.

Good pacing is important. It helps you maintain your health, your energy, your positive attitude, and, if you're steady, it helps you finish, perhaps more quickly than you anticipate. If the dissertation race stretches out over years, then maintaining your health--especially your emotional health--is crucial. A steady pace is conducive to supporting your mood because you continue to make progress (which helps, for obvious reasons), and yet it doesn't create the negative reinforcement that working to the point of exhaustion does. A steady pace with room for a whole life doesn't create the sense that the dissertation is some sort of cruel punishment because you're not creating the painful part of it.

I worked hard enough today that I was pushing my limits. I ran farther than I normally do. I don't normally time myself running, so I don't know if I ran faster, but I know that I ran faster than I expected. It was a challenge and a growth experience, and it left me feeling like the process is something worth doing. A good pace made it possible.

Would that every dissertation writer could say that. You may only want to write one dissertation, but if your career choice is to be an academic, that dissertation is only one race to be run. It may be a relatively long race--a marathon of academic projects--but you'll have other equally long projects if you hope to publish any books. If you learn to set a good pace and to work steadily, each project can be completed without making writing into a sort of purgatory.