World at warp speed

I think “They grow up so fast” is the cliche I hear most often during this phase of my life.  While I know this to be true, I am amazed again today at how fast my life seems to be going.  Warp speed.  I think being a working mother (in my case with pressing deadlines and the constantly looming duties of teaching) compounds my sense that life is rushing out from under my feet no matter how hard I work to catch up with it.  My children are aging.  My parents are aging.  I have a conference paper to write.  I have student papers to read and respond to.  I have classes to prepare.  It’s all beautiful, but there’s a sense of panic that I tune into during quiet moment.  The beauty feeds the panic because everything that I have right now–beautiful little girls and two healthy parents–will be different.  Before this year I knew all of this was true.  Kids grow up.  We all grow old.  I knew it.  But I didn’t know how deeply I would feel the loss.

As I’m writing this it’s Friday night and I still have work to do.  I haven’t taken a day off with the girls in two weeks, so maybe my panic and sadness is just a signal that I need Sabbath.  I need to be with them, rest with them, play with them.  I need to listen to them talk and brush their hair long enough to feel a little bit of boredom at what is static rather than panic at what is fleeting.

 

Messy is best

I’ve written previously about one of the many dilemmas I face as a writer: not being good at every necessary step.  I can’t “synergize” with my teammates and their unique strengths when I write.  I’m a team of one, and I’m stuck with the skills and abilities that I have, which do not offer comprehensive coverage.  I can think, imagine, and draft an outline.  I can revise sentences and wordsmith a final draft.  I am not a strong writer when it comes to the middle part: the writing of a good enough draft, sentence by sentence.  It feels so tedious after the expansive work of outlining.

Well that’s a recap of prior posts.  In order to get the middle part done, the actual drafting of linear sentences, I’ve been trying to do several things.  1)  Review my outline and notes.  2) Imagine my audience carefully, emphasizing or fictionalizing how nice they are.  3) Begin speaking to this audience, imagining myself on the stage or over a cup of coffee with a smart friend, and 4) typing with my eyes closed what I would say to this friend over coffee about my topic.  I try to write without getting bogged down in revision (I have my eyes closed so I never go back to edit–yes it’s messy), but to follow my logical outline, imagining the connections among ideas and paragraphs that I need to spell out if my audience members are going to follow my ideas.  I make so many connections; I need to slow down and make the case for these connections implicitly or explicitly  in my article.

This visioning-writing is key for me.  I hope to find out soon how hard it is to revise this form of freewriting into conference-worthy prose.

 

There has been much debate…

As I compose a new draft of my research article today, choosing where to put each idea that I’ve carefully crafted or hastily sketched over the last year (gulp) and a half, I realize how much I appreciate a good introduction.  I have written many introductions to this paper over the last year and a half, each of them trying to find the right framing technique for the ideas to follow.  The color of the frame matters, it trains the eye to see what’s inside in a particular way.  It forms expectations.

I enjoy reading narrative more than exposition, and so I am drawn to introductions that launch with anecdote.  My last draft began that way.  It, sadly, has to go.  The frame was too loose.  It lacked force of focus.  This draft needs a lead that focuses the eye on the political, on the cost of teaching undemocratically.  I think it needs to bring the word “dictator” to the fore.

But my teachers at U of Chicago taught me to begin with common ground, with an idea that readers would identify with–or with some conflict that the paper will contribute to:  ”there has been much debate….”  Creating this sense of “oh yes” identification at the outset draws readers in and establishes your credibility as “on their side” or at least “relevant to their concerns” and therefore worth reading.  Do I therefore want to begin by stating the value of teaching democratically in a way that readers will affirm?  I can continue with details about process syllabi, which I know many of my readers will be unfamiliar with and skeptical of.  I could also save this for later.  OK, I think I’m–once again–back to outlining.  It is a comfort zone for me.  Am I procrastinating again by returning to outlining again?  Or have I identified, through my drafting process, that my former outline wasn’t right and therefore I need to return before I can move forward.  Writing is certainly recursive for me.

 

Parts on the ground

I feel like a kid who has disassembled a radio and the parts are lying all around on the ground.  My article has enough ideas.  It has enough data.  It even has enough words.  Currently the ideas, words, data, and references are a pile on the page.  My job is to give them order and craft.  This takes self-confidence.  Do I know where to start?  What word comes first?  Can I say what I mean coherently?  It seems not so hard when someone else is doing.  As the kid with the radio parts, I wish I could call an adult radio-fixer over just sit and watch while she reassembled it into working order.

 

Imagining Loss

The sun is shining. The grass is green. The leaves are letting in dappled light.  The kids are playing.  ”Mommy, let’s play family. You be the Mommy.”

OK, done.

“I’ll be the baby.”  She starts this whining cry that is her imitation of a newborn.  Ah, sigh.  Here we go.

“Oh, come here baby, and I will hold you and keep you safe.” I think I’ve lived this scene fifty times this past month.  Playing make-believe can get old.  I start making grocery lists and work schedules in my mind.  I pick up a kids book and begin to be “the teacher” who wants to read to her.

I’ve learned a strategy to extend my patience–imagine loss.  I imagine that my kids are all grown up and don’t live here anymore.  I imagine missing them terribly, wishing I could remember what they were like at 2 and 6.  And bingo, here they are!  I get to remember vividly right in front of myself.  If I’m feeling a bit morbid, I might even imagine that one of them has gotten hurt, and I long to see them whole and unencumbered.  And presto, here they are!  Perhaps growling like angry werewolves at each other, or crying, but here and whole nonetheless.  I savor the look of their arms and legs, the dimple on their chin and cheeks, the way they approach me expecting a hug.

I even do this with my spouse when he’s annoying me.  I imagine him gone and starting to miss him.  The imagined loss makes me wonder at the present moment.

So, I write all of this in order to ease me into academic writing.  How can I take this strategy-for-living-thankfully and apply it to my writing?  First, I can imagine the loss of time.  We know that procrastinators avoid the task because making the choices required by the task is unpleasant because one fears one might make the wrong choice, i.e.procrastination is related to a fear of failure.  Procrastinators write only when the time limitations make failure more certain if one puts the task off longer.  So, when faced with an unpleasant writing task, I might take a moment to imagine the loss of time, the deadline approaching with nothing completed.  Even though my deadline is fluid–have something published in 16 months–I need to face it squarely in order to be thankful for the opportunity to write today.

On a more immediate scale, I need to realize how quickly my time today will fly by.  If I make a schedule for all that I want to get done today and take a minute to imagine the kids needing to be picked up at school at 3:00, I can remember to be thankful for this time to write and, hopefully, actually do that writing. What other loss can I imagine?  The loss of intellectual community.  Really, this is something I’m just starting to have, so I have to both imagine having it as well as imagine losing what little bit of it I have.  The more I write academically, the more I “join the conversation” among colleagues about issues that really do interest and energize me. First task today:  making the schedule for the next five hours that includes writing, filing papers in my office, biking for 20 minutes, and writing some more.

 

No more excuses

I’ve had my fair share of legitimate excuses these past four years–new job to learn, pregnancy, baby to care for–but I don’t have them anymore.  Sure Caroline still woke up cold with a tummy ache in the night last night, but just once.  That doesn’t count as a legitimate excuse for not making progress on my article this morning.  This phase of writing is just plain hard, no getting around it.  I’m both a visionary and a wordsmith.  The launch of an article, when all of the ideas are flying and coming into some sort of visual (for me) relationship to one another, is engaging and pleasurable.  I enter the “flow” zone.  The wordsmithing of a paragraph is also gripping for me.  Tedious when I stop and see how few lines I’ve completed, but still, I enjoy it and experience flow.

The middle steps of the writing process are another story.  I lag.  I procrastinate.  I abandon projects.  I’ve dreamed them, but they don’t exist yet.  The middle section is what Peter Elbow suggests that writers freewrite, but I find the distance between freewriting and wordsmithing a final draft to be too great to be of much value.  I can freewrite.  Making the freewritten draft into something usable is very difficult.  Elbow actually suggests freewriting the same section three times as a way of improving it, getting it closer to final draft, while never getting stuck.  Perhaps that’s a solution.  It seems that the third draft can’t really be called freewriting anymore, then, since the mind isn’t free but trying to stay loyal to the preconceived–and improving–argument.  Well, it’s nice to have that technique in my toolbox in case I get stuck this morning.  40 minutes of drafting, here I come.

 

Here I am, slowly

It’s Tuesday morning, the first week of university classes.  I felt prepared to teach yesterday, and I’m almost ready to go today as well.  My article revisions have not progressed much in the last week, however, but here I am, slowly getting down to it.  I’ve gotten up at 5 a.m. to create writing time.  I’ve pressed “start” on the coffee pot I prepped last night.  I’ve fed the fish.  I’ve put of a sweatshirt. I’ve opened this blog.  I’m moving slowly at this hour of the morning.  But I’m here and it’s time to get to work.  I hope that I can make enough progress this morning to feel enticed to get up tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…

 

Discouragement

I didn’t work on the article yesterday.  In the morning, I went for a 4 mile run with Rachel.  All day I worked on my syllabus and reading for ENG 495.  I could read all year and still feel unprepared.  The course covers EVERYTHING, it seems.

So this morning, I am reluctant to read the article again, reluctant to work on it.  I feel discouraged.  I feel like it must be no go, never going to get finished, embarrassing if anyone else reads it.  They would just tell me it isn’t finished yet; I have more thinking to do, more reading to do, more “analysis of my data” to do.  All of this makes me feel, why bother?

I know these feelings are normal.  I’ve read dozens of writers testify to the same.  I know the task is just to name them and move on, to even find joy in the writing, putting one’s critics on silence.  Telling them off even.  Anne Lamott recommends a visualization: dropping people saying critical things into a glass jar and screwing down the lid.  Maybe I’ll try that rather than believing these discouraging ideas and letting them keep me from writing.

 

Energy (!!)

Fall semester begins in less than a week.  The campus is busy with kick-off celebrations and faculty meetings.  This year, I’m up for it.  We had a lovely summer, even while I taught a lot.  Unlike the previous three years, this August I’m not longing for a vacation just as school gets underway.

I could say that it’s because I chose to vacation in Montana rather than attend the NWPM Portfolio Workshop, which I was sad to miss but duty to family called.  Maybe that did play a role in my feeling rested.  I think the real cause of my newfound energy is that my children are sleeping through the night AND I’m getting exercise on a daily basis.  Pregnant and/or nursing a baby wore me out for the last three summers.  Worth it, but exhausting.

I’ve made a commitment to try to wake early to write.  I thus went to bed at 9:45 with an alarm set for 5:45.  I couldn’t fall asleep for a while, wasn’t that tired.  I woke up at 1 am, not that tired.  Steve (lovingly) kicked me in his sleep at 5:00, and I wasn’t that tired, though I had been deep in the middle of a dream about a virgin wilderness and a gaggle of geese lowering themselves into a lake.  I got up.  Time for coffee, Cheerios, banana, and writing.

I feel some fear as I turn to writing this morning, but I hope that this time and space becomes a familiar friend to me.  Don Murray wrote of writing as a lover, always exciting, always teaching him things, always waiting for him.  I hope to get to know my own writing with so much familiarity over this next year, as my life as a mother has changed and given me this early morning hour.

 

What can I accomplish in 20 minutes?

As a writer, it’s tempting to yearn for a large span of time and to delay writing until one appears–which is infrequently.  Research on productivity suggests writing in shorter sessions every day.  How short is short?  I don’t rightly know yet.  This weekend I had success with 90 and 40 minute sessions.  I accomplished tasks I had projected would take much longer, which is rare for me.  Today I have only 20 minutes until I want to head home to see my children, achingly cute as they are.  Here I go.  I’ll let you know what I got done in 20 minutes…

Well, I wrote an insightful, but very messy, couple of paragraphs on the effect of standardization on democratic pedagogies.  The thinking and drafting felt very rich.  It does seem possible to “get into” the ideas of my project sufficiently in 20 minutes to take it one small step forward.  20 minutes.  I can find that on the busiest of days sometime between 8:30 and 4:30, no?