II. Process/Product/Consequences

            Teachers of writing often try to get students to distinguish the processes of writing from the products; the more that I thought about procrastination, the more that I found the need to talk about a third category: consequences. In terms of a paper written for a class, there is the process that one uses to generate the product (the paper), and that paper, in turn, has certain consequences—specific and short-term (or first order) ones such as the grade and longer-term (and more amorphous) ones such as the teacher’s opinion of the student. Thus, the grade may influence a student’s ability to get or retain a scholarship, the teacher’s willingness to work with the student or write a letter of recommendation. In graduate school, maintaining the good opinion of faculty often becomes an end in and of itself (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but can be part of a paralyzing process). It’s not uncommon to motivate one’s self to write with grandiose positive fantasies about magnificent long-term consequences, or equally grandiose but negative fantasies about what will happen if the product is awful—the Pulitzer Prize, or finding one’s self shoveling roadkill in west Texas. Hence, the issues in writing look something like this:

In my experience, the more that one focuses on the long-term consequences of the product—the impact on one’s career, the estimation of one’s colleagues or mentors, positive or negative fantasies about the reception one’s work will receive—the more likely one is to get a writing block. It was interesting to discover, then, that others have noticed the same correlation. Rose Fichera McAloon, who specializes in working with ABD students in writing impasses, says of the cases described in her article, “all of whom are women and whose fantasies abouf the meaning and possible out- come of the project impeded progress to completion” (231). It isn’t clear to me whether the issue is that those fantasies are always more pleasurable (or at least interesting) than the gruntwork of writing, or if they are insidiously paralyzing. What one ends up writing is never as good as what one imagined writing, so every sentence is a kind of disappointment (“a wholly new failure” in Eliot’s words). Readers are never satisfied with one’s products, so there is always more work to do. And one ends up submitting something not because it is finished, but because the very sight of it is nausea-inducing. The process of academic publishing is so slow that by the time something comes out I barely recognize it as my own—never to finish means never facing any of those strangely disappointing moments; it means remaining in the place where one can imagine the perfect text.

            W. Somerset Maugham has a haunting story about a man who spends most of his career as a customs official in China trying to get back to London; when he gets there, he finds it doesn’t live up to his fantasies. He begins to fantasize about how wonderful China could be, and heads back there. On the last stop before China, he gets off the boat, and spends the rest of his life in Haiphong thinking about how wonderful China could be, happy with a mirage that was much better—because it was a mirage—than the reality could ever be. Submitting one’s work to others, whether one’s dissertation to one’s committee or one’s manuscript to a journal, means being willing to trade the mirage of a perfect text for the reality of a flawed one. It means leaving Haiphong and going to China. McAloon describes that she couldn’t write her dissertation when it had all sorts of profound meanings about her gender, worth, and identity. Once she realized those were not actually the stakes,

I was then able to demystify the process and come to view the dis- sertation as simply another academic task that needed to be completed. Once I realized that I wanted to pursue it for its own sake and for career advancement, I allowed myself to know that I wanted it more than life itself. (247)

McAloon, a psychoanalyst, found it helpful to keep her “destructive impulses” (including the desire to put off the writing) “front and center” in her mind (247).

            Procrastination is often described by economists as “hyperbolic discounting”—a person who chooses to procrastinate does so because s/he excessively discounts what the consequences will mean in the future. Someone who, in the abstract, wants to save for retirement, but keeps spending all their money purchasing things for current consumption, hyperbolically discounts how unhappy they will be when they have very little money for retirement. Because no single expenditure tanks the retirement fund, and no single cigarette is the one that gives a person cancer, it is difficult in the moment to care very much about what will happen years from now. One strategy is to connect the action to future actions, to frame this choice as indicative of the choices one will make in the future (Ainslie). Or, in other words, you don’t smoke a cigarette because you want to see yourself as someone who doesn’t smoke, or you exercise because you want to see yourself as the sort of person who exercises, or you protect your time for scholarship because you want to see yourself as a productive scholar.

            If, however, one is ambivalent about that self-image (and McAloon suggests that is part of what is at stake), the framing the imminent decision in terms of identity can be a paralyzing strategy. Whuzzerface points out that it’s exactly this tendency to connect the present and future that can contribute to alcoholics drinking—a single misstep means they may as well give up on the larger goal—and my doctor tells me that she has trouble persuading some women to exercise because they don’t want to be “the sort of woman” who leaves her family in order to go to a gym. If the stakes are that high—if writing a chapter, or protecting eight hours a week, feels like adopting an identity about which one is ambivalent—the some form of psychotherapy may be useful, and it may be for that reason that many graduate students and scholars engage in therapy.

            But not everyone does, and there are other strategies. If the consequences of writing a flawed text are unthinkable (and they can be unthinkable to people who define themselves as good writers), then there are various strategies for doing the unthinkable. The first and most obvious is simply not to think about it. That is, some people choose to procrastinate the worrying. Some people find it helpful to block out time for thinking about the consequences—for some reason, it can be especially productive to set that time for the same time that one is engaged in physical activity—while some people find that procrastinating it endlessly is helpful.

            Another strategy is to treat the aversion as a phobia (my favorite definition of phobia is fear of one’s own fear). If one is phobic about flying, the temptation is to liquor up and stagger on to a plane. There is a possibility, of course, that the experience will still be awful and reinforce one’s aversion to flying, and there is a limit as to just how much one can drink and still even stagger. If flying is an important part of one’s job, then liquoring up is likely to have fairly complicated consequences. One of the main problems with binge writing is that it reinforces the sense that writing is a traumatic experience, or can only be done when one is in a complete panic. So, just as some people have had success with deconditioning in regard to phobias, some people have succeeded at deconditioning themselves in regard to writing. They try strategies like writing in smaller bits, under more pleasant circumstances, and with lower stakes. 

            If the stakes are high (e.g., gaining or losing the respect of one’s mentors) it’s hard to imagine the process of writing would be pleasant. And, while imagining dire consequences can certainly serve to get one writing, that’s still keeping panic at the wheel. The difficult finesse one has to pull is to find a way to keep motivated enough to do something fairly tedious without relying on panic. Those long-term consequences tend to be either disastrous or triumphant; that is, negative or affirmative. One strategy that works for many writers whose tendency to imagine grandiose outcomes inhibits their writing (or causes more stress than they want) is to imagine plausible affirmative outcomes—instead of imagining winning the Pulitzer, to think about what more publication will mean in terms of promotion or raises; instead of imagining how shameful it be to be an ABD waitress in Barstow, imagine how good it will feel not to be a student any more.

            People who are very productive, it seems to me, focus on the process and product—they enjoy writing, or they like the research they’re doing, or they at least like some large part of the topic. In a perfect world, we would only research topics about which we are genuinely interested, and pursue questions that deeply puzzle us. Then, we would be more involved in the process, and less concerned about the consequences (if there is one reason to become a full professor, it is because it comes with that intellectual freedom). Believing in one’s argument can mean that one is motivated to get it right, and also so motivated to expose others to it that we are more resilient in the face of delays, setbacks, and outright rejection.

            It isn’t possible, I think, to be motivated purely by interest in the topic or joy in the process—every project involves tedious quote-checking, reading more about the topic than any reasonable person desires, struggling with impossible sentences, and mental fatigue—but the more that one can focus on those affirmative (and affirming) aspects of the process, the more likely one is to do the work.

            While focusing on disastrous long-term consequences is highly motivating, and a fairly common practice, I’ll suggest below that writers consider other strategies. But first I want to talk briefly about the surprising ways that focusing on magnificent rewards can be paralyzing. Because many academics were designated as promising, our sense of ourselves as people capable of extraordinary things can run deep. To produce something merely good is to risk that sense of self. Since academics often suffer from what pop psychologists have made famous as “the imposter syndrome” (the sense that we are not as good as other people think), we can have a kind of double bind when it comes to achievement. To produce something merely good, instead of extraordinary, reveals us for the fraud we have always secretly feared we are; for many scholars and students, the worst possible outcome is not a bad grade, as long as it is on something we can dismiss as not representative of our potential, but a good (rather than excellent) grade on something that represents our best effort. Our very sense of self is on the line, then, with each text we produce. The solution seems to be to avoid producing anything that is our best effort. As long as our full performance is delayed, so is our full revelation, and anyone’s ability to assess our true worth. By remaining in the land of glimpsed potential, we have left open the possibility for the grandiose positive outcomes, and final judgment of our potential must be in abeyance. At the same time, one has not actually risked the grandiose negative ones. One motivation for procrastination—a strangely pernicious kind—can be that it enables our never risking being told that one is not the golden child one wants to be.

            Burka and Yuen have, by far, the best advice for how to manage the kind of procrastination that comes from the imposter syndrome, and it’s fairly complicated—having to do with simultaneously lowering one’s expectations and taking credit for one’s achievements. In addition to recommending their book, I’d note that the syndrome, it seems to me, is closely connected to the “fixed” potential model of the mind, as opposed to the “growth” model. People with the fixed model imagine that we are given a fixed amount of potential, and the precise amount of that potential is revealed as we perform. Carol Dweck has argued that people with a fixed mindset at some point stop trying, and their achievement drops; people with a “growth” mindset (that your performance can get better with practice) are more likely to take risks, recover from setbacks, and, no shock, improve their performance.

            It seems to me that the fixed mindset is associated with the thesis-driven writing process, almost as though people with the fixed mindset see writing in terms of products that fully reveal static ability, as opposed to writing being a skill that improves with practice. It is partially that they see writing as something that conveys one’s thoughts, which, like one’s potential, is fixed. If one doesn’t have a fixed substance to convey, then one cannot create good products. People committed to thesis-driven writing processes often describe writing that doesn’t end up in the final product as “dead ends,” “wasted” time, “bad seeds,” or other metaphors that suggest the author would have been better had that writing never happened. It seems to me that productive writers tend to use metaphors that imply that such writing was useful, even if it never ended up in a final text. In other words, it was good practice. Although we understand that getting better at most activities requires practice—we wouldn’t expect much of a tennis player who only played in tournaments and never practiced or played between them—we have trouble seeing writing the same way. If writing is, as everyone says, a craft, then it should seem obvious that it requires a kind of work that is not always oriented toward a final product—artists do sketches, athletes work on skills, competitors play games with low or no stakes, musicians play over and over. A player who competes against team-mates doesn’t describe those matches as dead ends or wasted time.

            Writing teachers very nearly break into hives at the “building blocks” analogy. Behind much very bad educational policy (especially “back to basics” curriculum reform and high-stakes testing), it is a bad analogy in almost every way. It’s based on a bad description of language acquisition, writing improvement, and piano playing. The argument is that learning to write is like learning to play piano, and in both one starts with the “basic” building blocks. Thus, students should spend years working from correct words up to the five paragraph essay. It is assumed, despite years of linguistic research showing this is not the case, that words are the building blocks of effective communication. So, one should work on teaching students to use correct words, then to write correct sentences, and then correct paragraphs, and then to write basic paper forms (the notorious five paragraph essay that, despite what high school teachers say, college writing teachers hate with a deep and abiding passion), before they are allowed to be creative. The analogy is bad because:

·      Words are not the building blocks of meaning, and correctness is a not a separate skill on top of which are built the “more advanced” skills like intention. Trying to instill knowledge of grammatical “rules” in students before they have anything to say is like drilling students on the rules of tennis tournaments before handing them a racket and ball.

·      Correctness is a much more fraught concept than most people think, not simply because linguistic standards change over time, but by region and discipline. It is not a sign of moral worth or intelligence, nor is it entirely separable from content. Because people think it is separable from content, they tend to misunderstand what linguists and writing teachers mean when we say that we don’t teach it separately—they tend to assume that we advocate not teaching it at all. But, obviously, being aware of the rules of tennis (including how they might vary from a friendly game with friends to a tournament) is absolutely necessary if one intends to play competitively. It is, however, neither necessary nor even meaningful to assume that explicit knowledge of the rules of tournament play is a skill that must be acquired separate from and prior to learning enough skills to have a rally.  

·      The analogy to piano playing is made in defense of methods of teaching that keep students writing vacuous and highly formalized writing. Were that analogy applied back to piano playing, it would be the equivalent of making prospective piano players do nothing but finger exercises for years. A good piano teacher doesn’t even make a student play chopsticks for years.

·      People who are serious about piano playing don’t just practice the simpler and more “basic” skills when they first start; they don’t sit down to play the piano only when it is a virtuoso performance with high stakes. We understand that with all sorts of skills—sports, foreign languages, music, drawing—one’s skills improve by engaging in low stakes practice that no one else might ever see. Why can’t we imagine a similar relationship between practice and skill in writing?

In other words, if we took seriously the building blocks analogy, we wouldn’t see correctness as the first concern, limited to some point in one’s education to which one never returned. But neither would we advocate a writing process that depended on only writing when what one wrote would be part of a virtuoso performance. We wouldn’t talk about “dead ends” or “wasted time” in writing—we would see writing that didn’t end up in a published form as practice. And we wouldn’t see writing as a revelation of fixed ability, and therefore find the notion of best effort terrifying, but as an activity that will get better if we do it more.