In my corner of the academy, one isn’t really taught much about\u00a0writing.<\/p>\n
One is taught constantly\u00a0to produce texts and to judge texts, but that\u00a0isn’t\u00a0the same\u00a0thing, because writing is a process, and the text is merely the product. A theory of a\u00a0product isn’t a theory of its production.<\/p>\n
There\u00a0is of course a cottage industry of advice, guidelines, tips, “rules for writing<\/a>,” writing strategies<\/a>, and so on. Generally\u00a0this advice is instrumentalist. It tells you, “Picture\u00a0your reader!” “Write short sentences!” “Always revise!” “Have modest goals!” It tells you, in sum, “Write\u00a0like this<\/em>\u00a0if you want to succeed.”<\/p>\n The problem with this sort of writing advice is that it isn’t really\u00a0about writing. It is about career success, behavioral self-optimization, and complying\u00a0with norms.<\/p>\n The second problem with writing advice is that it constantly\u00a0equates writing with\u00a0composition<\/em>.\u00a0But composition is only one\u00a0metaphor for writing.\u00a0Perhaps improvisation\u00a0<\/em>(to borrow a sibling musical\u00a0category) is another possible\u00a0metaphor for writing. Maybe it’s\u00a0even a good one?<\/p>\n In jazz improvisation, for example, there’s a form that you’re\u00a0expected to know, and a set of standardized\u00a0scales and harmonies, but through some curious real-time\u00a0alchemy (which I imagine\u00a0musicologists have written about in great detail),\u00a0each phrase\u00a0is supposed to\u00a0come out as something\u00a0singular<\/em>. “Fresh,” perhaps. New, even. Somehow unpredictable, but still communicative \u2014 “having\u00a0something to say,<\/em>” as a former housemate of mine used to put it. Otherwise you’re just ringing the changes and it’s automatically boring.<\/p>\n A lot of academic writing is like this kind of bad jazz improvisation, the kind where the musician is palpably avoiding\u00a0taking\u00a0any risks.\u00a0Too predictable. You can already guess\u00a0what’s going to be said before\u00a0you read it. If you write from an outline, this sort of text\u00a0tends to\u00a0come\u00a0out.\u00a0The overall form\u00a0is respected. An argument gets made. But in stolidly\u00a0composed<\/em>\u00a0writing,\u00a0you don’t necessarily\u00a0get\u00a0that feeling\u00a0that good essays are supposed to convey: the feeling of a live\u00a0intelligence darting from one turn\u00a0to the next, surprising you or taking you places. Totally composed writing never gets\u00a0close to the unconscious. But the unconscious is where good thoughts come from.<\/p>\n I’ve been working on my book about\u00a0Paris 8’s Philosophy Department, and I find that I just don’t get far without making\u00a0space\u00a0to improvise. By improvise, I mean: trying to take in\u00a0everything I know about\u00a0my object of inquiry, and then letting the thoughts come out in words\u00a0through some sort of\u00a0loose process where I stare at the page and see what comes out, more like free-association. (Improvised music is also a form of free association.)<\/p>\n This improvising moment is only one of the many\u00a0moments in a writing process. Another, the more obvious part,\u00a0is the long revising cycle. Just to be autobiographical: once I have some sort of rough draft, often full of\u00a0notes\u00a0to myself\u00a0like “cite XYZ here” or “say ABC here,” I re-read it and edit until I’m happy. I used to print everything out to read it on paper; now sometimes I re-read on the screen.(Weirdly, if I make a PDF of my own writing, it\u00a0feels<\/em> more like reading a piece of paper than if I read the text\u00a0in my text editor.)\u00a0Maybe I’ll re-read and edit\u00a0once or twice as I’m writing, just to\u00a0get\u00a0the text presentable, and then again\u00a0after a few days or weeks to\u00a0get a better overall perspective, and then a few times in response to feedback from\u00a0my friends or colleagues. (Not counting peer review-type\u00a0revisions.) There are lots of versions.<\/p>\n I’m not claiming to be at all original; I was taught to do all this revising work. “All writing is rewriting,”\u00a0my graduate school teacher Susan Gal used to say. Writing groups used to be all the rage back in Chicago. There were whole infrastructures\u00a0for supporting revisions.<\/p>\n But the process of producing\u00a0the first draft: that’s the part\u00a0that still\u00a0feels like improvisation to me.\u00a0The blank page is rather like a long silence\u00a0waiting for\u00a0you to play some notes. Sometimes when you sit down to write,\u00a0you manage to get in contact with something that’s not rote or frilled. Other times the words\u00a0come out drab\u00a0or blurry, but then you can try to fix them\u00a0in revisions, a completely different activity. I try not to compose, in the sense of trying to be sure\u00a0what I want to say before I say it. You just don’t know how it has to sound until you’re there in the right\u00a0context.<\/p>\n I’m curious if this makes sense to\u00a0anyone else out there?<\/p>\n I’d like to have more ways of talking about\u00a0writing as a\u00a0praxis. This is a first stab.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In my corner of the academy, one isn’t really taught much about\u00a0writing. One is taught constantly\u00a0to produce texts and to judge texts, but that\u00a0isn’t\u00a0the same\u00a0thing, because writing is a process, and the text is merely the product. A theory of a\u00a0product isn’t a theory of its production. There\u00a0is of course a cottage industry of advice, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[498],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2237"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2248,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions\/2248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}