I did almost no writing at all this summer. (Well, certainly I wrote while at Bard, but I didn't write anything outside of class or anything that I wanted to keep going with.) In fact, I'm not sure I've written much of anything to speak of in the last couple of years, aside from blog posts and advisor letters and term comments for my students.
Even with a new writing project -- the FGS history -- I found it hard to get motivated to do much of anything this summer. Partly it was just a hard summer after a hard year, but partly I'm so out of the habit of writing that I almost didn't know how to go about it.
But over vacation I read Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which I already blogged about, and I was struck by a piece of Cain's career advice:
"Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire." And then she tells the story of getting together with some fellow law school alumni, and many of them were jealous of a classmate who had argued several cases before the Supreme Court, but she found herself jealous of the classmates who had gone on to be writers or psychologists." (218)
Hmm, I thought. In the midst of my birthday distress this summer, I engaged in the probably unhealthy project of FB friending several grad school colleagues with whom I'd lost touch, and then winding myself into an unhelpful, unhappy frenzy of jealousy about how their lives had (apparently) worked out. And most of that jealousy was about their (perceived) intellectual lives -- and not about their teaching, but about their research and writing. Now, even in the midst of my birthday wallowing, I knew that I was feeling jealous of a phantom, of my romantic imagining about what their intellectual lives might perhaps be, based on their FB updates and their college webpages -- clearly this is not realism! I managed to move on from that wallowing in just a couple of weeks, but upon reading the above passage in Cain's book, I thought that maybe that jealousy was telling me what I felt was missing in my life.
And then, the day after I got back from vacation, I had brunch and a lovely long talk with Mean Something, who was in town, and I was inspired to realize anew that she has basically two full-time jobs and a writing life ... so much for my sense that somehow I'm just so busy and emotionally drained as a HS teacher that I couldn't possibly write this year without the course release I was hoping for!
It took a week or so for all of this to sink in, but by gum, I am now well and truly motivated to reclaim the writing life! So I've now joined the newest iteration of Dame Eleanor's writing group and have set a serious but do-able goal on the FGS history to have accomplished by mid-December, and I'm excited!
I've long been a fan of Robert Boice's work on writing productivity, and I'm thinking of rereading him as my bedtime reading (or, more realistically, maybe I'll reread a shorter, easier distillation of Boice: Tara Gray's Publish and Flourish), but I'm also feeling a little skeptical that I'll be able to adopt the brief daily sessions of writing, even though I have in the past been a huge fan of this approach. I'm just not sure that I can pull off daily writing during the school week, given the reality of my HS teaching schedule and grading rhythms, but I should be able to write at least a couple days during the week and then on the weekends, and that seems like plenty.
My goal for this week is just five hours of research, which is a low enough figure to be definitely do-able but is a high enough figure that it's actually more than the work I did in most weeks this summer. Inspired by this goal and my intention of getting back in the writing saddle, I tucked in on Sunday afternoon and did three hours of research on the FGS project, and really I enjoyed every minute of it -- this is fun stuff! Of course, I haven't done any writing work since then, and I know that a three-hour burst followed by two days off is the opposite of Boicean philosophy. But Wednesday afternoons are going to be one of my regular writing sessions, so I should be able to meet my weekly goal handily, and that's not bad at all in the year's first week of teaching.
I'll probably be a little saddle-sore in the first two or three weeks, but it's good to be back on the horse! (And now I promise I will stop beating this metaphor.)
You're right that even a little bit of work, maybe not every day but on fairly regular basis, keeps the love alive and gets us pumped. Wednesdays won't be a writing day for me because I teach for more than four hours straight and follow that up with a department seminar. But other weekdays? Game on!
Posted by: Janice | September 05, 2012 at 04:01 PM