I must admit that saying “I haven’t written anything for a year” is not entirely true. From time to time, I write snippets of something that could become a decent text, if I did put enough effort into it.
Case and point: I wrote this text as a supposed introductory blog entry. I wrote a beginning and then stopped. Let’s figure out what went wrong here.
This article lacking sources
So, how do I write well?
The consensus on the matter is that your writing directly depends on how many books you read. Open any handbook on creative writing and you notice all of the advice of reading voraciously, all the time, any words that come into your general vicinity. But how does it work exactly? How does one’s reading transform into their writing?
Studying in university, I spend most of my time awake (and half-asleep) reading, and the time I can devote to writing is severely limited. Even before stumbling into the vicious world of academia, I was mighty unsure about my ability to write a coherent text, the ability which quickly dried out once I learned that to address any theme, you must accomplish time-consuming research referencing all the sources that uttered the tiniest word on the subject. This always was a problem for me: how do you balance these two enormous tasks that don’t have much in common? Looking at it right now, I am thinking it’s quite a decent text. You’ve got a standard beginning for an academic paper: establishing a theme, describing a context, and, finally, raising a question. A bit of tweaking here and there, a couple of arguments, some examples, a brief conclusion et voilà. These are basic things you learn while studying in academia. Following these rules is unavoidable if you want to get a passing grade for your essay. But does it make a good text?
If I were to follow my academic instincts, I would explore how our current understanding of writing and reading is affected by their meaning in a historical context. To show how massive the difference between what we now understand under creation and its consumption and how these concepts functioned in the past, I would choose an example from European history that would contradict my experience in the most obvious way: if for me reading and writing are immensely different experiences, for a medieval commentator of the Bible, on the contrary, all writing is just an interpretation of your reading. While writing a commentary on a text that represented the ultimate truth, medieval scholars couldn’t claim originality. Their works by definition could come out only in the image and likeness of God’s creation, but never as an original text. This is, of course, an oversimplified view of the Middle Ages: it would be wrong to reduce all of the Middle Ages to one understanding of the sacred text, but you need to take into account also specifics of a time period and historical development of a particular country.
Though this idea doesn’t do much for medieval studies, it could be used as a polar opposite in comparison to how I could describe the way things are now. Where we could see harmonic relationships of interdependence between reading and writing, we observe a deep fracture between these activities. Writing is now primarily perceived as a domain of creative force, while reading plays only a supportive role as a leisure or a preparation for more writing. I do not wish here to cry over the lost literacy, as old white academics like to do. I don’t think you need to waste your time disputing this “oh no people don’t read anymore, because of computers or something” when we live in a society with almost 100% literacy. People read a lot, just not what you want them to read, Dietrich! The problem that interests me more is this devaluation of reading as an activity. George Perec (yes, we get to our guy!) writes in his social-physiological essay about reading that we rarely regard reading as an activity on its own. We read to pass the time, to get some information, or to discuss a book with our friends. Even if reading constitutes a significant part of your job, it is valued only as a preliminary state, usually to writing. You won’t get paid when you just tell your boss that you have been reading the entire month.
This gap between the supposed passivity of reading and the productivity of writing is even more visible in the case of creative professions. There the uninterrupted inspiration is being relentlessly celebrated. If you open most books on creative writing (I’ve done this for you, yay), you will almost for sure find a couple of pieces of advice like “just write first what comes into your head”, “write every day, even for a few minutes”, “don’t be ashamed to write no matter what. if you don’t have any ideas for your novel, just write a shopping list”. Even if there is some truth in this advice, and you really need to calm down your perfectionism sometimes and just write, it doesn’t change the fact that writing is an extremely privileged activity that doesn’t come to everyone naturally. Failings of automatic writing were already proved by surrealists at the beginning of the 20th century: your unconsciousness is not some kind of magic box that could produce ideas out of nothing. No matter how easily an idea comes into your head, it always comes charged with cultural and historical baggage which you can’t interpret when you only sort through the mess in your head. So, you need to read, even though everything seems to assure you that reading is optional.
And now we’re back to the same unease that started this text: How do you reconcile reading and writing, if even culture considers them two vastly different endeavors? In their book Radical Self-care, Svenja Gräfen writes how ashamed they always felt to put some much time into research instead of writing. This time, invisible to the publisher and the tax department, is considered as procrastination or an obstinate resistance to do something useful. Gräfen writes that dedicated to taking care of themselves, they started to consider this time as a breather, necessary to create. But why don’t you view it as it is: reading that is imperative to flesh out your story?! Why do we tend to equal reading with an empty time, time forever wasted?
d produce ideas out of nothing. No matter how easily an idea comes into your head, it always comes charged with cultural and historical baggage which you can’t interpret when you only sort through the mess in your head. So, you need to read, even though everything seems to assure you that reading is optional.
And now we’re back to the same unease that started this text: How do you reconcile reading and writing, if even culture considers them two vastly different endeavors? In their book Radical Self-care, Svenja Gräfen writes how ashamed they always felt to put some much time into research instead of writing. This time, invisible to the publisher and the tax department, is considered as procrastination or an obstinate resistance to do something useful. Gräfen writes that dedicated to taking care of themselves, they started to consider this time as a breather, necessary to create. But why don’t you view it as it is: reading that is imperative to flesh out your story?! Why do we tend to equal reading with an empty time, time forever wasted?