Lots of well-intended guides to academic writing encourage regular practice. We’ve heard it before: writing is a muscle. It needs to be exercised. Regularly. And, there’s some truth to this. Writing regularly can help overcome the fear of the blank page. It can direct the focus and quell those little voices that worry that the words might not come. Writing regularly can facilitate the movement from one project, to the next, to the next and can gather energy and momentum. It can provide that rush that we know what we’re doing and that we’re actually doing it.
There are lots of reasons to keep the writing muscle moving.
But, constant momentum can also be frenetic. It can be quick, whirl in circles, and spin out of control. A few words can become too many words and not all of those words may be organized around a coherent framework or a clear set of ideas. Too many words can become muddled. Too many words can become incoherent words. And, often, by the time that we realize that they’re as muddled as they are, we’re feeling too attached to let any of them go.
That’s why writing, like reading, needs still moments.
I’m not referring to writing blocks, as those times when writing just doesn’t happen. To be honest, I’ve never experienced a writing block. Not yet anyway. I have experienced times when I’ve not particularly motivated to write and when I don’t write as well as I could, but I haven’t experienced times when I can’t write.
We might think about still moments as intentionally taken pauses where the writing has to stop in order for it to continue. Sometimes, still moments only last for a moment. Other times, they might occupy a longer period of time. Still moments are when we have an opportunity to think about what we’ve written. They’re moments to figure out what we know, what we don’t know, and if it matters. They’re moments to contemplate taking our ideas in a completely different direction, or abandoning them all together, (which is something that we rarely discuss in terms of writing, a secret silence.) Still moments in writing are intentionally taken moments of indecision. Because indecision is so often uncomfortable, our urge, is to resist stillness with more writing.
I’m having one of those still moments in my current writing project. I’ve been writing about it, on and off, since my sabbatical last year and it’s still in pieces. Some of the pieces make sense. Other pieces make less sense. I’m not yet sure that it makes sense altogether. Going through the exercise of putting more words on the page might help me to feel, temporarily, like I’m doing what’s expected; but, it’s probably not going to help me sort this all out.
It’s time to accept that this project needs a still moment. It needs to occupy some space in my thoughts while I’m walking, while I’m reading, while I’m doing yoga, and while I’m doing all those other things that aren’t actually writing.
The lesson here is patience, which also happens to be a handy lesson for the current state of the pandemic.
upalonger 