In case it's not obvious, I've restarted posting to this site, the oldest of my blogs, for several reasons; none of them include "wanting to become a famous and oft-cited blogger." Actually--true confessions--I tense up a little bit every time I open my Blogger page until I see "zero views" on all my recent stuff.
I created this blog originally back in 2009 as a way to get into the habit of writing something critical every day--sort of as a ramp up to the book. Different people prefer different writing practices. Me, I subscribe to the idea (attributed to Raymond Chandler) that to write anything worthwhile, you have to write a million words of crap first. You gotta drain the sac of poison--cliche, bathos, warmed over rehashes of others' ideas--before you start tapping into whatever threads of gold you have shooting through the dirty quartz of your soul. (Even that image I pinched from Ole Anthony.*)
Have I gotten to a million words yet? No idea. I know that, for me, the crap never completely goes away, instead replenishing itself daily. The longer I go without writing, the more of a reservoir I build up. I've not written for a while--at least since my last conference presentation in March--so I have some crap to burn off.
I don't mean that crap is totally useless, though. No, crap teaches as it purges. I'm only modestly experienced as bloggers go, but what I've learned is this: quantity over quality yields the rewards.
In their excellent book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, Daniel Bayles and Ted Orland recount the story (no idea if it's real or a fable) of a ceramics teacher who divided his students into two groups for the semester. To one group, he explained that their grade will come from a qualitative assessment of ten works that they have the semester to produce and perfect. To the other group, he said that their grades are purely qualitative: produce one hundred products of any quality, and they pass.
The result? The students who produced one hundred works ended up producing better works. The qualitatively assessed students spent so much time trying to get it right that they never let themselves go through the necessary crap stage where they learned how they best made ceramics. The perfect, as they say, became the enemy of the good. The quantitative ceramics students, however, had the freedom to fail. They could produce guilt-free crap, which let them gradually learn not just ceramics but their own process at producing ceramics. They had the room to develop and refine a personal style and method. I write blog posts, then, in part to help me refine my own process.
I also find that writing writing writing pushes me to think about old topics in a new way. I learned early on to distrust any academic work I was engaged in until I ran into a stuck place in the middle of my writing. In that stuck place, the assumptions and arguments I had going in smash against the reality of my evidence or the logical results of my reasoning. I have to stop, rethink, back up, and reassess. It sucks, usually, even when I expect it.
But, usually, the hard passage opens into a new argumentative path, one better and stronger than what I had going in. Writing on a blog, every day, helps me break those dark nights and those wider paths into more manageable bits. I develop lines of argument as I go along. I see where and how certain paths end in cul-de-sacs. I explore ways out of them.
I tell my students regularly that the process for writing anything worthwhile, from an essay to an article to a dissertation to a book, resembles an iceberg. Ninety percent of the work you put into the piece remains hidden beneath the surface. Scads of research, pages of paragraphs, and whole other volumes of argumentative possibility--your reader will never see them in the piece you create. Only ten percent or so of all your work remains; that ten percent is what readers see. But, I caution, it's the ninety percent beneath the surface that makes the ten percent float. Otherwise, I warn, you create nothing more than a fragile layer of thin ice.
Thus, this blog--for anyone who might stumble across it--is mainly me working through ideas for myself. I'd love it if my meanderings proved useful to others; occasionally I'll even recommend a post to folk. But most of the time, if you read this and think "this is kinda crap," know that you're right! You're peaking beneath the surface, looking at the stuff that'll likely end up on my cutting room floor.
More
JF
*From a New Yorker article about Anthony:
“Peace is really what we’re searching for,” [Anthony] said, swivelling his fierce gaze around the room. “But a life without suffering is meaningless. We are like hunks of quartz, and our real identityis a vein of gold inside it. Whenever we prefer someone’s interest over our own, whenever we lay down our lives for someone, we knock off some of the quartz and reveal the gold.”
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