✍️ How to enjoy writing

It occurred to me recently that I seem to enjoy writing more than most people I know. In this series of posts I will reflect on how I approach writing, in order to identify what it is about my writing practice which leads me to enjoy writing. There’s a risk of perceived hubris in offering unsolicited writing advice to the world, so I should be clear at the outset I’m not positioning myself as an expert writer. I don’t think I’m a bad writer by any means but I’m aware of many weaknesses to my writing which I’ve never really made any effort to address e.g. my tendency to imitate in theoretical writing, the slightly florid quality which often creeps in and the bagginess of my prose*. The risk in positioning myself as a source of guidance on how to enjoy writing, is that the degree of enjoyment I’m confident is unusual might in reality reflect my unwillingness to address these weaknesses.

For someone who has often been described as ‘prolific’ I am in a sense a deeply lazy writer. I’m not working to produce an outcome which will satisfy an external requirement or please an external audience. Instead my writing is much more on the level of what Lacan would call drive rather than desire. For me writing is scratching an itch, decluttering my psyche by rendering formless thoughts as things with form so that they are out there in the world, rather than in here sapping my energy. To write in this sense is profoundly energising, it leaves me feeling more in touch with myself and the world, whereas to not write leaves me feeling sluggish and cut off. As Nietzsche puts it in the Gay Science (pg 90) it’s the only way I know to get rid of my thoughts:

But then why do you write? –

A: I am not one of those who think with a wet quill in hand; much less one of those who abandon themselves to their passions right before the open inkwell, sitting on their chair and staring at the paper. I am annoyed or ashamed by all writing; to me, writing is nature’s call – to speak of it even in simile is repugnant to me.

B: But why, then, do you write?

A: Well, my friend, I say this in confidence: until now I have found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts

B: And why do you want to get rid of them?

A: Why do I want to? Do I want to? I have to

B: Enough! Enough!

In this sense my enjoyment of writing might seem like it simply tracks my own psychological peculiarity. But this assumption is complicated by the writing habit I’ve engaged in for my entire adult life. I started blogging over twenty years ago, in what was entirely an anonymous habit until I established this research blog fourteen years ago in the second year of my part-time PhD. During this time I also wrote extensively in other now lost forums, such as the international philosophy discussion board I helped moderate for years. To what extent does my writing reflect my psychological peculiarity as opposed to my psychological peculiarity reflecting my writing? I won’t make this series of posts about answering this impossible question which isn’t even of much interest to me, let alone others. But I wanted to explain why I think the duration of my writing habit leaves me able to talk more generally, rather than just being a series of quirks I’ve habituated myself into over the years.

I write a lot. My formal academic publications put me into the ‘relatively prolific’ category for someone of my age and career stage, particularly given I only worked part time as an academic until mid 2020. I’ve written three and a half monographs (in the sense that the second edition of social media for academics was a substantial rewrite) with another due to be completed over the summer. I’m in the early stages of starting the fifth, which will be co-written. I’ve written fifteen chapters and twelve articles if my university website is counting them all accurately. I’ve written endless guest blogs and pieces of cultural commentary for various websites over the last ten years. But what makes me unusual I think are the 5,863 posts on this blog (in fact this is the 5,864th) as well as the posts I wrote daily on sociologicalimagination.org before we closed it in summer 2018. I have a complex relationship to the idea of writing books, I write articles reluctantly for reasons I’ll explore in later posts, but I love blogging, whether it’s here or more formally on other websites. The relatively large quantity of outputs is an outgrowth of this fundamental enjoyment of blogging, in ways I’ll explore later in this series.

My idea is that over the next month I’ll write a series of 10-20 posts which consider principles or practices I can identify in my approach to writing, with a view to explaining the sources of my enjoyment. I’ve suggested a basic psychological mechanism earlier (effectively ‘decluttering’) which I’ll elaborate over the course of these posts, with a view to interrogating my own writing process from a more psychoanalytical perspective. But I’m hoping these posts might be useful to others, providing suggestions which could be applied in order to increase the enjoyment of your own writing. In doing this I’m not suggesting my approach will necessarily work for other people, or ignoring factors which make it easier for me (e.g. no kids). But I’m hoping that analysing my own writing process, where and how the enjoyment arises, might provoke insights in other people. These are my working titles, though I’ll update them as I go and add links to the posts once live:

Consider this critic a cretin
Just resting on laurels completely invented
Word acrobatics performed with both harness and net
I'm so full of shit

*I was struck that Sage’s James Clark, who edited Generative AI for Academics as well as Social Media for Academics, was able to remove a couple of thousand words from a chapter largely by rewriting my sentences to remove this bagginess. It’s certainly a wider academic affliction but it’s one which is particularly pronounced in how I write.

Mark Carrigan

✍️ How to enjoy writing

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