The notion of abundance figures heavily in my first two posts in this series about enjoy writing. Lots of ideas, lots of connections, lots of writing. It might seem jarring therefore to suggest that placing limits can be crucial to the enjoyment of writing. It might have seemed like I’m advocating a life built around writing whereas I want to argue that feeling you never have enough time for writing is actually quite helpful, even if it might be frustrating at times. It’s better to have too little time for writing, than it is to have too much. Given my recent intellectual obsessions I can’t help but register the point as a Lacanian one. Limits structure our enjoyment. The constraints in our way render the object elusive and energising*, imbuing it with the glamour that leads us to pursue it ever more strenuously. The constraints upon the satisfaction of our drives make it easier, though by no means easy, to avoid caught in the repetitive circuits of drive. They harry us towards sublimation**, finding expressions of the impulse which matter the most to us, as well as challenging us to act on them as best we can.
Even if that’s how I’d now understand the point, it’s an observation I made a long time ago. As a part-time PhD student it was hard to find time to write. I had a miserable year when working full time in London, having convinced myself that I would write for 3 hours on the train every day from Coventry. The reality was that I had to quit that job in order to avoid quitting my PhD. But while I was anxious about progress during that time, I was not anxious about writing. Nor was I ever really during the part-time PhD process, largely I think because I couldn’t afford to be for most of it. In contrast I was surrounded by people who had funded PhDs, theoretically gifting them near*** full time immersion in their writing and research. Yet they were so anxious about it. It often appears to me as if they were fighting for every paragraph they were produced, hacking through thickets of worry to get words out on the page. Whereas I hungrily seized upon the chronically restricted opportunities for immersive writing which were available to me, made worse by my inability to avoid side quests which I’m belatedly realising stems from my undiagnosed adult ADHD.
How long does it take you to write? I’m a faster type than most, with a speed of around 140 words per minute if I’m happy to write carelessly. If you have never tested your typing speed, I’d encourage you to do here because it provides a material insight into the nature of your writing process. The most I’ve ever written in a day is around 7000 words. A usually positive day in which I’ve dedicated a non-trivial chunk of time to writing will produce around 2000-3000 words. I tend to write 1000 words each day as a matter of routine. If you assume I’m writing continually at my fastest speed (which obviously isn’t the case but it helps simplify the exercise) that’s 50 minutes to 7 minutes of actual typing during that day. Even if you were to quintuple that to adjust for the variable actual writing speed, or to account for the fact I’m typing faster than most people, that’s still only 5 hours through to 0.5 hours of actual typing each day. (This post of 1358 words took me about 45 minutes to write which is longer than usual, partly because I took a typing test and searched for an interview described below, partly because at this point in the year the birds start waking me up at 5:30 and I’m sleep deprived as a result)
The time we spend in a given day engaged in the actual physical activity of writing is far more limited than we tend to assume. So what are we doing the rest of the time? My impression of the full time PhD students I mentioned is they were spending far too much of that time, without the discipling presence of unavoidable limits, agonising about the fact they weren’t writing enough. I suspect that some of my colleagues get stressed out by blocking out ‘writing time’ in which they expect they should spend much of the time physically writing. But writing by its nature is the outcome of a wider process which needs to be fuelled by the activities which are so to speak ‘upstream’ of it. Reading, thinking, reflecting, analysing, discussing are necessarily preliminaries to the writing process which you need to find ways to make time for. But the actual process of writing is not in itself time consuming, if you are already full of ideas when you sit down to write.
For example Neal Stephenson, who writes large and complex science fiction novels, describes spending two hours a day writing before going off to do something else. I’m struggling to find the interview where he describes coming to this realisation, having previously pressured himself to spend whole days writing. I see a comparison here to sleep hygiene. Much as you shouldn’t just lie in bed if you’re struggling to sleep, you shouldn’t just stare at a blank page if you’re struggling to write. It imbues the process with anxiety and drags you down into a normative sense of what you should be doing. In contrast if you can come to writing fresh, with something to say, it can be a quick and satisfying process before you move onto something else. This is not to say that longer stretches don’t serve a purpose. Clearly they do. But in my experience this is the later stages of writing, when you have to fit things together in a more systematic way in order to prepare them for publication. In that sense we’re really talking about editing, which leaves me doubling down on my claim that writing, in the strictest sense of the term, neither does nor should take a long time. Limits can help you implement this recognition in practice, though calibrating your expectations of the writing process have an important role to play as well.
*Though as I’ll come back to, I think enjoying writing depends on grounding your practice in drive rather than desire. if you approach it in terms of objects you’re pursuing, imagining that with this text will come the recognition that’s long been overdue, you’ll inevitably alienate yourself from the writing process because it becomes about satisfying the Other rather than satisfying yourself. Obviously this is not a choice, in the sense of deciding “today I’m going to let my drives dictate my writing!” but I would argue you can steer this through the habits you cultivate and the writing process you reflexively endorse.
**This is a potentially contentious reading of sublimation, but it’s essential to my developing project to incorporate Lacanian psychoanalysis into neo-Aristotelian philosophical anthropology. I’m suggesting that the libidinal economy of drive as it intersects with the socio-cultural environment has a comparable significance to how Hartmut Rosa has argued temporal dynamics complicate Taylor’s notion of the strong evaluator. We need to bring philosophical anthropology into the ‘real world’ by sociologising it from the outside and psychoanalysing it from the inside.
***Because anticipatory pressures meant they were trying to write other things, get research experience and teach even if, astonishingly in retrospect from the vantage point of 2024, the steer from the department was that you should just focus on your PhD and not worrying about publishing anything.
(See how in writing one thing, I’m generating and capturing fringe thoughts about another? This is a pretty natural example of the strategy I was advocating in yesterday’s post. I’ve just made a breakthrough in another project which was entirely incidental to the post I’m actually writing, which I’m recording because it’s my blog and expectations of what the reader considers salient barely figure in my psyche, if at all. Though obviously it’ll be easier to stick to this in private notes then writing others at least potentially read)
Mark Carrigan 