There’s a certain wastefulness entailed by the approach to writing I’ve advocated in this series. Inevitably a writing practice which is regular, free and uninhibited will produce more ‘wasted’ writing than a more planned and considered approach, at least if you consider it in terms of the desired ‘outputs’ you are producing. A theme I’ll explore later in the series is how a fixation on outputs prioritises desire over drive. If you’re writing for the things you imagine will one day be released into the world, which is always implicitly a desire about how those works will be recognised by others, it’s difficult to inhabit the satisfactions which writing brings. It means looking ahead in order to anticipate where you’re going rather than enjoying the journey. It’s not possible to avoid an anticipatory perspective entirely. But it can quickly expunge joyfulness from the writing process if it is not kept in check.
For example I can feel how defining this as a ‘series’ has changed my relationship to the writing of these posts, with a vague sense of obligation creeping into how i’m approaching them. I’ve tried to counteract that by waiting for the feel of an idea before writing the next one in the series. I’ve had this extract from a Paul Graham blog post, originally encountered through Henrik Karlsson, stuck at the back of my psyche for the last week. Other than assenting to it as obviously true in my experience, I wasn’t sure why this resonated with me so much:
If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
It feels to them as if they do, especially if they’re not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It’s only when you try to put them into words that you discover they’re not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you’ll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.
https://www.paulgraham.com/words.html?ref=pcounsel.blog
I wonder if the planning writer* encounters this recognition of the incompleteness of their own thought much less regularly than the spontaneous writer. It’s surely a regular experience to find yourself trying to explain something to someone, only to discover that you understand it much less well than you thought. This I’m realising is the intellectual discipline entailed by teaching, in the sense that to teach a subject well you have to understand it sufficiently to facilitate explanation beyond your comfort zone. To struggle to put something into words entails a similar experience, encountering what I’ve tended to think of as the discursive gap between our projects of articulation and the cultural resources available to us.
We lack the words to say what we want to say. If we find some words to say it, our expressions stare back at us as mockingly from the page, embodying our inarticulacy. This at least is the case if you feel you have a prior knowledge which you are trying to express, which means that your faltering expressions confront with you with the incompleteness of that knowledge. It is difficult to sustain a belief in your own “fully formed ideas” through such bruising encounters, which possibly explains why the planner feels compelled to do their utmost to ensure those ideas really are fully formed before writing.
In contrast the spontaneous writer doesn’t labour under the delusion their ideas are fully formed. In lectures, presentations and conversations they are frequently surprised to find themselves sharing ideas which they were not previously familiar with. The interaction offers an occasion for something new to emerge in the act of sharing, connections to form in a particular context which express novelty where previously there was none. So too in the act of writing. To the extent writing is regular, free and uninhibited it provides a similar occasion for novelty. Rather than the incompleteness being a state which inheres in you as the subject, it becomes a ground for creative engagement with the external world. It’s the incompletion which drives us to keep trying to say what we’re trying to say, with the caveat that we ourselves are changing through these recurrent acts of articulation:
Much of our motivation – our desires, aspirations, evaluation – is not simply given. We give it a formulation in words or images. Indeed, by the fact that we are linguistic animals our desires and aspirations cannot but be articulated in one way or another […] these articulations are not simply descriptions, if we mean by this characterisations of a fully independent object, that is, an object which is altered neither in what it is, nor in the degree or manner of its evidence to us by the description.
In this way my characterisation of this table as brown, or this line of mountains as jagged, is a simple description. On the contrary, articulations are attempts to formulate what is initially inchoate, or confused, or badly formulated. But this kind of formation or reformulation does not leave its object unchanged. To give a certain articulation is to shape our sense of what we desire or what we hold important in a certain way.
– Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers Vol 1, 36
What does this mean in practice? It means that what could be characterised as ‘wastefulness’, producing many thousands of words which you don’t ultimately ‘use’, should instead be seen as a process of thinking. It is through continuing to write that you continue to think, with the satisfaction that comes from getting ever closer to a (paradoxically) moving target. Your thoughts get clearer, more connected and enter the world with increasing sophistication. But what you’re trying to say itself changes in the process. This is a primary satisfaction of thinking-through-writing in my experience: a sense of progress combined with endless new vista of uncertainty opening up as you move forward. It means that a piece of writing inevitably leads to the next one. It means that answers inevitably lead to more questions. Even the most perfect writing, in its very perfection, challenges us to continue. The end is where we start from:
What we call the beginning is often the end
T.S. Eliot – Little Gidding
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
If you experience the incompleteness of your writing as frustrating or shameful, it could instead be reframed as a challenge to write more. The frustration could reflect unrealistic expectations about the finality of your writing as much as any inherent character of the writing process. If you accept that your writing will always be incomplete, there is license to explore that incompleteness with creativity and enthusiasm. To keep trying to say what you’re trying to say. You’ll never say it but you’ll become a different person with different thoughts in the process.
*I’ve not argued yet for my distinction between the planning writer and the spontaneous writer as two ideal types. But these are categories which I’ve seen endlessly invoked in different forms, suggesting two fundamentally different orientations to the writer process. I’d be curious about trying to understand these differences in Lacanian terms because it’s easy to cast the planning writer as the neurotic obsessive, papering over the cracks in the symbolic order by being ever such a well-prepared subject in their contributions to it, in contrast to the hysterical character of the spontaneous writer, crackling with jouissance as they surf the wave of symbolic incompleteness. The problem with this, I point out rather myopically, is that I’m a textbook neurotic obsessive yet not only am I not inclined to function as a planning writer, my experience is that I cannot do it even when I have tried hard to order my writing in this way. If this is true of me, I have no reason to doubt it might be true of others as well, suggesting the obvious Lacanian reading of these categories is too simplistic.
Mark Carrigan 