"'The Option' Days" Are Here Again

I have a writing routine.  So does every successful writer.  In my class today—the second of the quarter—my students were treated to guest appearances by New York Times best-selling author Joshua Wolf Shenk and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Barry Siegel.  (And damn did they ever handle it with aplomb.)  Joshua talked to them about his writing routine—a mandatory three hours slaving and flailing daily—and as he did the contours of my own routine became more apparent.  (What can I say?  Contrast has a way of creating reliefs.)  My routine is more ambitious than his by the very degree to which I'm a lesser writer.  I don't tie myself to the chair for three hours daily but six.  Had I Shenk's skills I wouldn't need to.  (Only I don't.  So I do.)  Over the course of the conversation I inadvertantly revealed to my students the existence of "'The Option' Days."  What are "'The Option' Days"?

Besides an excuse to indulge my love of awkward quotational apparatuses, "'The Option' Days" are those entirely comprised of six or more hours staring at a Word document which contains only the words "the" and "option" (in that order) and being dunderstruck trying to complete the sentence. 

Do I want a verb?  "The option considered by . . ." would make for a fine sentence.  As would one in which "the option" introduces a prepositional phrase: "The option before the . . ."  That would also work.  Whichever one I choose will determine the argument and tone and structure of all that comes after it.  So I sit there. 

Paralyzed by "the option." 

Haunted by "the option." 

Aware of the irony inherent in feeling paralyzed and haunted by all the options "the option" provides but unable to appreciate its ironical exquisiteness for the foul mood into which I've descended. 

So I sit.

Frustrated.

I stare dumbly.

And brood.

Over the dead end that is "the option." 

Comments

[Rob MacD]

So this would be a particularly literal example of "option paralysis".

Or am I just lamely over-explaining a subtle joke you already made?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I don't believe I've already made that joke, but I could. My baseball coach said I suffered at the plate from "analysis paralysis." He thought I'd walk to plate and run game theory scenarios; all I was actually doing was trying to foul off junk and work into a fastball count.

[d]

I can't handle more than 2-3 hours in front of the computer, a writing routine that I've held over from the dark days of the dissertation. The goal each day was to add 250k to whatever chapter I happened to be working on -- that worked out to about a page of new material. It could have been new prose, it could have been girthy footnotes, it could have been anything. Once the threshold was reached, the options before me were (a) to continue for a while in the hope of adding another 250k; or (b) to stop there and begin drinking.

[Stephen]

Alas, my writing routine is probably the most inefficient ever devised. It consists of the following:

1) Stare at the screen dumbly for at least an hour, probably playing solitaire.

2) Once I begin to feel guilty about 1), plink away madly at the keyboard for about half an hour.

3) Repeat.

[Adam Kotsko]

I get up and walk around a lot. Pacing helps me to think. I try to compose the perfect sentence in my head, and it helps not to have the blank screen staring at me.

[N. Pepperell]

I pace, too - and sound out sentences in my head while I'm doing it. This is when I'm in an actual concerted writing phase. I don't do the "sit in front of a computer for x hours a day" thing - at least, not yet (we'll see what happens when I get closer to my submission deadline...).

Instead my writing tends to go in fits and starts. I start with reading, of course - I need to feel fairly immersed in the materials I'm trying to write about. This is where I can bog down - getting myself to the point that I feel comfortable enough with the material that I feel I can do justice to it. I started blogging, among other things, as a means of practicing writing without a high level of immersion in my material...

When I've read enough that the strategic point of the piece is in my head but I'm finalising last bits of reading or otherwise preparing to write, then sentences, structures, and concepts tend to percolate through at odd moments, so I'm always snatching stray bits of paper (margins of course materials, backs of envelopes, receipts, whatever comes to hand) and writing ideas out. I almost never actually use these scraps when I sit down to write - from experience, I know that the best ideas and associations tend to recur - this practice writing is basically just developing associative grooves, so that useful phrases and organisational principles will be close at hand when I need them.

Then I actually tend to spend a couple of days not being able to do anything even remotely related to the writing project. I've learned that I won't get through this phase any faster by staring at a computer, but that it actually does seem to help to do something that requires sustained... er... nonconceptual concentration - housework, jigsaw puzzles, mindless computer games, reading very "light" material - anything that lets my brain continue working on the structure of the piece in the background, but doesn't distract me into thinking about some new communicative piece.

And then I settle down for a really intense, sustained burst of writing - broken with bouts of pacing, but otherwise a fairly exclusive activity. I can complete around 3500 words in a four-hour stretch, can manage a couple of four-hour stretches in a day and, assuming the piece is long enough to require it and that the intensive writing period doesn't get interrupted by anything else, can keep up writing in this way for around a week - with progressively lessened productivity after the first couple of days - before I can't "hear" myself any more and have to take a break from writing.

I'm usually left with a piece that is organisationally and stylistically workable, and with a bucketload of citations to chase up, because references have occurred to me while writing, and I didn't want to interrupt the writing to chase them down. So I chase citations (and fix awkward sentences) for a long time after I write...

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

N.P. and Adam, I wish I could do the pacing thing, but whenever I do, my mind wanders unproductively. I do, however, tend to concentrate well while doing menial tasks; I'm Fred F'in Jameson while I do the dishes. I have numerous techniques to jumpstart my writing, however: I move from Word to Notepad to Outlook to scribbling on a yellow pad or spiral notebook or on a desk or if at a desk then on my knee, &c. I'm a firm believer that since different media activate different areas of your brain, changing the media (even if only on the computer, i.e. from moving a practiced environment in which Ctrl-I italicizes to one in which html does) makes you rethink, literally re-think, the messsage . . . or brings the fact that you don't have a message to rethink to the fore.

I too have sustained bursts of writing, but I find that if I wait for them, patiently, while doing something else, they never come. They need to be coaxed by the routine to manifest, like a jogger who runs her best after her muscles warm up and her ligaments loosen; eventually she'll tire, yes, but before doing so she'll, well, hit her stride. (I'm I-Mean-That-Metaphor-Literally-Man this afternoon.)