Who here wants to be able to write their complex ideas clearly and perfectly the first time they sit down to paper/a keyboard? *everyone in room raises hand* *I raise my hand*
I hate to tell you this, but that’s not possible. If you’re a writer or artist, you probably already know this. But even me, someone surrounded by published academics who are transparent about how writing involves (months/years of) revision and drafting, even I still fall prey to the idea that I can just poof write something fabulous immediately.
Of course, the pressure of having to finish a dissertation by a deadline doesn’t help. But there’s something bigger at play here. Graduate school, and the writing that I constantly do here, has taught me an important lesson: patience. I have learned, and often have to relearn, that writing is a practice. Like yoga or self-love, writing is something that you do by doing it over and over again. It is not something that you arrive at or pluck, perfectly packaged, from your back pocket.
In spite of knowing this, I frequently demand that my finished written product appear. So often, I have to write (pick one! Your choice!)
-An article up against a deadline
-A cover letter
-A fellowship proposal
-A section of a dissertation chapter
And just as often, I start the project thinking I can really conquer the beast, I’ll get this one in the bag right away this time. I feel defeated when, at the end of a five-hour writing period, I’m more confused than I was at the beginning.
Day two: Rinse and repeat. I walk into the library, sit at my carrel, arrange my notebook, mug, computer, and pens just so. And I dive. Deep. Deep into the tangle of complex ideas that I have to sort out. I could say anything in the world. The possibilities are overwhelming! Of all the infinite things one could write about, one has to settle on an actual argument, or a point, or a story, or a perspective. One has to write a thing. And one has to make it clear, accessible, seamless. Once again, I spend hours writing, brainstorming, listing, outlining, researching. The end of the day comes and I am boggled, tired, nowhere near completion.
This goes on for weeks. If I’m in a bad place, anxiety sets in: I don’t actually know what I want to say. Just start from scratch. I’m not supposed to be doing this. I should have been a nutritionist yoga teacher. I should be writing fiction instead.
But when I’m lucky, my tender, wise side corals my nervous intellect and I realize that this is how it works. Writing, for me at least, takes a long time. It takes an intimate commitment to daily work. It takes faith in my own knowledge, as well as an acceptance of the time required for my knowledge to crystallize` into words intelligible by those outside of my (gnarled, sweet, crazy) head.
Patience. Going into the writing practice every day, knowing that I am a witness to unfurling, to a thing that has its own calendar.
Natalie Goldberg ponders this in Writing Down the Bones; she brilliantly tells us about the meditative quality of a lifelong writing practice.
in The Cancer Journals, Sister Outsider, and in much of her poetry, Audre Lorde talks about this. She insists on the generative, healing property of a writing practice, as well as the radical political act of being a minoritized body who writes herself into visibility.
Gloria Anzaldua addresses the necessity of never stopping writing. She speaks in tongues and owns the tongue as a political life choice in a settler colonial world that seeks to eradicate her indigenous queer Chicanx life.
Octavia Butler says in an interview that she simply couldn’t stop writing, even though initially nobody would look at, never mind publish, her work. For years. Yet she came back to her work. Every time.
Patience. Perseverance. Nurturing myself by showing up to write every day.
If you rearrange the letters of ‘practice’ and add a few consonants, you get ‘patience.‘ Writing and patience.