Writing Again

My Muse only speaks in bursts.

I researched and wrote my D.Phil. in 18 months (and got married in the middle). It took two and half years of frustration, despair, and hints from my supervisor before I realized that the only way out was to start writing, even though I had nothing to say. So I set myself the goal of writing two double-spaced pages every weekday. I chose that goal because I found it was consistently manageable. The resulting sense of moving forward, even at a snail's pace, made a huge psychological difference. Baby steps to the elevator... And strangely, I found that as I wrote, I acquired things to say. Research questions began to form, arguments took shape, I started to see the gaps in the existing literature. Within a four months, I had gone from a blank page to a full chapter and an outline for the entire thesis, more than I could show from years of note-taking in the library.

After a month of doing other stuff, I'm writing again, trying to finish a paper for journal submission by the end of September. Two pages a day. Some days it's agony. The words just won't come, my head aches, I can't seem to focus. Some days it's just a bit of a slog -- a chore I have to get through before moving on to more interesting things. But then there are the other days.

Occasionally when I'm writing, I get a moment of sudden clarity, a fleeting inspiration for how to express something. Sometimes it's a precise arrangement of words, but more often it's just a raw idea which I have to capture in rough language before it disappears. When the Muse speaks, I must type. I stop compulsively checking my e-mail, looking up references, and fidgeting. If I allow my attention to wander, even for a moment, the vision disappears, and I lose what I was trying to capture, probably for good.

Today was one of those days. I'd slogged for three hours and barely managed a single page, when suddenly the book I was reading sparked a new train of thought and I chased after it, feverishly churning out 3 pages in about half an hour.

At times like that, I have this desperate feeling of not being able to type fast enough. It's a bit like running for the Tube when the train is just about to leave, but knowing that the doors won't spring open if I don't quite make it. Once the inspiration is gone, there's no regaining it. I charge down the page, leaving a wreckage of dangling quotations, question-marked references, and mangled spellings in my wake. Once I've captured the idea in terms intelligible at least to me, I can go back and clean up the mess.

When it's all over, I'm exhausted -- mental exhaustion that spills over into physical. But it's not the kind of tiredness I can sleep off, at least not right away. The best way for me to unwind after a frenetic writing burst is to read for fun. I think I need to re-balance my brain by taking in enough words to make up for all those I've just poured out. When I got home today, I had to collapse on the sofa and read 50 pages of Dracula before I could even face the prospect of fixing dinner. Thankfully there were leftovers on hand. Then Anthony made me popcorn and a foot bath and let me snuggle up next to him two episodes of The West Wing.

On days like this, I love my work.