Why It’s Worth It to Do Irritating Things

So I’ve spent the morning working on my chapter, and I’m making good progress.  I’ve hit my “five solid pages by Thursday” goal, and I actually intend to write for a bit longer, hopefully getting to 7 pages, which will mean that I’m ahead of schedule.  When I say “five solid pages,” this doesn’t mean that they are “done” or “perfect,” and it doesn’t mean that there won’t be shifting of things as I move forward.  That said, five solid pages is five solid pages.  I feel, if you can’t tell by the repetition of the word “solid” like I’m producing concrete stuff – not just “word vomit” as CC calls it.

But so what does this have to do with doing irritating things?  Today’s post is about setting up the conditions for productivity, which for me means doing irritating things.  Look: I fantasize about writing when the mood strikes, and about letting the scholarship flow out of me like breast milk or menstrual blood or some other awful l’ecriture feminine metaphor for the writing process.  But that is decidedly not how I actually make progress on anything.  In fact, it’s a really great way for me to procrastinate, buying into metaphors like that.  So for me, the key to actually making writing progress is to set up irritating benchmarks for myself that force me to stop thinking and to start putting words on the page – words that come together in strong paragraphs and that advance an argument, so not just any old words.  And I will tell you that as I agree to the irritating things, I bitch about them constantly.  Because you know why?  They’re irritating.

The first irritating thing related to my book project this summer is that I decided I wanted to apply for an NEH summer stipend for next summer.  Because of the (dumb, dumb) process initiated by my institution to “encourage” people to apply, this meant that I needed to pause when I wanted to be doing other things during the month of July in order to figure out where I actually was in the book project, figure out how to articulate that to people outside of my field, blah blah blah irritation,etc.  So anyway, I found out today that I’m going to be one of the two people nominated by my institution, which means that I have a) greater motivation to knock out this chapter draft and b) that I’ll need to polish up a full-on proposal for the NEH stipend, which will force me further to refine my project and to continue making progress on it so that the things that I write won’t all be lies.  (I have no illusions about the likelihood of actually getting the NEH funding, but in many respects the point isn’t getting funded or not: it’s that I need the irritating thing in order to spur me on to ever greater heights of uncompensated achievement.)

The second irritating thing is that I agreed to be “on” for Writing Group in August.  This is irritating for lots of reasons, not least that I sort of hate sharing my work when it’s in progress, and also that mostly in writing group the trend has been to use the group more to talk through ideas, so I feel like kind of a goober for being like “hey, here’s 50 unwieldy pages!  In your FACE!”  (Basically, I feel like that’s sort of a dick move, even though I know it’s what the group is supposed to be for.  It’s kind of like those people in grad school who are all “Oh, I’ve had a draft of my seminar paper done since week 8 and now I’m just focusing on crafting really strong sentences.”  We all hate those people, right?  I hate those people.  So even though I kind of am those people, usually I feel that it’s best to err on the side of not ever mentioning that I am those people.  But that’s not really cool in the context of the writing group, as part of the point is to mentor through example or something, so if I hide the way I really work, how is that being a good faith member of the group?  It’s not.  On the other hand, revealing how I really work is irritating both to myself, and, I fear, to others.)

But so anyway, both of these things are irritating, and likely they won’t have many, if any, concrete results, except they mean that I’m writing.  They mean that I’m not dithering.  I’m not Not Writing.  And what’s good about that, about not Not Writing, is that it makes me Keep Writing, which is actually the opposite of Not Writing, not just Writing, if that makes any sense outside of my head, which I hope it does.

I don’t know that irritating things motivate other people, actually.  I think for some people, irritating things actually produce the opposite effect.  But for me, the irritating things are worth it.  They are a low stakes incentive to Keep Writing.  Which, for me, is exactly what I need.