I need to write. I need to write. I need to write.

I'm at that point in the semester, and at that point in a project, when I know I need to start writing. But everytime I catch some free time, when I know I should begin, I read another article. I go to the library and check out another book I won't read till the summer. I take more time than usual to grade. I sign up for another reading group, volunteer to help with another conference, visit a professor in their office hours to talk about an old project or ideas for a project that is not this one, the one that prevents me from sleeping, that terrifies me most in its unborn form.

I help another graduate student with their job application, article for publication, sometimes even with their paper for the same seminar I am not yet working on my own paper for. Anything. Anything. These things enable me to not write, and this is essential.

In a pedagogy exercise recently I had to respond to the question "what enables you to write?" Hidden under the use of "enable" in this question I suspect is a discourse about access and sponsorship, affected by class, race, ethnicity, gender, geography, various institutions of power, etc. I would like to answer this question with a question: "no, really, what enables one to write and where can I get some??"

That said, I suppose I have a "real" answer.

The short version of what enables me to write: two cigarettes and a cup of coffee.

The upshot of the long version of what enables me to write: the repression of self-hatred.

I hardly expect that this is an individual experience. Insecurity, vulnerability, and pain hold chief residence on the continuum of feelings that writing manages to distill in me. Even as the amount of pleasure I get from writing is proportionate (enough) to keep me producing, that pleasure can never be annexed away from the anxiety.

Anecdotal moments along the timeline of my childhood and intellectual development, my class background (below the poverty line most years I was growing up), my race (white), my gender (female)--all of these components mean, all of them matter. All of them lead somehow to an overdetermined position I inhabit and write from. Yet when I sit down to write, none of the constituent parts of my backstory, on a conscious level anyway, seem to hurt or help. The writing process, for me, is so deeply personal that its pain and pleasure solicit a self that, while constituted by any number of life events or cultural factors, feels remote from the positive architecture or negative detritus of my past.

Writing is an intimate and frighteningly non-intimate process; I am alone and yet under surveillance. A future surveillance: every moment I am writing I am aware of the other eyes my writing is or will be for.

The phantom audience produces one of the uncanny effects of writing, the schizophrenic feeling I get from taking the position of a scholar yields another. Underneath my projected avatar of a very pedantic looking (Freudian, actually, for whatever reason) manwoman with a pipe (I've never smoked a pipe), I know that it is actually me, whoever that is, producing, owning and offering the words I am writing, and that concept is rather frightening.

All that said about writing being personal and terrorizing, there are a series of rules and tricks that enable me to write against this (seemingly) monumental injunction. To name just a few:

Rules: I have a research or pre-writing threshold I have to cross before I can begin to write the real body of the paper. I have to at least start my document in Appleworks. I usually have to rearrange a little furniture. Coffee and cigarettes have already been mentioned.

Tricks: When I pause in writing for a moment or a day, I leave the sentence I’m working on unfinished, or force myself to write one more half-sentence past my breaking point so that when I return I have a place to start. I write myself notes in the third person (a trick which I'm pretty sure I stole from E Hayot) that direct the work I will take up next, or I call attention to the things I have missed or skipped or run away from. Frequently the self-hatred manifests here, as I often remind myself in crude notes to myself how terrible my verb range is.

While there is this darker side of the writing process, at least in my experience, the way in which writing produces these selves that, like in a hall of mirrors, alternately stand in for and sometimes end up being the actual me (if such a thing can be said), makes it the most valuable and desirable activity that I know of. Writing and revising, I am aware of myself as a text that gets rewritten, where the conflicts do not resolve into singularity but rather produce a polyvocality that is itself not a resolution.