I used to find writing a chore. It was hard work; I was assailed by doubts about what I was trying to say; none of the sentences ever quite fit together as I had hoped; the work always took too long.
Now all these things are still true, but I find not writing worse than writing. What happened in the meantime?
It's probably a matter of habituation. The more time you spend on an activity, the more reflexes and tricks of the hand you develop that speed the activity along. We call this “knowing what you're doing,” though if it's mainly a matter of habit, knowledge probably enters into it only trivially.
It's also a matter of investment. After a few years, you begin to think of yourself as somebody who does writing, and if you're not doing writing at the moment, you're falling out of the definition of yourself.
Habituation and investment leave the way clear for writing to be a predicate of the person, and not particularly a way of communicating with readers. That sounds monstrous. What could stop me from becoming the verbal equivalent of the man who made the world's biggest ball of string?
Even before I had the habit or became identified with the activity, I put things on paper to try to make sense of things. At times the very idea of making sense of things fails to make sense. There has to be at least a glimmer of sense for there to be something to write about, some goal toward which the sentences snake. Where sense is already made, no point in doing it over again.
The dysphoria of not being busy writing at the moment compounds with the dysphoria of either being defeated by the senselessness of things, or the dysphoria of the lack of newness in things, the sense that one has nothing to contribute and nothing to get excited about.
When you get to either of those positions, it's time for a walk. If you're too demoralized to go out for a walk, what then? Maybe write about it, to get it out of your system?
I used to find writing a chore. It was hard work; I was assailed by doubts about what I was trying to say; none of the sentences ever quite fit together as I had hoped; the work always took too long.
I would add that writing is a profoundly unnatural activity, one to which our organism is quite ill-suited — sustained mental focus on something not materially manifest (a topic or discursis), focus something that is manifest, but is so in a terribly static way (the word processor's white field), and prolonged, sedentary stillness, where only fingers and eyes move.
I thus find that in writing I vie against my body's own impulses and inclinations.
Instead of writing becoming a predicate of a person, it can perhaps be thought of as a predicate of many-persons. Some people trade 'owneship theories' of meaning for the multi-voicedness and addressivity of an utterance to understand how words mean (and how to mean with words). One can also understand practices - even solitary ones, like writing - that have developed through habituation, as similarly multi-sited, embedded in not just the person's habitus but in both them and a world, dispersed in connections. Perhaps it's not that we as individuals connect ideas and people through writing (create, contribute, make sense), but that the practice of writing enables for ideas and people to connects us (we are created, contributed, made sense of)? In that case, if ideas and people are in existence, writing could be its own best medicine.
It wouldn't be impossible that “not writing” is to be glossed as “feeling disconnected from the process of writing that is going on somehow whether I do it or somebody else does.” I imagine there were days when Homer couldn't get a hexameter out and just had to let the epic buzz along without him.
(Incidentally, I got over the hesitation chronicled in this piece, but then was kept too busy by other writing to come back to Printculture with the good news.)
Perhaps I overstated my case? If writing is truly distributed 'the epic' may not have buzzed along very well without Homer. 'Agent and cultural tool operate in tandem' (J. Wertsch). But what kind of tandem is there between writing (as a muli-sited practice) and writer? What makes dialogicality break down in that relationship? My question is, I guess, would someone have come and nagged Homer on behalf of 'the epic'? (Unless he and the epic had a falling out, or both needed some time off.)
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