fighting to write

The last couple weeks, I’ve been fighting with writing. I finally got comments back on my paper that I am aiming to submit for publication as soon as possible, so I was pushing myself to finish the revisions quickly. But – I’d forgotten how hard that revision process is. It’s slow, and takes a lot of mental power. Each day it was a struggle to get through the next section, and I never got nearly as much finished in a day as I wanted.

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If the pen is mightier than the sword, than I guess it makes sense that writing is hard. But what is it about revising that is particularly hard? Writing from scratch is no easy task either – but on some level, you just put words down on paper, and you have to be willing to accept that those words will be messy and disjointed, otherwise you’d never have any words at all. It’s the cleaning up and organizing of those words and ideas that takes so much focus. I guess it’s a little like reorganizing a closet. The typical process tends to be to first pull everything out, then sort through it throwing out whatever is unnecessary, and maybe group items together in a way that makes sense, and maybe find some new storage options, and finally after deciding on the best spot for everything, put it all back in the proper place. Out of that process, the easiest step is the first one of taking everything out and laying it in a mess in the room. The organizing and sorting and pruning out the unnecessary and determining the best spots to make the most important items accessible – those steps take more work.

Of course there’s also the factor of having a paper filled with complex science and math that I hadn’t really looked at for months to make this process extra challenging – it’s like having an extra messy closet filled with lots of weird, random items. In any case – getting through those revisions was hard. And I think that an effect of that was to make it extra hard to do any other types of writing – like blogging. I really wanted to do more personal writing here, as this is the place where I can do the fun stuff – but I just couldn’t seem to get any words down last week.

I also know that I think my academic training has led me to be a super critical editor. That’s what we’re taught to do, be critical of everything that we write, thinking about how the reviewers would think. This mindset definitely spills over to all of my writing. Things like simple emails sometimes take me much longer than they should, because I like to check over every word multiple times. And of course, I do it with blog posts, too. It’s crazy how long it can take me to write something here! I’m in this place of trying to figure out how to get this writing out. Starting this blog has been pretty fun for me as a new hobby – especially the times when I get some nice comments - it’s like I have an actual audience. I’ve always done personal writing but it’s basically been in private journal format, where I can just dump out words in a jumble and not worry about making things neat and tidy for public viewing. Nowadays I find myself thinking of things I want to write down, only to end up crunched for time to actually put it on paper (well, word-processor, really) and sift through it enough to the point where I feel ok about putting it here on the web for all to see. Of course the revision process is important, so it’s good for me to have a spot that’s more public for my writing, to force me to adhere to a higher standard in writing quality… there are things to be said for double-checking basic grammar/sentence structure/idea organization :)

One solution is to go back to the idea that practice makes one more efficient. So I hope to kick up my practicing a notch or two by attempting to increase my writing frequency. Hopefully this will help me figure out how to find that balance of perfection and completion, where I write something that is of decent quality but also learn not to agonize over every single word quite so much. This post should be a good test for me; I just poured out all these words after getting home, and I’m not going to let myself spend too much time obsessing over whether it’s good enough to publish. Truth is, I won’t be having scary reviewers reading this, at least I hope not! So there’s my writing fight – it’s a process, and I hope to learn how to deal with it a little better. If I keep writing, hopefully I will get there!