Writing (Group) Wednesday

A full year of a faculty writing group was among the most productive experiences in my 20 years on UND’s campus. It is only recently that I’ve become fully aware of how solitary writing is as work. The chance to chat weekly about writing as writing did wonders for making the process seem less isolated and isolating.

More than that, hearing how my colleagues made time, space, and energy for writing in what is turning out to be a chaotic year. In my case, simply setting aside time for the writing group was a huge boon to my writing discipline. If my blog encouraged me to keep reading and thinking, the writing group encouraged me to keep writing when it would have been easy for me to press pause on my various commitments.

My take-aways from the writing group are really straight forward.

First, I learned that writing rewards strategies more than gimmicks. I tried this year to get into using a paper notebook and as much as I enjoyed it, I only managed about 60 or 70 entries before my discipline ran out and I lost interest in the process. In the end, this was too much of a gimmick for me. It did not move me closer to any discernible goal.

My colleagues in the writing group all articulated strategies from the bewilderingly simple (find a consistent time to write) to the complex and emotional (write when you feel the urge to write).

Second, my colleagues reminded me just how busy academic life can be. They too juggled grading, conferences, grant writing, administrative responsibilities, and other forms of job related business. I often get frustrated that my job gets in the way of my job and that frustration can sometimes lead to the kind of self recrimination that does not lead to strategically sound approaches to writing. This is especially the case when self recriminations intersect with the pervasive suggestion both within and outside the academy that faculty are lazy and entitled.

The writing group helped me avoid what I sometimes call “the flail” where I throw tons of energy at writing to feel like I’m doing SOMETHING, but I do this in such an undisciplined way that it doesn’t really produce sustainable results. 

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the writing group has given me time to think about how writing practice shapes the kind of arguments that we make. I’m becoming more and more interested in the relationship between where, when, and how we write and the kind of knowledge that we create. As I’ve blogged about before, I’ve become preoccupied with the idea of fragments and how our writing practice produces fragments and our works then become exercises in categorizing and reconciling these fragments.

Thinking about fragments coincides with some of my research interests in the archaeology of the contemporary world. Excavating the fragmented reality of every day existence suggests that the fragments that we create while writing might not be a problem of practice that seeks some kind of strategic resolution, but an authentic feature of the modern world that we often seek to describe.