It should come as no surprise that I spend a fair bit of time and energy writing. Erratically as this blog updates, it does update, and I am not exactly noted for doing a lot of audio or video work. Too, it is not the only blog that I maintain; I run one in support of my teaching, and I have (comparatively) recently taken to working on another one entirely. While it is admittedly the case that neither updates particularly quickly, they, too, update, and they, too, are creations of text.
So, too, is the journal I have maintained since the end of my undergraduate career. I had made abortive efforts to write one a few times in the past, but I had never been able to summon the discipline to actually carry out the task of putting pen to paper on what I admittedly still struggle to make a daily basis. The years have seen my entries increase in length and heft, and while I do not anymore usually devote myself to a simple record of the day's events, I still do much to note what happens and how I feel about it.
In addition, I do still work on papers. The fact that I am more or less done with formal education, having earned a terminal degree in my chosen field and having no plans at this time to try to seek another, does not mean that I am done with papers. I have constructed much of my identity around being a productive scholar; years of graduate school tend to have that effect. And while it may not be the case that terribly much of my writing has made it into print (or promises to; I have an article forthcoming), much of the writing that I do for my blogs is of a scholarly nature, and I do a fair bit of conference work each year. Although I am presenting fewer papers, I am proposing and organizing sessions more frequently, and doing so (especially the latter) takes many words on many pages. Really, it is like writing short papers, and so even when I am not "writing," I am writing.
Similar is the editorial work that I have been doing recently. I am a reviewer and a member of the editorial board for the nascent journal Humanities Directory (and we could use submissions!), and going over articles requires no small amount of writing. For example, I worked through a series of drafts of an article for the journal, and each of my sets of comments consisted of several hundred words. One topped a thousand. Admittedly, the writing was far less intensive than is needed to generate an article, but it was still writing. I still had to be able to identify what I saw, recommend changes, and explain why those changes were the kind that ought to be made--and in text rather than in voice or image.
And then there is grading. I do not teach the kind of thing that can be reduced to a multiple-choice exam. I do not even teach the kind of thing that can be assessed through nothing more than a simple formula or template. I teach writing, and writing can be good in many ways, such that a single pattern cannot account for them all. Instead, as I assess the writing submitted to me, I write in response to it, noting what I find works poorly and what works well, and explaining both how it works as I find it and how it can be improved. I have yet to have happen, as has happened to me, that there is more text on the page from the instructor than from the student, but I very much leave my marks on the papers I receive--and they do not stop at A or B or F.
Of course, I cannot grade what I do not assign, and those assignments oblige me to generate written materials. It is true, admittedly, that when I teach a course across semesters, I retain much of the earlier assignment forms, and so my writing tasks are lessened. But I adjust each term, often several times, and I am occasionally assigned to teach entirely new courses. Further, because I seek to model the behavior I expect to see from my students, I write responses to the prompts I assign. Again, I am sometimes able to recycle them from term to term. I also sometimes use writing I have done in other circumstances but which illustrates what I want the students to do. But there is still the need to generate writing, to produce fresh examples so that the students have an increasing body of work from which hopefully to draw inspiration for and understanding of the assigned tasks, a need that I work to meet each term and for each class. So I end up writing a damned lot for many reasons.
Even so, there are many times I find myself struggling to get words onto the page. Despite the practice I get in doing so, I have difficulties writing. It is not easy, as some well know, to generate content. I have to take in much to be able to produce much, and there is only so much of either that doing the other will allow; it is quite the challenge to read while writing, or to write while reading. And even though I read much (subscribing to several journals in addition to reading online and in other venues), there has to be time for the ideas to percolate and align themselves in my mind before they can productively emerge into the part of my mind that I can directly perceive, from whence I develop them into a form that may or may not be worth the attentions of others.
It is, frankly, a damned lot of work. And I know that it is not the kind of work that is commonly called work. I know that there will be some who read this who scoff at my assertion that writing is exhausting and demanding. After all, to write, a writer sits with a pen in hand or a keyboard at fingertips, rather than sweating in the humid heat of the New York City summer or stopping sweating in the kindly Texas Hill Country August sunlight. A writer traces lines or presses buttons rather than carrying weight up stairs and hills or hammering nails into boards so that they may stand independently.
To those people I say several things. The first is that it requires experience in the world to be able to write of it. Did not Melville serve aboard ship before writing of shipboard life? Did not Poe suffer loss before penning odes to loss? Did not Bradstreet see the hardships of new colonies before bespeaking them in page-bound verse? Did not Twain work in the world before commenting upon it? Did not Wheatley know of slavery? (Is it not obvious that I have been teaching American literature?) What can be written without experience? For even if a thing may be discussed which had not been endured by the one who discusses it, still that one must have some embodied understanding of something at least tangentially similar to be able to discuss it in a way that has any hope of being convincing.
To them I say also that I have done such things as dig ditches in the lush and fertile soil of the Texas Hill Country while the cool and kindly August sun smote me about the head and shoulders. I have put pipes together and pulled wires through them so that the darkness of the night could be pushed back in homes mine and others'. I have fought in the dank and humid heat of the New York City summers. It is why I use them as the examples of physical work. And I still struggle as much to do what I do with pen and keyboard as I have done with hammer in hand. I think I am not the only one--and I think that it is far easier for me to do such work than it is likely to be for those who inveigh against my speaking of "challenge" to do the work that I do.
But they are like to know that. For from how many is heard the refrain that "I'm no good at English" or words so similar as to make no difference? And what else is the study of English but the study of writing--a study embodied in the very thing being studied. Writing can hardly be studied save in writing, and many are the people who say that they cannot write well. For them to then say that what I do, writing in abundance and striving ever to do yet more of it, is not work and is not difficult is, frankly, a fucking load of shit.
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