Writing as Muscle

Rebecca Foote recently invited me to a part of an ACH panel on publishing in digital humanities along with Jojo Karlin and Nat McGartland. You can find other posts related to that conversation here.

During the recent ACH panel on DH publishing, Jojo Karlin commented on the sheer quantity of public writing that the Scholars’ Lab puts out into the world. In the moment, I flippantly referred to that volume as a kind of sickness that we couldn’t turn off. But I followed up with a more serious answer: as I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been making a concerted effort to write every day lately as a response to the cataclysmic political times that we live in. The real truth is that I believe it would become much harder for me to write if I were to slow down. Sharing things publicly is really an accountability mechanism more than anything else, a way to force myself to keep writing.

There’s an old saying among music teachers that practicing for one hour daily is more useful than practicing for seven hours once a week. There are a few thoughts behind this. For one, you actually damage your muscles beyond a productive state if you work yourself to the point of exhaustion. By contrast, the same amount of time measured out equally across a week yields a consistent and healthy amount of stress on your muscles, recovery time, and rest to build up the neural pathways in your brain that you ultimately want to get from practicing. The once weekly seven-hour approach is also less likely to yield useful practice time. With a big stretch of time like that you will, at best, need breaks. At worst, you will find yourself distracted, pick up your cell phone, or your brain will wander. It’s difficult to imagine what you would practice for seven hours in a row, let alone the degree of concentration that would be required to sustain it. You’ll be better at deliberate, intentional practice every day.

I’ve been approaching writing the same way. I’ll share a follow-up post about some different tools and tactics I use to keep the pace, but the underlying idea behind all this is that writing is a muscle, a skill that you can practice. If you do it every day, writing ultimately becomes easier whenever you sit down to do it. The approach is akin to what Twyla Tharp calls “the creative habit,” and I have had to get creative to keep it going. Somedays I will have a substantial chunk of time, but those days are rare luxuries. It’s more common for me to be scrambling to find a way to fit writing in however I can. Even five minutes at the desk matters—it’s a way to shake off the rust. I only have ten minutes while walking? I can spend it dictating into my phone. Two minutes before a meeting waiting for others to arrive? I can make some quick notes.

Therein lies the real secret: the daily approach is a way to save time in the long run. I learn how to write regardless of whether inspiration is striking. Since starting this practice, my voice is much easier to find when sitting down to write. The editorial process feels easier to navigate; I’m much less given to endless tinkering. I need writing to be as natural and easy as possible, and the daily practice is essential for that. Sitting down to a blank page is always frightening. It would be immeasurably scarier if I weren’t facing it down everyday.

In short, I don’t write every day because I have oceans of time. I write every day because I don’t have time to waste.