Sunday, August 17, 2014

In a fight to the death, my odds may not be good

Last week I finally got The Article of Eternal Return off my desk and back to the journal that had it most recently. That means that pretty much the only writing I got done this summer was an R&R of an essay that was already pretty polished--and perhaps 2/3 of which I left intact. I did some reorganization and made some major changes to the conceptual framework, but nothing that should have taken me two months.

Worse, I did nothing but work on that essay. I mean, sure: I went to the gym, and I ate and I slept and I faffed around on the internet. Maybe once a week I saw a friend or went to a movie. But I let the yard turn into a jungle and I put off errands for weeks at a time (taking 60 minutes to go to Target was way too much of a time commitment!); even running a load of laundry felt like an imposition.

There are always binge weeks here and there in the life of a project where I eat, drink, and dream whatever I'm working on--but usually they're pleasurable periods of mania when everything seems to be going right and all I want to be doing is writing. It doesn't feel grindingly painful. And it doesn't last for six weeks straight.

This tells me it was probably a mistake. Not the actual work I did, but my decision to gut it out until it was done. I'm in a dark psychological space with this piece, and probably the sane thing would have been to take a break, set it aside, and work on something I felt invigorated by and that might give me some renewed confidence. (In other words: what my advisor made me do with my first chapter.) But I don't know how to do that. I only know how to bite down hard, hold on, and not let go.


Comradde PhysioProffe said...

Sometimes you do just need to gut it out.

Flavia said...


Yeah, I agree--especially when there's a hard external deadline! But that wasn't the case here, and I think I probably wasn't working very efficiently, because my head wasn't in the right place.

It's hard to know, though--and after working on this piece for so long (and presenting on it so many times and getting such consistently positive feedback), it didn't feel like something that would benefit from just simmering on the back burner for 6-12 mos.

Historiann said...

Go watch a dumbass movie just to make yourself laugh. Tammy was about the right amount of stupid for me--maybe it would work for you? (Failing that, why not Anchorman, or Old School, or another colossally stupid Will Farrell movie?)