on writing

Writer’s Diary #05: Write every day, maybe not?

Daniel Tubb

A lot of writing advice for academics emphasizes the importance of writing every day. I am thinking, for example, of Paul J. Silvia’s [How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing] (https://www.amazon.ca/How-Write-Lot-Practical-Productive/dp/1433829738). Sometimes, I’ve tried to follow such advice—keep a journal, write daily, keep track of how much I write, forget my excuses, make the time, etc. Such an approach has its place. But a new book I’m working on takes a very different approach. As much as there’s a choice to write a lot, there’s also a choice not to write.

If a lot of advice boils down to “don’t break the chain” and write every day, make it a habit, there are some days that this makes no sense.

I’m about to go on a trip to New York City with some students to share our work. We’ll be driving all day and, frankly, I don’t think I’ll find the time to write. The approach that seems to come out of a lot of self-help literature for academic writers is to find the time, come hell or high water. Get up earlier, stay up later, or squeeze it in somehow. But sometimes this is just not possible.

For next week, I plan the opposite: a conscious decision not to write. Sometimes doing nothing is the right decision, and with moving house, holidays, some weekends, the start of term and other urgent matters, doing nothing is a better approach.

Write every day, unless it’s not wise.

Writer’s Diary #04: Getting Back on the Bus

Daniel Tubb

Yesterday, I fell off the writing bus. I didn’t write anything. After staying up too late writing the night before, I slept in. Instead of journaling and working on the book, as planned, I found myself distracted by one false digital emergency after another.

Today, without childcare, I’m planning to find time to write later in the day. But for now, I want to reflect on the idea that writing a book is an exercise in returning to the work, again and again.

A bad day, or even a terrible week, doesn’t matter. Writing exists in the here and now. If things don’t go as planned, the solution is to return to the writing.

I’ve come to see writing as similar to meditation and breath work. In some forms of meditation, the goal is to focus one’s attention on the breath. As the mind inevitably wanders after a few seconds or minutes, the task is return to the breath.

Writing follows a similar pattern. Sometimes it flows, sometimes it doesn’t. You write, then you drift. Getting upset only exacerbates the situation. The key is to come back to the words, just as one would return to breath.

Every day, I make a concerted effort to write. But, there are days, like yesterday, when it just doesn’t work out.

On those days, the solution is wait and come back the next day. Or next week. Start over, again and again.

Writer’s Diary #03: Linking Habits

Daniel Tubb

This morning, I wrote for 5 minutes while the coffee was brewing, and another 5 minutes while I drank it. I got an early start, and wrote at the typewriter. Inspired by James Clear’s Atomic Habits idea of linking a habit (coffee) with something you want to do (write this Writer’s Diary), I wrote this. The idea, which stuck in my mind when I read Clear’s book years ago, is of making things one wants to do stickier, and more likely to be done, by linking them to established habits.

The first thing I do every morning is drink a cup of coffee. Could coffee be used to create a habit of writing a journal, planning the day, posting an article, going for a run, and working on a book? It seemed ambitious, but this morning, it felt promising.

This approach to writing this diary raised a question: If I want to write more regularly, in this diary, is it better to work by hand, or to type, or to dictate? While there is no one way to write, I’ve found the methods are different. For me, writing by hand is slower, more fluid. Writing on a computer is faster, but I think and edit more as I go. Voice dictation, which I sometimes use while walking, is a good way to get an idea down, but it’s not so good to develop an idea. Each medium of writing is different, but whether I’m typing, handwriting, or dictating, I think linking to a coffee habit is promising.

This morning, I typed.

This evening, I revised.

Writer’s Diary #02: About Nutgrafs

Daniel Tubb

There is a concept in journalism known as the nutgraf, a portmanteau of the words “nutshell” and “paragraph.” It’s a paragraph in a news story, placed near the beginning, that summarizes what’s coming and explains the main point or purpose of the story.

So what does the ‘nutgraf’ of a book look like? It’s a paragraph, placed early on, that summarizes the book’s main purpose, argument, and structure.

My first book had two. The first, in the preface, was 450 words in and 162 words long.

How does a gold rush shape the lives of those who live alongside it? There is no single answer. Dwelling on the hopes and the dreams, the successes and the failures, the strategies and the tactics of those after el oro in the most impoverished region of Latin America’s second-most inequitable country tells unexpected stories of the production, accumulation, and transformation of value. I offer contradictory stories in three parts. In the first, gold is a high-value export commodity, which makes panning the core of a rural livelihood strategy and a complement to subsistence household production. In the second, the metal is embedded in a cash economy, which offers a way for miners from the Chocó and elsewhere to attempt to accumulate a little cash. In the third, gold is part of global legal and extralegal flows of capital, in which value undergoes processes of transformation, rather than creation. Together these three parts, which each consist of two chapters, create a study of gold embedded in informal and precarious shifting livelihood strategies.

The second nutgraph was in the Introduction, 450 words in, and 262 words long.

This book considers the ways Antonio and others experienced the boom times of a gold rush and the ways that this gold rush was embedded in wider legal and extralegal economies. It would be easy to fall into a narrative found in much writing about the commodification of nature and natural resource extraction, but I strive for a different complexity by weaving together stories about the lives of artisanal and small-scale miners and those who live in the communities where these miners work. Gold enables some forms of autonomous livelihood, even as it disables others. Mines create freedom and unfreedom; they are at once destructive and constructive. The conditions of extraction and the environments affected and the miners themselves matter at least as much as the mere presence of mining. This book offers insight on the contradictory ways that gold both liberates and subjugates as mines become sites of exploitation and emancipation. What results  is a twofold investigation: First, stories of lived experience drawing on the lives of a handful of miners on artisanal and small-scale gold mines. Second, stories of money laundering through gold by cocaine traffickers and speculation on mining projects by multinational corporations wherein gold facilitates other economic processes. These accounts, nevertheless, remain stories from the margins, because their setting is the poorest and most discriminated department in Colombia and because the stories focus on those who make a living through “precarious” and “informal” shifting livelihood strategies—strategies which themselves offer a certain freedom, especially when compared to the nonexistent alternatives.

Both are examples of a certain conciseness I was striving for in Shifting Livelihoods: they appeared early, were short, and explained the purpose and outline of the entire book. Each took, I suspect, weeks to write.

I am working on the introduction to my new book about Makeshift, and today I focused on the paragraph, which comes after the opening scene. As I thought about it, I thought it should be at the bottom of page two, about 350 words in, and about 300 words long. This paragraph should flow from the first scene, which I think of as an “ethnographic short,” and connect to the next. For the short, I’m on the floor, lost, trying to work out the purpose for a new writing project.

My task, for an hour this morning, was to revise a paragraph into something under 300 words that makes the point of the book and ends with a transition to the next section. I failed. While I am familiar with the formula, I ended up with 1,000 words.

This means either:

  • Makeshift doesn’t need a 300-word nutgraf;
  • Makeshift needs a 300-word nutgraf, and I need to move the 1,000 word on the purpose of the book to come later.

I’ll tackle this decision, first thing, tomorrow. I suspect the wright answer is the second.

Writer’s Diary #01: Feathering Your Nest

Daniel Tubb

Today was a good day for writing, even though I didn’t write a word for the book.

Writing a book is like running a marathon, after a marathon, I think. Having never run a marathon, I don’t know if that’s true, but I suspect it is. Why? A book is hard work. It takes a long time. In my experience, writing a book cannot be rushed. Finishing requires consistency over the long hall. To write a book is to keep coming back to the words. Not over days or weeks, but months and years. My first book, including my dissertation, took at least four years. My second, including the web project, took two. The one I am working on is in its fourth. Writing takes time, especially if, like most of us, one has to juggle many responsibilities. So, it’s important to celebrate the small victories, as one would a good training run.

Today was a day of such small victories. I feathered my nest to prepare for the hard work to come: I organized the office, arranged papers, threw away old cables, cleaned my desk, tested equipment, emptied drawers, charged batteries, swept the floor, etc. It took the morning, and by two o’clock, I was spent and anxious. Had I done anything? I had. Preparing to work is work. A big project requires physical and mental space. But, I was grumpy—I had written nothing. So, I resolved to write.

I planned the afternoon with Cal Newport’s Time Block Planner—write this diary, run, and post something. I completed the plan, made dinner, baked bread, washed dishes, wrote a letter, and dug out Virginia Woolf’s diary which I read in bed.

I didn’t work on the book project directly, and an outside observer might have thought my day was procrastination. But, it wasn’t. It was a good day of preparation to write with serious intent.

Self Help for Writers

Daniel Tubb

By Daniel Tubb, published in Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 11.1

Anthropologist, ethnographer, writer? What am I? I spent seven years as a grad student (two in coursework, two and a half in both fieldwork and writing) and two as a postdoc. Only lately have I begun to identify as a writer. When did this happen? In the morning, I think.

The sun began to peek above the sea. I felt the air caress my face, inhaled the salty twang, listened to the waves rumble on the beach, and let my fingers patter on the keyboard. I had left my hotel room to sit on the beach after a conference in the Caribbean. My mood was meditative as an elderly woman stretched in a yoga pose, and I practiced my morning writing calisthenics on my keyboard: a holdover from fieldwork. In the mornings, I wrote questions to follow up on, first drafts, reflections on process, and notes for myself. I used to think the words were most important, now I’m not so sure. Julia Cameron (The Miracle of Morning Pages, 2013) calls what I was doing morning pages: a practice of both ethnographer and self-help guru. Do I write that last part with a cringe of cynicism? Perhaps, but, might the writing be as important as the words written?

Should we think of ourselves as writers? Yes. Prosaically, because our careers depend on it: finishing the PhD; getting the tenure track or alt-academic job; keeping that job; and advancing our careers. At each step, publish or perish. Aspirationally, because writing is a craft which requires both skill and practice. Learning to write is a kind of enskillment.

My cynical self asks why academics write so much that nobody reads? Anthropologists are as guilty as anyone. Michael Taussig (The Corn Wolf, 2015) laments this ‘agribusiness writing.’ Might one explanation be our training is, in fact, in agribusiness writing? I trained as an anthropologist, academic, scholar, and researcher, but not as a writer. Graduate school involved gleaning big ideas from convoluted, sometimes serpentine and labyrinthine and even tortuous scholarly prose. I read far more about my field site and ethnographic theories and methods than I ever did about writing. I was trained to think, but never in something so prosaic as how to write. The only university course I took on composition was in Spanish. If we read accessible and readable ethnography, it was on the side. We read the high priests of writing culture, but rarely the Stephen Kings of writing culture.

I mean it. Despite this clumsy transition, we never read any Stephen King. This might be a shame, because the career of a fiction writer seems more the model for many an anthropology graduate student: underemployed precarious obscurity for most, with a good income for a few. I found Stephen King’s memoir (On Writing, 2002), with its descriptions of receiving hundreds of rejection slips while writing in a laundromat, comforting as my then failed job search grew into its third year. King’s daily writing inspired my own. His golden rule—keep reading—kept me, well, reading.

Is there one way to become a writer? Sure. To paraphrase Antony Johnston, a prolific graphic-novelist and writer: Write. How to write? Tautologically, do what works for you. How do you know what works for you? Try various techniques. I read the self-help for academic writers’ literature. Although my grad school self would have rolled his too-soon jaded eyes, here’s some of what I read.

For me, the Writing on Writing series started it all. Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron reflect on the call and response rhythms of writing before dawn. Tsing references Dorothea Brande’s (Becoming a Writer, 1934) advice on developing a habit: “Write every day, first thing.” No time to write? Paul J. Silvia (How to Write a Lot, 2007) deconstructs every such excuse. Heavens, I logged my writing for a year. After all, Anthony Trollope famously woke, wrote for three hours, and then ran the British Postal service—he was nothing if not prolific. Wendy Belcher (Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, 2009) breaks down the Herculean task of preparing an article for publication: her workbook taught me how to revise. Deirdre McCloskey, the prolific, conservative economist, recommends William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White (The Elements of Style, 1999); Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (The Reader Over Your Shoulder, 1979), who have delightfully quirky insights; Joseph M. Williams (Style (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/900697.Style), 2002), who advises writing with characters and actions, putting subjects and actions at the beginning of the sentences, and cutting down on nominalizations; and Richard A. Lanham (Revising Prose, 1987), who describes how to edit out long prepositional phrases. We all have our tick-words, which Bruce Ross-Larson (Edit Yourself, 1996) lists alongside alternatives. Roy Peter Clark (How to Write Short, 2014) casts brevity as positive; then shows how it is done.

On writing books, William Germano’s (From Dissertation to Book, 2013) meta-commentary on turning a dissertation into a book shows why a dissertation is your last piece as a student, how a book has a thread pulling everything forward, and how a dissertation is written defensively with an audience of five: your committee. A book has a wider audience. Eleanor Harman, Ian Montanges, Siobhan McMenemy, and Chris Bucci (The Thesis and the Book, 2008) edit a volume on the difference between the two genres. William Germano (Getting It Published, 2008) and Anthony Haynes (Writing Successful Academic Books, 2010) describe how to write a book, select a publisher, decide between a university and a commercial press, craft a prospectus, and write the damn thing.

Ethnography is not journalism, but Kirin Narayan (Alive in the Writing, 2012) gives practical ethnographic exercises drawn from creative non-fiction—her bibliography is a gold mine. In a workshop I attended on turning a dissertation into a book, the facilitator recommended Jack Hart’s (Storycraft (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10140746-storycraft), 2012), whose advice on structure, story, character, point of view, scenic writing, analysis, and digression gave me a new vocabulary; Ursula K. Le Guin’s (Steering the Craft, 2015) advice on rhythm and sound applies as much to fiction as ethnography; and Mary Karr (The Art of Memoir, 2015) opens memoir as another body of literature to learn from. Ethnographers don’t write fiction, but Renni Browne and Dave King (Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, 2004) are invaluable on editing, dialogue, and techniques to show, not tell.

Feeling anxious? You’re not alone. Writers writing on writing might help: Virgina Woolf (A Writer’s Diary, 1973); Lafcadio Hearn (“On Composition,” Life and Literature, 1920, p. 53), who describes re-reading notes and a technique of composition I mirrored, accidentally; and Rosa Luxembourg (The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, 2013), whose early letters are on writing. I’ve found video inspiring too: Alan MacFarlane has many, but his videos on academic creativity and on writing come to mind.

Reading about writing as a craft has been inspirational. Maybe my morning notes won’t lead me to craft the next Great Ethnography. However, in my own way I have been implementing Ray Bradbury’s advice (http://thewritepractice.com/ray-bradbury/), “Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

Cite as: Tubb. Daniel, 2017. “Self Help for Writers.” Culture: The Newsletter for the Canadian Anthropology Society, 11.1, 11.1.