Me. Condensed. A Cautionary Tale.
I, the self-professed princess of procrastination, have a firmly established love-hate relationship with writing. I've not been able to understand it, but found a bit in a book I picked up to help me with history papers. The bit in question skewers me (and the guy it's actually talking about), so I'm putting it up here as a reminder. The book is called A Short Guide to Writing about History, and was authored by Richard Marius.
"To postpone writing until one has done all the possible research on the subject can be disastrous. Many historians have fallen before the demand they put on themselves to read one more book or article before they could start writing. That was the fate of Frederick Jackson Turner, who, after propounding his "frontier thesis" of American history, was expected to write many important books. He signed several contracts with publishers without being able to produce the books. Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote the following sad words about Turner. They should be stamped on the skin of every historian tempted to put off writing:
He became haunted by the suspicion, so clear to his biographer, that he was temperamentally 'incapable of the sustained effort necessary to complete a major scholarly volume.' "I hate to write," he blurted out to a student in later years, "it is almost impossible for me to do so." but it was a self-description arrived at after long and hard experience. In 1901 when he was forty, Turner had signed contracts for nine books, not one of which was ever to be written and only a few of which were even attempted, and his life was punctuated by an endless correspondence with disappointed publishers....the carrot of income was no more effective than the stick of duty and ambition. Turner's reluctance to address himself to substantive history was so overwhelming that A. B. Hart, a martinet of an editor who presided with ruthless energy over the authors fo the American Nation series, extracted Rise of the New West out of him only by dint of an extraordinary series of nagging letters and bullying telegrams. Hart in the end counted this his supreme editorial achievement.
Over the years Turner had built up a staggering variety of psychological and mechanical devices, familiar to all observers of academia, to stand between himself and the finished task. There was, for example, a kind of perfectionism, which sent him off looking for one more curious fact or decisive bit of evidence, and impelled the elaborate rewriting of drafts that had already been written. There were the hopelessly optimistic plans for what he would do in the next two or twelve or eighteen months, whose inevitable nonfulfillment brought new lapses into paralysing despair. There was an undisciplined curiosity, an insatiable, resltess interest in everything, without a correspondingly lively determination to consummate anything; a flitting from one subject to another, a yielding to the momentary pleasures of research as a way of getting further from the discipline of writing...There was overresearch and overpreparation with the consequent inability to sort out the important from the trivial - a small mountain of notes, for example, gathered for a trifling projected children's book of 25,000 words for George Rogers Clark."
Marius concludes thusly: Turner's life helps illustrate something I said earlier in this book. Writing history is brave business. At some point you have to settle down and do it, and doing it takes a kind of courage that every historian must summon up if he or she is to do the job.
*** I think this applies to pretty much any sort of writing. At least for me it does. And with that, I'm going to nut up and quit procrastinating and dive into this Constitution paper that should have been finished three days ago. Wish me luck!
"To postpone writing until one has done all the possible research on the subject can be disastrous. Many historians have fallen before the demand they put on themselves to read one more book or article before they could start writing. That was the fate of Frederick Jackson Turner, who, after propounding his "frontier thesis" of American history, was expected to write many important books. He signed several contracts with publishers without being able to produce the books. Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote the following sad words about Turner. They should be stamped on the skin of every historian tempted to put off writing:
He became haunted by the suspicion, so clear to his biographer, that he was temperamentally 'incapable of the sustained effort necessary to complete a major scholarly volume.' "I hate to write," he blurted out to a student in later years, "it is almost impossible for me to do so." but it was a self-description arrived at after long and hard experience. In 1901 when he was forty, Turner had signed contracts for nine books, not one of which was ever to be written and only a few of which were even attempted, and his life was punctuated by an endless correspondence with disappointed publishers....the carrot of income was no more effective than the stick of duty and ambition. Turner's reluctance to address himself to substantive history was so overwhelming that A. B. Hart, a martinet of an editor who presided with ruthless energy over the authors fo the American Nation series, extracted Rise of the New West out of him only by dint of an extraordinary series of nagging letters and bullying telegrams. Hart in the end counted this his supreme editorial achievement.
Over the years Turner had built up a staggering variety of psychological and mechanical devices, familiar to all observers of academia, to stand between himself and the finished task. There was, for example, a kind of perfectionism, which sent him off looking for one more curious fact or decisive bit of evidence, and impelled the elaborate rewriting of drafts that had already been written. There were the hopelessly optimistic plans for what he would do in the next two or twelve or eighteen months, whose inevitable nonfulfillment brought new lapses into paralysing despair. There was an undisciplined curiosity, an insatiable, resltess interest in everything, without a correspondingly lively determination to consummate anything; a flitting from one subject to another, a yielding to the momentary pleasures of research as a way of getting further from the discipline of writing...There was overresearch and overpreparation with the consequent inability to sort out the important from the trivial - a small mountain of notes, for example, gathered for a trifling projected children's book of 25,000 words for George Rogers Clark."
Marius concludes thusly: Turner's life helps illustrate something I said earlier in this book. Writing history is brave business. At some point you have to settle down and do it, and doing it takes a kind of courage that every historian must summon up if he or she is to do the job.
*** I think this applies to pretty much any sort of writing. At least for me it does. And with that, I'm going to nut up and quit procrastinating and dive into this Constitution paper that should have been finished three days ago. Wish me luck!