A writing diary (#1)

Starting my first dissertation chapter

Joan Didion by Henry Clarke, 1972. To be clear, I am NOT comparing myself to Didion (though I have been wearing a black poncho lately). I just needed an interesting image.

Wednesday, November 13

I began today—I am thrilled! I can write! After months of reading to prepare for this moment, I dove in and the water was warm! There is such a euphoria to beginnings, to entries, to opening doors and sashaying into new rooms!

In the evening, I saw Alexis Pauline Gumbs speak about her new biography of Audre Lorde (Survival Is a Promise). When she spoke of the period in which she wrote this book, she described herself as having been “in the ceremony of writing.” I will sit with this phrase and turn it over on my tongue. I’m not ready to swallow it yet but I like the taste.

Tuesday, November 19

Is the beginning too clunky? Have I zoomed too far out and am I digging wildly to get to the meat of the argument quickly enough? How do I historicize this? Do I need to historicize this?

Write it through. Write it through. Overhaul later. Later!

Wednesday, November 20

No, I was right… this intro is overwrought and distracted—more detailed about the things I won’t be deepening than the ones I actually have to lay the groundwork for. I restructure. I do this by hand in a notebook. I do my best outlining—always—by hand. I also transcribe my notes from Lauren Berlant’s last book and find quotations that I can use as a number of different anchors. Maybe Berlant will be my main interlocutor, or at least I might start with one of their quotations…

Saturday, November 23

abby

has pointed me in the direction of an Adrienne Rich poem from 1972 called “Rape.” It knits together both sexual violence and police violence, which are the main problems I will focus on in chapters one and two. I want to use Rich—I can’t write about 70s and 80s American feminist literature without her—but where to put this now!? As an anecdote at the beginning, or at the end? Or somewhere else? New ideas are emerging but they are writhing like newborn puppies and I can’t catch them all.

Friday, December 6

I woke up feeling low this morning, but then remembered that I had earmarked the day for writing and nothing else. This is the first day of sustained writing on my calendar this entire semester (which will shortly be over). I write all morning and finally have a shape that I like, including an intro that arranges my primary questions and interventions in a logical, coherent way.

And then it’s gone. All of it.

I make lunch and when I sit down at my desk again, Microsoft Word has glitched and the file is corrupted. It’s also nowhere to be found anywhere in my Cloud storage or on my hard drive. This has never happened to me before. I spend two hours troubleshooting, but it’s no use. I have to start over, completely from scratch.

I feel betrayed by the one thing I am good at right now. As I re-write, I am tempted to try and conjure up the lost sentences but doing so is more painful because I can’t get it exactly the same. I have to pretend it never happened and make this draft its own. Ugh. This sucks. I feel so blue.

By 8:30pm, I have re-written what was lost and then some. I knew I would feel badly going to bed without achieving my goal of a complete draft of the intro to the chapter. I feel relieved and proud that despite doing so much rewriting, I’ve still ended up with 1500 fresh, usable, new words. This is the longest sustained chunk of text that I have managed to eek out so far.

Wednesday, December 18

This is day 4 of sustained, focused writing time, and I am experiencing the high of endurance. I restructured by hand in my notebook last week—the chapter is now built around stages in the argument, braiding together texts, rather than separating them as a lot of dissertation chapters I’ve seen tend to do. This is better. Writing by hand also forced me to be succinct about what the main arguments of each paragraph will be. It taught me what historical and theoretical digressions are worth digging up and which I can skip past. Now I’m filling out each bullet point into a paragraph, and I am almost through the introduction and setting the theoretical stage. I am proud and happy. Writing is a miracle.

Wednesday, January 15

I have forgotten that I was keeping this writing diary. Oh, well. December writing ended strong. January was a harder push—I had to teach the new puppy to rest on her bed under the table while I work. She learned quickly, and I love hearing her miraculous little breaths, seeing her paws twitch, looking at the doughnut shapes she makes with her tiny growing body. But I am so distracted. And when I went back to the text to find the passages I want to close-read, I realized that they were so different from how I remembered them. I had been building up to a whole argument about Del’s stillness in the fight with her boyfriend, Garnet, at the end of Lives of Girls and Women, and have only just realized that it never says she remains still—instead, she is thrashing and fighting him like hell. Where did I get this other image from? What am I going to do with it? The whole structure needs to change again. I am worried that the chapter is becoming a different project, one not closely related enough to the arc of the dissertation as a whole.

Tuesday, January 21

I’ve changed stillness to “refusal” and used this more capacious term to encompass a non-prescriptive repertoire of movements that evoke opacity and legibility, including but not limited to the unmoving body. Del’s fight with Garnet, in other words, can stay, albeit with a few new rhetorical pivots to justify the connection to 70s feminist endurance art (Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, etc.). I’m nearing the end of the draft and feeling accomplished, especially considering how late I started writing.

One of the big lessons: don’t over-read. I was told this before I started and thought “but there is so much I have to know!” And that is true, but I only used a fraction of it, even with my love of citations and secondary voices. This is something that I have to work on: foregrounding my own voice and not letting sources speak for me just because I like them. To practice, I’ve canvassed some book chapters by scholars who I think are both skilled writers and who work with diverse theoretical archives, creating a document with all of the turns of phrase they use to put themselves in conversation with other voices. Amber Musser’s chapter on Carrie Mae Weems, for instance, has some really elegant pivots to make theorists ranging from Moten to Barthes to Spillers and Irigaray work for her reading of Weems’ photographs. Of course, I’m never copying these verbatim, but I’m looking at how they work and trying to internalize it.

Update: As of 11:55am, this draft is written through. I have a few “TK” moments left in that I have to go back to, but I have it all down—I can’t believe it! This is a dissertation chapter (I hope!) Writing is sometimes so magical and sometimes mundane. What a weird and wonderful job I have.

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What I’m Reading:

• The White Dress by Nathalie Leger (thank you, Winnie)

• Dog Songs by Mary Oliver

• What the Body Cost by Jane Blocker

What I’m Watching:

• Shrinking

• Thinking of watching Sybil on Mubi soon