On starting papers, or: how I got over professional despair and learned to love philosophy again

This is the first instalment of our new series How Philosophers Write, a series aimed at demystifying the writing process of how we write publishable works. It is not meant to be universal advice, but rather meant as a series of very personal accounts. Through these accounts, we hope that readers (graduate students, but also more experienced philosophers) will learn something through the exemplars they see. As Confucius says (Analects 7:22), " When three men are walking together, there is one who can be my teacher. I pick out people's good and follow it. When I see their bad points, I correct them in myself."

We hope to discuss such topics as writer's block, finding new topics, publishing on topics that are not fashionable, overcoming the psychological obstacles of revise and resubmit, picking up a project again you left a long time ago. Please contact Helen De Cruz ([email protected]) if you want to write a contribution.

Our first piece is written by Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University. 

This is a very personal story about how I got over an extraordinary degree of academic writer’s block. None of the particulars may apply to you. If there’s a general lesson, maybe it’s that your writing process might turn out to be really weird, and really personal, and you may need to go on a long and painful voyage of self-examination and tailoring your process before you can write. (Or maybe not. Maybe this is all easy for you.)

I had a devastating, decade-long case of philosophical writer’s block, which I got over only fairly recently. To give you a sense of how big a change it was: during all of my graduate school years, I wrote one paper. During my first three years as an assistant professor, I wrote… one more paper. And then I figured out some stuff. And since then I’ve been happily writing about four papers a year. And I wrote a book, too. And most importantly of all: I actually like what I’m writing, now.The first things I wrote felt like ripping out my own teeth and bones, so that I could mash myself into a box labelled “Professional Philosopher”.

The most important things I figured out — and this will sound trite as shit — is that I needed to actually be excited about the thing I was writing. I needed to love it, to look forward to seeing how it would turn out. This sounds obvious, but it was easy for me to lose grip of, as I became professionalized into the discipline.

The most important thing in this whole internal drama, for me, was starting to pick out topics out of genuine interest, and not just throwing myself at the closest available intellectual epicycle. And it’s not just conscious career-ism that got in the way. It’s actually easier to think in epicycles. When the literature is well-established, a tidy little move is something you can hang onto. It survives in the brain. Those exciting, weird, new ideas, on the other hand — they’re inchoate and runny. And if you don’t tend to them carefully, they’ll get trampled underneath the march of the easier-to-articulate.

So basically, I came out of grad school drowning in papers I thought I had to write, all of which bored the crap out of me. At some point, I was basically severely depressed and on the edge of leaving philosophy. I was facing down a couple of paper drafts that I’d been laboring under for, like, two years, which I hated passionately, and every inch of which bored me stiff, but which I was somehow convinced that I absolutely had to see through. Because I had an expertise, and there was a literature, and here was a move that could get published. I was trapped.

In this dark moment, I confessed all this despair to a mentor. That mentor took a look at me, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Thi: life’s too short to write boring philosophy.” And I thought, “My god, yes.” I thought: in the drive to publish and survive, I’d forgotten about the thread of excitement that drew me here in the first place. And then I burned those old drafts. (Literally. In a fire.)

So I have now adopted three rules, which have basically saved my philosophical soul. These are Thi’s Totally Personal Criteria for whether a paper’s worth writing or not.

1. The basic idea of the paper should be sufficiently interesting to make me laugh with delight.
2. The argument of the paper should be elegant.
3. The idea of the paper might actually help people in, like, the real world

If a paper idea doesn’t meet at least one of those three, it goes in the trash immediately. And papers should probably meet at least two of these, before I’ll really put effort into it.

I think of this as a kind of mental weeding. The easier, duller epicycle ideas, that fit tidily with the literature, are louder and clearer. It’s so much easier to imagine what that paper will be like, and to start writing it, and to become trapped in its coils. And those kinds of ideas crowd out the really interesting stuff. So you have to aggressively weed them out.

And that brings me to my second bit of self-discovery: I needed to start writing sooner, to get down an ugly and sloppy first draft while the idea was live in my brain, before it got overwhelmed in the morass of literature review, qualifications, and worries. I needed to capture a whisper of the exciting idea, before I starting letting the rest of philosophy shout over it.

So here’s what it looks like for me, in process. If I have an interesting idea, I’ll throw it into a notebook. A lot of times, this happens when I’m at a conference. (Let’s be totally honest: a lot of the time, it happens at the bar after the conference, in some kind of drunk heated conversation with a bunch of other philosophers.) The barrier for taking a note here is really low. I end up writing down a lot of really, really stupid ideas. After a conference, I’ll probably have pages and pages of notebook of almost illegible scrawl, beer-stained, sauce-splattered scrawl.

It’s so easy for these little seeds to slip from your mind. Back before my journey of self-realization or whatever you want to call it, while I was still trudging through my unbearably boring projects, sometimes I’d go read through my notebooks and trip of these exciting ideas that I’d forgotten about, that had slipped from me almost the moment I wrote them down. The whole point is not to forget that stuff.

So now, immediately - like on the plane ride home - I transcribe all of this scrawl, and expand it, onto my computer. Then, the next working day, I try to give every idea at least a little bit of a chance. I’ll sit and give it some serious thought and try to sketch a little outline of what an argument might look like. I mean, tiny: like four or five lines. Sometimes I end up with twenty or thirty of these after a conference.

And then I’ll go back to my normal working life. Some of these outlines will just die. But others will cling to the back of my mind. As long as they’ve been given that first little bit of love and care, they’ll start to gather more energy. I’ll think of some weird extra addition in the middle of doing something else, and throw it into my document file. After a week or two, a few of the outlines will have gathered some steam. They’ll also be these great messes of disorganized extra notes and thoughts. I will now re-write those, and turn them into even bigger outlines.

By this point, I might have a couple of ideas, that are still live. Now I apply my criteria. Is it exciting? Is it interesting? Could it be useful? And if it isn’t, I kill it. But if it is, I start researching and reading.

I think what really changed for me is: I started to trust my sense of boredom. I let it weed out the easier-to-write papers, the straightforward projects. (Also: the hardest thing I ever did was to throw away 15,000 words of my book manuscript, because I realized it was boring as hell. But the book is so much better for it.)

Another crucial part here for me is: in the old days, I would read and read first, everything I could get my hands on a topic, for years, without writing a thing. I’d only sit down to write once my brain was stuffed to the brim with morass. It turns out, I can’t work that way. If I read too much, without first having captured the original live thread, the reading will drown the thread. If I read too much first, then when I do turn to write, all I can ever output is horrific boring summaries of the literature, with tiny annotations. My own grip on my ideas is too weak. I have to get down the idea first.

Around this first stage, I also start a separate stream of thought about how to sell this idea to professional philosophers. But it’s important to me to keep separate these tracks: the idea that excites me, and the stuff I need to pack into it to get it recognized as a piece of actual professional philosophy by real live philosophers. I need to keep them explicitly separated, so that the professional demands don’t swamp the exciting idea. (You may not have this problem. I write on weird stuff, like games and echo chambers and monuments and the social practice of fondue, so I get a lot of rejections that are basically, “This isn’t actually a topic for philosophy.”)

And I really do need to write early and often. A lot of the times, only a month after I’ve had the original idea, having only read a bit of the literature, when the idea has reached the first stage of ripeness, the first moment I really feel like I have a grip on its shape, I’ll sit down and dash off a very rough draft. I mean very rough — I’m going to sit down for a day and hammer out a filthy, disgusting, sloppy piece of junk. And almost none of that writing will actually survive the many stages that come next: the enormous literature review, tectonic shifts in the argument, dozens of rewritings. But I need to get down that original thread, and I need to capture that glimpse of the thing that excited me.

Because if I have that, then I can keep a hold on it. It’ll guide me, and I won’t forget about it.

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Thi: thanks so much for this post - it really resonates with me. I wasn’t terribly productive as a grad student or in my first job for the very same reason! I was primarily working on writing the kinds of papers I thought I was “supposed” to write—papers making tiny little contributions to or critiques of things other people had written. I too found it boring and, quite frankly, depressing. That wasn’t why I went into philosophy: I went in philosophy because I loved big, bold exciting ideas. So after a year or two post-grad school, I did what you did: I started writing on stuff that excited me. And roughly the same thing happened to me that you say happened to you: I became far more productive and finally started to enjoy philosophy again.

Interestingly, I also use the same writing strategies that you do too. One of the biggest errors people make, I think (or, at least, I found it an error when I used to do it), is to get so swamped in reading the literature that you never get started and writing takes forever. Like you, whenever I have an idea that I think is interesting, I do a *very* quick lit search to see if it has been defended...and then I get right onto the drafting. I only do a lot of literature reading after I draft something--because, as you note, it's only really in drafting something that you figure out how well the argument works, how interesting it is, and so on. Why bog yourself down in learning everything about the literature before you figure out whether your argument has 'legs'? I draft maybe 4-5x as many papers as I publish--and the reasons are the ones you give: I figure out while drafting something that the argument doesn't quite work, or isn't as interesting as I thought it was, and so on. Even in these cases, though, drafting can be productive--as sometimes I will head back to drafts years later when the "solution" to the paper's problem occurs to me.

Anyway, I think your post is right on and would encourage people struggling with productivity and lack of enthusiasm to give your strategies a shot!

[The other Eric S]

Awesome. Trust your sense of fun! Eat dessert first!

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When a topic in philosophy grabs me, I try to write down immediately what I (!) think about it--only then do I go to the literature. One learns through the discovery of errors in one's own thinking. Reading something in philosophy before you yourself have tried to canvass the matter is a waste of time.