It’s easy to lose heart when you are writing for academic publication.
This is especially so if you entered your field with all the signs in evidence that you’d be really good at this. A knack for really ‘getting’ the literature and ways of thinking in your field. A drive to dig deeper or to introduce new perspectives. An abundance of ideas. A way with words. A wish to make real contributions.
And then you find that translating all that potential into written work is mighty hard!
I want to name two kinds of pain that are intimately familiar to me, and that I’ve seen clients and colleagues struggle with as well.
(1) Writing feels like producing widgets.
It’s painful to be caught up in academia’s cynical culture of mass production. The advice to ‘just get your papers out’ is alienating when you want your writing to be meaningful. It’s particularly painful when the pragmatics of an academic career in which you’re required to ‘keep pace’ seem forever to prevent you from getting to your most important work.
(2) You’re all fired up, but the words don’t come.
The opposite is painful too: Your head is filled with ideas for that book or paper that you just know is yours to write. You long to work on the project, it keeps tugging at you. Yet somehow all efforts to work on it end in frustration. You’re too tired. You’re bogged down by other tasks. And when you do block off time and sit down to work, no inspiration is to be found, and you cannot access the bright ideas or burning energy that seemed so ready to hand.
These two pains often show up together, and they make it hard to stay in touch with what we truly want to write.
If you’re feeling anger and grief over spending so much time and energy on the ‘wrong’ things, trust these feelings for the disconnect they seek to remedy. In the everyday pursuit of ‘producing the goods’, we lose our connection to what is, and can be, actually good about the work that we do. It’s vital to reclaim that connection in any way we can.
What I want to offer here are two ‘sanity strategies’ that come with stories from the world of art production. These are not the ultimate solution to what is ultimately a very complex issue with many roots, some of which are systemic. Rather, they are redirection strategies, providing a shift in perspective on how and in what to invest your energy when writing. These strategies offer a reframing that’s also a reclaiming, of your writing practice as yours.
Two figures of inspiration
I give you the reverent art forger and the irreverent art teacher as unconventional travelling companions on the journey of refiguring your relationship to your writing.
Their predicaments are close enough to those of academic writers to make them interesting, yet far enough to avoid taking them literally.
The art forger pours his time and energy into creating ‘art’ that looks right but holds no depth or meaning. The art teacher pours her time and energy into caring for the creative work of others, leaving little for her own pursuits. In different ways, they’re both at risk of losing the connection to their own expression.
How does a sense of reverence help the forger? What does the teacher get from turning to irreverence? Well, quite the same thing: it allows them to invest themselves in their work on their own terms.
The reverent art forger
Art forgers typically aren’t the reverent sort. Eric Hebborn (1934–1996) certainly wasn’t. He was a dealer of old master drawings in London and Rome, yet a good portion of the art he sold was made by his own hand. He had no qualms about leading experts to the wrong conclusions. Some have praised his autobiography, Drawn to Trouble, for its clever wit and insight; others have condemned it as a feat of grandiose exaggeration and lies.
But as he played the cynical game of making fakes and passing them off as originals, there was something else, too, going on for Hebborn. He brought a certain reverence to drawing, which allowed him to stay connected to his creativity.
A story in his autobiography illustrates this.
In Hebborn’s inventory there was a Bruegel that he suspected to be an engraver’s copy. All the details were precisely rendered, but he found it to lack a certain ‘aliveness’. Hebborn’s sense of this was shaped by his own devotion to the art of drawing since he was a teenager. He conceived of drawing as a gift from Nature that could only be acquired with “an immense amount of application” and was, even then, always at risk of being taken away.
He compared the art of drawing to learning a difficult language: the ‘language of line’. Not many people truly mastered it, but the old masters had, and so – after many years of dedication – had Hebborn. To him, the Bruegel drawing looked traced by a copyist rather than committed to paper by a draughtsman.
Hebborn devised himself a project. He would copy the engraver’s copy once more to give it back the life that would have been expressed in Bruegel’s original pen strokes.
He sourced the right paper, made the right ink. He studied the order and rhythm in which the lines of the drawing would have been executed by the master himself. He did some dry runs by drawing on scrap paper. The next day, after a sip of brandy, “the stage fright vanished and the connection between the conscious and the subconscious was unblocked” (p.217). He could now draw full out, even as he was copying. The result pleased him greatly: “Whereas the old version was impersonal as though it were the product of a copying machine, my own had, I hoped (and I am not ashamed of using the word), the authentic touch of a draughtsman’s hand.” (p.217)
Reverence as a return to practice
Recreating the Bruegel was an act of forgery, but it was also a chance for Hebborn to practise drawing as a genuine art.
To succeed in the cynical game of forging art, Hebborn may not have ‘needed’ to apply himself to this extent. But here’s the thing: doing so mattered greatly to his sense of himself as an artist. His reverence for the language of line gave him a sense of kinship with those who had mastered it in the past. It put him shoulder to shoulder with Bruegel and other old masters, united in the project of keeping that language alive and flourishing.
It also mattered greatly to his experience of his own work. Rather than putting his talent and ability in the service of ‘mere copying’, he put them in the service of art as practice, deepened with every bit of preparation and every stroke.
When writing for publication feels cynical and disheartening, what's still true and meaningful for you about the work as a practice?
What is there to hold on to – to be reverent about – that can restore your sense of yourself as a writer and your experience of the work as worth your while?
The irreverent art teacher
Art teacher Betsy is one of the coachees in Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast ‘Magic Lessons’, featuring writers and other artists who struggle with creative blocks. (You can find the relevant podcast episodes here and here.)
Betsy is looking for a different way into artmaking, because she feels stuck. She has been teaching art at a high school for nearly thirty years, while making her own art on the side. She’s raised children too, and now has grandchildren. Betsy has been aching to do something new with her art. “I am unravelling with this desire to do something else,” she says.
Yet following that desire has proved hard. Ideas come to her, in her dreams and during the day, but she finds that “the threads, the little filaments have just brushed past” before she can grab them. She makes plans to work on her ideas after school or at nights, after everything else has been taken care of, but it doesn’t happen. Caught in a cycle of exhaustion and depletion, she feels ever further away from what she longs to create.
Elizabeth offers Betsy four words:
Sexy.
Dirty.
Naughty.
Wicked.
She laughs after saying these words: they feel so transgressive. Most things in Betsy’s life point to an archetypal expression of creativity as The Great Mother: nourishing, generating, teaching, raising, loving, sharing, giving. Elizabeth asks Betsy to turn the tables on this:
“Sexy, dirty, naughty and wicked are words of self-pleasure…. What I am talking about here is having an affair with your creativity, behind everybody’s back.”
Betsy gasps.
“Why didn’t I think of this?”
She’s into it. She runs with the image of the affair and all the assumptions it questions. That everything she works on must be public. That it all must generate something worthy.
Busting these assumptions feels freeing and exciting. She speaks of the “life energy that I’m trying to keep bubbling” the energy she feels she has lost. Having an affair with her art sounds like a way to get it back.
Elizabeth says: “you’re seducing this energy back to you”.
Like “getting ready for a date”, Betsy begins to clear out her studio space. She starts to think of time differently, being prepared to risk, to waste. To follow her whimsy wherever it takes, for a few minutes or however long. In search of a wink, a stolen kiss – and that is enough. “I’m entitled to be a little reckless.”
Irreverence as a return to playfulness
Betsy is finding a way to give expression to her desire for something new. The image of the affair relieves her from the pressure of approaching this new project with great expectations and great seriousness. It sets her free to play, and not just once! It invites her to return again and again to find out if there’s more – and what more there is.
This matters greatly to her sense of herself as an artist. It also matters greatly to her experience of her own practice. The irreverence of seduction over production restores her agency in relation to the work she wants to make, without immediately creating all sorts of binds.
When the writing that matters to you most seems perpetually just out of reach, where can you drop propriety?
What is there to let go of – to be irreverent about – that fills your sense of yourself as a writer through acts of wasting, risking and defying?
Producing the good(s): a shift in perspective
‘Producing the goods’ often feels like all that academic writing is about. But the reverent art forger and the irreverent art teacher are a reminder not to lose sight of what we can cultivate as good that isn’t dependent on outcomes.
A turn to reverence or irreverence can work as a ‘sanity strategy’ by shifting the perspective back to what’s meaningful and enjoyable in your writing. Meaningful and enjoyable for you, while you’re at it.
Which type of turn are you drawn to? What could it look like in your case? What would that give you?
Here are some qualities you might like to pay special attention to:
Movement
The work of a copyist can feel stilted and mechanical, but the reverent art forger found a way to invest himself in the movement of the drawn line.
The irreverent art teacher found a way to begin again and thread lightly: moving with the impulse to do something new while letting go of the notion that one already needs to know how.
How are you moving with your words? What do you let your writing be moved by?
Community
Eric and Betsy aren’t solitary actors in their stories. Their very way of going about their practice expressed allegiance.
Eric’s allegiance is to those who speak the language of line.
Betsy’s allegiance is to those who see artmaking as a practice of relinquishing control as much as one of making things up.
Which tradition or lineage are you renewing through your efforts? What shared pursuit are your investing in?
Delight
Betsy and Eric each access delight and pleasure in artmaking. Thereby they break away from casting themselves as capitalist subjects whose lives (only) consist of producing and consuming.
In their reverence and irreverence, the art forger and the art teacher live the assertion that their creative life is more than ‘producing the goods’.
How can you deliberately delight in your writing?
This is a reworked version of my presentation at the 2020 EASST/4S conference, the largest annual gathering of academics in the field of Science & Technology Studies. My presentation was a response to the call for papers for the panel “Articulating and Relating to Different Forms of the Good in Bad Situations.” I am grateful to Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent, Jeannette Pols, Jonna Brenninkmeijer and Dick Willems for convening this inspiring panel.
