Shut Up and Work

For the last year or so, I've had my Comp I students keep a blog over the course of the semester. It requires them to write on a regular basis and hopefully introduces them to the value of writing as a tool for thought, invention, recollection, etc. They get to write it about whatever they want, so I've had cooking blogs, Jeep blogs, music, movies, your name it. One student last semester wrote about success. He said up front it was his goal in life to become really wealthy and so he was making as study of what makes people financially successful. Oddly enough, there was no post about becoming an English instructor as a way of rolling in the Benjamins. Anyway, he did introduce a new idea in one of his posts that really got me thinking. It was about goal setting, and he said something about how when we make our goals really public, it sometimes saps us of our motivation to work on the goal. He made a 30 day goal for himself on the blog but didn't say what the goal was. He wrote, "My reason for not telling you what my goal is derives from another video I watched on TED. This speaker explains how telling people our goals makes them less likely to happen. This is unlike most of the information that I have read about in the many self-help style of books that I have read but it does make sense. He says that by telling people our goals it gives us the satisfaction that we already have it, because of that we feel less motivated in obtaining them."

I found this fascinating because, like this student, I've always heard that it's important to tell people what you're shooting for because it makes you more accountable and, therefore, more likely to do it. But the more I thought about it, the more correct it seemed. In my past, any time I announced I was spending Christmas break/spring break/summer/long weekend/whatever working on a story or working on my dissertation, it almost never happened. I've spent a lot of time saying I was going to work on my dissertation only to pick at it here and there and then suddenly find a reason to shut down the computer and instead go help clean the house/break up a fight the kids are having/go to lunch with Suzy/etc.?

So I am essentially out of time with my PhD program. They like you to be done in seven years or less, and my seventh year ended this Christmas. It's embarrassing to write that. That's a really long time. Long enough that I don't want to dwell on it. Anyway, I applied for and received a one-year extension, and it swiftly became clear it was time to stop being a dilettante and get to work.

Don't get me wrong. It isn't as though I wasn't doing anything. I had my prospectus, I had rough chapter outlines, and I had about 60 pages of rough draft. But obviously, when you're on borrowed time, you need better than just that.

So, the day after Christmas, I began in earnest and, except for my wife and kids, I didn't mention it to anyone. When people asked what I was doing over break, I would say, "Just hanging out, you know? Not much." I kept my work a secret and found that I worked more and better because of it. The only pressure to work came from me and not some external, "Oh, I mentioned to so-and-so that I'm working over break so I'd better get to it" kind of thing.

So every morning except Sundays, I put on my bathrobe and padded downstairs to our cold, concrete basement. I'd turn on the brass banker's lamp that came from on top of my parents' piano, crank up the space heater near my feet, and start chipping away. The first day, I wrote a thousand words and came back upstairs at about 10:30. Suzy, to her everlasting credit, said, "A thousand words is good, but why don't you go see how much more you can get done? Write until noon." So I did that and ended up with just over three thousand words for the day.

So I started with twenty thousand words and sixty odd pages on December 26. Day before yesterday, I emailed a copy of my draft to my committee chair that over 55,000 words and 165 pages. So I nearly tripled my word count and more than doubled my page count in slightly less than two months. Some days I wrote close to 3k words, other days I barely picked out a thousand. I worked at home until school started back up and then I began working in a study carrel in the library during my office hours. I grew a beard, wore the same bathrobe every day, and didn't change my desktop background on my computer because whatever I was doing was working. (Superstitious? Maybe a little.)

Now, of course, the way I approached this was totally the wrong way to go about it. Generally, students write a chapter, send it in, get feedback, make revisions, resubmit, and then, once they get approval, move on to the next chapter. That prevents anyone from going wildly off track and writing a hundred pages of wrong-headed stuff. For me, for my life and times, this simply wasn't an option. I teach five sections of comp every semester. I have three kids. I only have a year to get this thing done. There's no time to lovingly, carefully scour each chapter hand in hand with my adviser.

Consequently, in all likelihood, there are probably some major revisions heading my way - assuming my adviser doesn't just ignore me altogether for this breach of academic etiquette. (He wouldn't do that. He may not be pleased with me, but he won't ignore me.) I know there are problems with the draft. The conclusion is weaker than Kip Dynamite. There's a fairly serious lack of theory-related sources in several of the chapters. It's personal to the point of being memoir-ish at times. It focuses a lot on Mormon doctrine at a time when Mormonism isn't super popular in the generally very liberal world of academia.

Having said all that, I have a 165 page draft with an intro, six chapters, and a conclusion on my hands, and, as I say to my students all the time, a bad draft on the page is infinitely better than a good idea in your head. A draft is something. You can revise it, alter it, expand or cut it. You have something to work with. An idea not written down is about as valuable as sculpting with air. There's nothing there to work with.  

So that's something, and I think I owe at least some of that progress to just keeping my big yap shut and going to work. Now life is just a matter of catching up on all the things I neglected while working on the dissertation (I started grading papers today. Eesh.) and waiting to hear back from my committee chair. Hopefully, he'll get back to me soon and will have at least as many good things to say as bad things to say. He will have work for me to do, that's for sure. One other thing that's for sure is that, when I start doing that work, you won't hear about it until it's done.