The mystique of writing

undine wrote a post recently about the "one catchy magic ingredient" that makes people feel able to write, without which they feel semi-paralyzed, or at least, believe they will be semi-paralyzed. She also noted that a "highly respectd senior scholar" who was at the table during this conversation appeared slightly mystified by it, regarding writing as something you just do, without need of magic talismans.

 

My summer internship has been very interesting in this regard, because what I do all day, 5 days a week, is research and write, and what most of the other people who work here do is research and write, and yet there appears to be little mystification of that writing process. I get the sense that "writer's block" is not really a prominent concept around here. There's writing, it needs to get done, so we just do it.

 

This is not remotely meant to say, Therefore, you sucky whiny academics, you should just do it, too! It's just struck me how different the atmosphere here is about writing.

 

There are other elements of writing culture that cross over - we all write multiple drafts, we revise and polish, we all read each others stuff (that is, I get everyone to read my stuff and I read other interns' stuff; I'm not in a position to comment on what most of the other people here are doing! but you get what I mean).

 

The biggest reason for the difference, I think, is that legal writing is not your "own" writing (unless you're creating legal scholarship, which is not anyone's purpose at my current internship). I don't have to decide for myself what issues or questions to grapple with: I write about what I'm told to write about. I write about whatever conflict it is that two people or entities completely removed from my life decided was important enough to go to court about.  The parameters are set, by other people. Sure, I may discover that there are cases or statutes relevant to the case that no one else has yet brought up, either because the parties were slackers, or because my perspective is just different enough that I look for something that they didn't. But I can't decide that although the case I'm writing about deals with fraud, really it would be so much BETTER to talk about adverse possession instead.

 

And you know, right now, I really kind of like this. It's simpler. No one is going to judge me by saying that what I write isn't "important" or "relevant", because it obviously is to the parties involved, even if to no one else (and those parties probably spent a lot of money or expended other resources in order to get to the point where I'm involved). I don't have to figure out how to articulate my research questions before I even know anything about the topic. I'm sure at some point in the future it may drive me nuts to have my work driven by other people's concerns, but right now, I'm good with it.

 

It's a little bit like getting a paper assignment in school, but guess what? it's REAL.

 

(I mean, I still manage to obsess somewhat, and perhaps over-identify with my writing, but old habits die hard.)

Comments

[undine]

Interesting post, NK (and thanks!). I think you're right about the kinds of writing making a difference. It's not as high-level as what you're doing with research and writing, but when someone gives me a set of information and asks me to write a report, or even just asks for a report on something, I just get at it--no angsty magic rituals there.

[Seeking Solace]

I am so enjoying watching you evolve into thinking and writing like a lawyer.

And don't forget, you can be creative in you language when you do legal writing. I once wrote a brief for a motor vehicle accident case involving a car, a delivery truck and a tractor trailer. Because the circumstances of the accident were rather confusing, I described the case in my Statement of Facts as if I were telling one of those "Priest, rabbi and Raquel Welch in a rowboat" jokes. The partners loved it.

[Dame Eleanor Hull]

I keep trying to create writing assignments for myself. It's a great idea in theory & sometimes it works in practice, but it really is hard to get that Other-perspective of "this is what this project needs" rather than the academic "does X imply Y? or Z? how related are Y & Z? would Critic C help with Z? oh, noes, should read D through H!" and so on.

[Susan]

This is really helpful. I'm trying to think about writing as a task that I do, so it doesn't take over.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

undine - exactly. Even things like class assignments were never very hard to do (though I never really thought of them as writing, even though really, they are).

Seeking Solace - I love the joke idea! That's great. Also, I'm glad you like these posts, because I'm never sure how interesting they are. :-P

Dame Eleanor and Susan - I think it is really hard to convince oneself the writing is an assignment from someone else - separate from oneself - when it's not.

[richard]

Very perceptive post. I experienced the same phenomenon as a technical writer in between undergrad and grad, and I have to say that 10 years of writing day in and day out for a living did make some aspects of scholarly writing easier. But ultimately the psychic state required to produce creative scholarly work is different from that required to produce creative technical work. One thing I discovered is that I can write perfectly good manual in a bullpen, surrounded by salespeople screaming into telephones (this is pre-iPod, incidentally), but I can do neither scholarly work nor fiction in those circumstances. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it has to do with being able to create a self-standing world inside my head, which is not necessary for technical writing, but is vital for more creative work. If the real world keeps breaking in, I can't sustain the imagined world.