How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page

by Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Editor)

This little book arose spontaneously, in the late spring of 2015, when a series of conversations emerged — first in a university roundtable on graduate student dissertation-writing, and then in a rapidly proliferating series of blog posts — on the topic of how we write. One commentary generated another, each one characterized by enormous speed, eloquence, and emotional forthrightness. This collection is not about how TO write, but how WE write: unlike a prescriptive manual that promises to unlock the secret to efficient productivity, the contributors talk about their own writing processes, in all their messy, frustrated, exuberant, and awkward dis/order.
The contributors range from graduate students and recent PhDs to senior scholars working in the fields of medieval studies, art history, English literature, poetics, early modern studies, musicology, and geography. All are engaged in academic writing, but some of the contributors also publish in other genres, includes poetry and fiction. Several contributors maintain a very active online presence, including blogs and websites; all are committed to strengthening the bonds of community, both in person and online, which helps to explain the effervescent sense of collegiality that pervades the volume, creating linkages across essays and extending outward into the wide world of writers and readers.
Contributors include: Michael Collins, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Alexandra Gillespie, Alice Hutton Sharp, Asa Simon Mittman, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Maura Nolan, Richard H. Godden, Bruce Holsinger, Stuart Elden, Derek Gregory, Steve Mentz, and Dan Kline.

Genres: Writing

182 pages, Paperback

First published September 11, 2015

Reviews

[Andrew Weiss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writers of any kind: I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Especially grad students past, present, or future, who are under an unthinkable amount of pressure, both from the academy and from ourselves.

Reading this book has felt like drinking a tall glass of water, and only then realizing how desperately thirsty I was. We all need this form of honesty and solidarity. We've been lacking it for too long.

While reading this book, I found myself saying this again and again to people, because I couldn't stop talking about it: this book deserves to be mandatory reading for all grad students. We'd all be a lot less terrified if we read it early on.

Note that it's not "How TO Write" or "How YOU SHOULD Write," but rather "How We Write," how the authors each write in their particular and unique fashion. But we can all find something deeply relateable in all of these stories, even when they don't match ours exactly. (Though they all do have an eerie familiarity about them...)

It's not about how to write any particular content. Here you won't find exhortations to clarity, rigor, specific formulae or anything of the sort. Instead, you'll find something much simpler and much more radical: a straightforward (but surprisingly entertaining) account of how real people sit down and put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards, as it were). Not shiny idealized accounts. Relatable, all-too-real accounts. Writing on airplanes or in small windows of time or under a pile of papers and deadlines or in the midst of the chaos of parenting -- and more.

Why? It's easy for us all to suppose that everyone else has this whole writing thing figured out -- that everyone else finds tons of quiet time, perfectly regimented at their desks or at the library, and they just sit down and easily bang out essay after essay, book after book, review after review. We suppose that everyone else has an easy time and it is just us, lone fuck-ups that we are, that struggle again and again to find productive time to meet a neverending onslaught of deadlines (which often seem to make a particular "whoosh" sound as they fly on by). But what we can all learn from reading "How We Write" is that in fact, nobody has it easy, and we are all of us a disorganized and anxious lot. And what a weight it will lift off your shoulders.

This book will liberate you from the crushing weight of impossible pressures that you put on yourself. You will breeze through it because you need it, and you won't know just how badly you needed it until you are done.

Read it soon. Seldom do we find something so therapeutic at once so easy.

You'll thank yourself when you're done -- and thank these wonderful and courageous souls for being so honest as to let us take a peek at their messy and crowded workstations. Because we all have them. Let's take a minute to revel in a bit of solidarity while we're at it -- and maybe we'll get that damn book finished before we know it.

[Xena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sure, give it a read. Some parts I enjoyed more than others. Akbari and Holsinger’s essays I found perhaps the most useful and relatable.

“...it’s a form of addiction: the high of writing in a concentrated way, where you no longer think consciously about the words you’re writing but just hear the words out loud as you put them on the page, is absolutely intoxicating.” - Akbari

As someone who writes mostly during the night and edits during the day, it was enlightening to read how it works for others. I’d recommend the book for anyone who wants to write a dissertation and does not know how to start or is too anxious to begin.

[Carol Tilley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Planning to buy copies for my doctoral students.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What I want to say in closing is that no one can tell you how to write, only how she or he writes. That process changes as life proceeds: writing is a mode of living, and must therefore be adaptable. Possibilities exist within every model. And so do perils."

"Producing a book is for me, then, a process of slow but impatient and inevitably disordered accretion."

". . . I love this book's idea of sprawling our weirdnesses out on pages and screens for everyone to see."

[emilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

very helpful to read this whilst going through a rough phase with my dissertation

[Chloe Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am reading this the weekend before submitting my undergraduate dissertation, hoping that I would be able to pick up a few nuggets of wisdom which can give my work an edge.

I have not picked up much - but it left me really hopeful, and energised to start again. These 13 essays bring out 1 message among little ones, some more useful to me than others: we all write differently, and so will you.

This moreover reminds me a little of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, though I would have recommended this more than Daily Rituals because of the variation of voices.

[Ashley]

Rec'd by Ariel