Writing Is My Drink (8 page)

all when my desk jet printer spat out the last page of that thesis.

Page 96—yes, I’d cut it close, but stil , it was done.

Just then the Clash song “Rock the Casbah” came on the

radio. I turned it up and up and up.

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Try This

1. Start noticing the times when you stop working. Is it when

you get stuck on something? When the writing starts to feel

“too hard”? Is it when you get thrown off your routine be-

cause something unexpected comes up? Is it when you’re on

the verge of taking your story to a deeper level? Keep track of

your sticking points. You might even want to take a few notes

about your stopping patterns.

2. Use the information you’ve collected against yourself. If

you’re a writer who stops when the writing gets tough, keep

a timer by your desk and set it for five minutes when you feel

like stopping. Tell yourself you only need to write for the five

extra minutes (but of course, here’s to hoping you keep going

past that). If the unexpected throws you off, keep a note-

book in your purse or backpack, and tell yourself you need

to find five minutes in your day to write—whether it’s waiting

at the DMV or at your kid’s soccer practice. (I’ve written in

the Costco parking lot with a baby asleep beside me. I’ve also

not
written when I’ve had all the time and quiet needed) You might be surprised what you can write in five minutes: a few

sentences, maybe a paragraph, and it might be just the para-

graph you’ve been waiting for.

3. Read Virginia Valian’s “Learning to Work” essay online. It’s on the Writing Is My Drink blog. Look under the tab “Learning

to Work.” After reading the essay, write for fifteen minutes on

your reaction to the essay. What parts of Valian’s experience

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could you relate to? What in her method for overcoming her

work problem could be helpful to you?

4. Commit to writing fifteen minutes a day for the next two

weeks. Keep a log. The log can be anything from a check mark

to a few notes about how the writing went. When I did this,

I kept a log only because I told my students I would be doing

so. Most days I wrote something terse, like “Did it”; but some

days I did take notes, and I was stunned to see how many rea-

sons I had for not writing. I love writing. I love having writ-

ten. I have written a book. I’ve had work published. I make

a living as a writer and a writing teacher. So it would make

sense that I would not resist writing for fifteen paltry min-

utes, but there it was, chronicled in grisly detail: “Too tired,”

“Don’t want to!” “Tired” “Too much to do.” Do I spend fifteen

minutes every day checking e-mail? Yes. Do I ever say I’m too

tired or don’t have time? No. But checking e-mail is a passive

activity. I do nothing but click and see what others have sent

me, how others want me to use my time, my energy, my life.

Writing is active. Writing is me forging my own meaning.

5. Disable your Internet capabilities on your writing computer.

Or write on an old laptop with no wireless. Or do what I do

most of the time: handwrite. There’s nowhere to click on my

yellow legal pad to get to Facebook. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Write for ten minutes on this question: What do you consider

your true work?

6. Twenty years after first reading the “Learning to Work” essay

in San Francisco, I found myself in need of its advice again.

Once again I was feeling stuck and couldn’t get myself back to

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the page. Luckily, despite multiple moves and numerous yard

sales, I still owned the copy of
Working It Out
that I’d bought in 1989. I dug it out and reread Valian’s essay and once again

felt inspired to start working again in fifteen-minute incre-

ments until I could get my writing momentum back.

I realized then how much my writing students could also

benefit from this approach and started teaching seminars based

on Valian’s ideas as well as my own on how to give ourselves—as

I learned from Valian—the pleasure of working consistently and

incremental y on a project. (That’s one of my favorite lines in

the essay: “I decided that I wanted to work every day, because

I wanted to experience that constancy of working that I had al-

ways denied myself.”)

Have you ever read an essay or a book that immediately

helped you? If so, write about the advice you gained from that

author and how you applied it.

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4

A Funny thing

Happened on the Road

to schema theory

Although I’d broken through the thesis block, my dream for

my “real writing”—whatever
that
might be—was still on hold.

Nonetheless, for first time since I hit puberty, I was neither a student nor a waitress. My freshly printed business cards declared

that I was an assistant professor of English. The relief of having

a Real Job with tasks that endured beyond the dinner shift—

not to mention medical, dental, and vision benefits—more than

made up for any ill-defined dream deferred, at least for a good

long while.

Nothing, though, prepared me for the terror of my first

quarter of teaching. Ostensibly, a master’s in English literature

is the preparation for teaching English at a community col-

lege. But reading Shakespeare’s tragedies in your apartment

and then writing papers about them or sitting through a lecture

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on feminist criticism and the Victorian novel is absolutely no

preparation whatsoever for standing in front a class and trying

to explain how to support a thesis sentence. No correlation ex-

ists between these two activities. It’s like thinking that studying botany will prepare you to run a landscaping business. Yes, it’s

good to know what those plants are doing out there, but let’s face

it: 95 percent of the time, you’re going to be mowing lawns and

hefting the lawn mower in and out the truck.

There is a time-honored disconnect between learning and

teaching in higher education. Few graduate students ever take

classes in pedagogical theory. The assumption is that if you

know your stuff, you’ll somehow be able to transmit that stuff

to your students. The
how
is your own problem. But in this case, the disconnect between the preparation and the daily work

seemed particularly absurd. One of the listed requirements of

my new job was a master’s degree in English, but the bulk of my

job assignment was to teach basic developmental writing and as

well as a course called Success Skil s, a component of the job I

remained in denial about until the final days of summer.

Success Skil s was part study skil s, part resource guide to

college life, part learning theory, and part motivational lectures.

As the school year rapidly approached, I sweated through the

last scorching days of the southern Utah summer, knowing that

I was in no way prepared to teach anyone how to succeed in

college. I flipped through the highly left-brained accompanying

text for the class, aptly named
How to Study in Col ege
, and a hot darkness overtook me. The Cornell Method of notetaking!

How to take multiple-choice tests! How to manage your time in

college!

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My problems with the course content were endless. First, I’d

never done half of the things the book recommended one do

to succeed and yet had somehow succeeded, although I could

not say how. I also did not deep down believe that the answer

to success lay in the rigid methods outlined, and if those meth-

ods were, in fact, the road to success, then learning and college

would be such soulless prospects that I would want nothing to

do with them and certainly could not in good conscience rec-

ommend anyone else to endure such an uninspired use of time

and money. I had gotten through college—it would seem, now

that I felt forced to locate the source of my “success”—mostly by

taking courses that created an enormous voltage of excitement

within me and by dragging myself through the requirements

that didn’t. But that could never be a recommended route, could

it? “So, kids, go for The History of Modern Art and the Harlem

Renaissance literature classes and feel free to leave your math

requirements to your final year. Then load yourself up on caf-

feine—diet pil s, if you have to—the mornings of those classes

and somehow just force your brain to focus on what is being said

in the class. Somehow, do the assignments, survive the tests. Yes,

you’ll get a D, but it’s not your major, so no biggie, right?”

Yes, my own absolute lack of method and structure as a stu-

dent was one of my major problems with the prospect of teach-

ing Success Skil s, but something more fueled my resistance,

something that I now realized—so late,
too
late!—would cer-

tainly undermine not only my ability to teach this course but

my ability to teach
anything
.

It dawned on me that I had no faith in my own intelligence.

I looked in the mirror and, like the anorexic who can’t seem to

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connect the dropping number on the scale and the reality of her

own body, could never seem to connect my academic achieve-

ments and my intelligence. Every success seemed like a fluke;

every paper that received an A just seemed like another lucky

break—maybe because I knew how much anxiety each of those

papers had cost me, how much rolling on the floor and gnash-

ing of teeth. If I were truly intelligent, I guess I’d always figured, I would have just whipped them out.

But now I was supposed to be a professor. Good grief! Let

the impostor syndrome begin.

My one remaining hope for preparing the Success Skil s

course was to badger the previous instructor before she fled for

California. B. was headed to Stanford to pursue a master’s in

education. A Caucasian woman with a degree in Chinese lan-

guages from Yale, B. appeared to suffer from no intellectual an-

orexia whatsoever. She was the Anti-Theo. She seemed to have

taught the classes here in her sleep; the rest of her time had been devoted to doing whatever she liked, which included running

a dude ranch with the guy who’d lured her to Utah. Unlike me,

who felt lucky to have this job—to have any job that wasn’t wait-

ressing—B. had just filled a short gap here. For a woman as bold,

entitled, and outspoken as B., this was a pit stop on the mighty

speedway that stretches between Yale and Stanford.

B. talked fast, referencing everything from Alexis de Toc-

queville to MTV to jokes about blow jobs. I had mixed feelings

about her; she was Glenda, the feminist good witch, and I knew

when she left, there’d be no one here who’d understand who I

was and how I’d come to be following this yellow brick road.

At the same time, I wanted her gone, gone,
gone
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like astronauts who’d both traveled off course and run into each

other in a far-flung galaxy. You couldn’t help but marvel that

we were here together in Utah, a state with no measurable rev-

erence or even need for the Professional Woman. But she was

Neil Armstrong, and I was one of those guys back in the ship

you can’t remember the name of, if you ever knew it. Being in a

staff meeting with B. dropping by was like finding a photo of a

babelicious woman among your boyfriend’s papers and having

him shrug and say, “Just an old girlfriend.” I wanted not only

to extinguish her, I also wanted to eradicate all memory of her

from the minds of my fellow faculty. But stil , I feared her com-

ing departure; once she was gone, my isolation would know no

bounds.

We had lunch together at a café in Pioneer Square a few

days before she left. She spoke with wild excitement about Jean

Piaget, schema theory, and Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple

intelligences as if all this were the stuff I lived and breathed. Apparently, all these things held the secret underpinnings to my