#20: Don’t just write it - ferment it!
So, you heard the last episode, and you're completely on board with not writing being an essential part of writing. But what sort of not-writing is best? Some not-writing activities allow our best ideas to ferment away in the background, growing in goodness like a good batch of sauerkraut. Other not-writing activities, however, grind the whole mental fermentation process to a halt.
The bad news is that, at the moment we decide to take a break from writing, we're especially vulnerable to plumping for the wrong sort of not-writing activities. The good news is that The Academic Imperfectionist is on hand to shut that shit down.
Here are the readings mentioned in this episode:
Kethledge, R. M. and Erwin, M. S. 2019: Lead Yourself First (Bloomsbury).
Newport, C. 2020: Digital Minimalism (Penguin).
Schroder, H. 2021: 'Set yourself free by developing a growth mindset toward anxiety', Psyche.
Episode transcript:
Breaks from writing are good. But some are better than others.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
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Okay, on to today’s topic. This one follows on from the last episode - #19: Not writing is an essential part of writing. If you haven’t already, you might want to listen to that episode before this one - but it’s not absolutely necessary, it’s not as if this episode is going to be completely indecipherable without the previous one - I hope not, anyway. Now, in the last episode, I argued that the time you spend not writing even though you have something you’re meant to be writing - so, time that we usually think of as procrastination, or wasted time - is actually a super-important part of the writing process. It’s when we give our subconscious a chance to work its magic on the ideas that we’ve been consciously grappling with, and we end up with more creative, interesting work as a result. Even so, there’s more to say here - and I want to say it in this episode. The basic point is this: it matters how you spend your I-should-be-writing time. I’m going to use an analogy here from my latest hobby: making sauerkraut. It’s very on-brand of me to get into making sour stuff while everyone else has been using the lockdown to get into baking cakes and other sweet treats. Anyway, to make sauerkraut, you basically mix up a load of chopped cabbage and salt, and then stick it in a cupboard to ferment. The actual effortful activity of buying the cabbage, washing it, chopping it, rubbing salt into it, cleaning up after yourself and so on takes about 30 minutes - an hour, tops. The process of fermentation, on the other hand, takes days, or even weeks (depending on how you like your sauerkraut). What you end up with is a jar of fermented cabbage that, thanks to the fermentation process, contains many times more goodness than the raw, fresh, unfermented cabbage. You don’t have to do much to it while it’s fermenting - you just need to check it once every couple of days. Even so, it matters what you do, and what conditions you’ve set in place. If you put the jar somewhere that’s too cold, it won’t ferment. If the jar is dirty, it will go bad. If you haven’t put a plate under it, it might overflow and flood your cupboard with salty, cabbagey water. If, on the other hand, the conditions are right, you get a nice jar of cabbage bubbling satisfyingly away as it ferments. The lesson here is: while ‘leave it alone’ entails ‘forget about it for a while’, it very much does not entail ‘it doesn’t matter what happens to it’.
Something similar is true of you - of us. When you’re working on a writing project, it’s normal to turn away from it and do something else from time to time - even for the majority of the time. In fact, as I argued in the previous episode, it’s essential, if you’re to produce your best and most creative and original work. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter what you do when you turn away from your writing. Some non-writing activities will be ones that help your ideas - like a good batch of sauerkraut - ferment merrily away, effortlessly multiplying in vitamins and probiotic goodness without you even noticing. But other non-writing activities are the equivalent of sticking your mental sauerkraut in the fridge. It’s too cold for anything to happen, and when you get back to it you need to spend time warming it all up even to return to the point where you left it. To get really good at mental fermentation, I think we need to do two things. First, we need to understand what sort of non-writing activities are right ones. Second, we need to understand our reasons for being drawn to the wrong sort of non-writing activities. Because, make no mistake, you are drawn to the wrong sort of non-writing activities.
To get a sense of what the right sort of non-writing activities look like, think back to those times when a good idea about your writing project has popped into your brain, completely unbidden, and taken you by surprise, when you weren’t even thinking about your project. You might have had conversations with other people about this sort of experience, and gained a broader sense of when people get their good ideas. You might have been out running, and the solution to some intractable problem rose up before you while you thought you were busy wondering whether or not it would start raining before you got home. Perhaps you know someone who has their best ideas in the shower. I mentioned last week the story of Archimedes’ ‘Eureka’ moment in the bath. Another well-known anecdote is about the 19th-century Russian chemist, Dmitri Mendeleyev, who came up with the periodic table in a dream. A common thread here is that these ideas pop up during what can feel to us like moments of mental idleness. We’re doing something that leaves our minds free to wander, or we’re asleep. We know that our writing project contains problems we need to solve at some point - but we’re not actively engaged in trying to solve them at that moment.
What about the wrong sort of non-writing activities: what do they look like? Well, those are the sorts of activities that gobble up your attention and make it hard for you to ponder things in the background, and they also make it hard to switch your attention back to your writing when you need to. They’re things like social media and responding to emails. Anything that requires a period of ‘Now, where was I?’ when you turn back to your writing to bring yourself up to speed with where you left off. Of course, the technology that we have today makes it very, very easy to engage in the wrong sort of non-writing activities. This was something I noticed a while back, long before I started thinking seriously about this topic. When I was a student, there were no smartphones, it was pretty rare for students to have their own laptops, and even if they did, there was no wifi. If I went to the library to work on my thesis, my options for non-writing activities were limited. I could gaze around the room - and actually, the Brotherton Library in Leeds and the reading room at Cambridge University Library are pretty pleasant to gaze around. Or, I could go for a walk, or go and get a cup of tea, or try out new styles of handwriting. These are all perfect non-writing activities: they involve taking a break from writing without eating up all your attention, so your writing project can ferment away in the background. These days, of course, if you want a break from your writing project, it’s far more easy and entertaining to open your browser and check Twitter or Instagram than it is to go for a wander or stare around the room. Or you might decide to catch up on emails instead, which is work too, right? All this is a big problem. Social media is engineered to engage your attention. Responding to emails, too, requires your attention. Mental resources that could be fermenting your writing project for you are diverted into other things. Effectively, turning to the wrong sorts of non-writing activities puts your mental sauerkraut in the fridge. When you’re ready to work on it again, you need to warm it up before you can get back to where you were when you left it.
Let’s return to the experience of having an insight about your writing project that takes you by surprise while you’re doing something else - something like staring around the library or going for a walk; you know, the right sort of non-writing activity. One thing that’s common to all of these experiences of unexpected insight is that they occur after a period of consciously working on a problem for a while - reading, thinking, and writing about it, or trying to. This period of consciously working on the problem can be a disheartening experience, which often looks something like this: we try to work on something, it’s hard, we feel bad because we don’t feel like we’re making enough progress, and so we give up and walk away - often while saying nasty things to ourselves, like maybe we’re just not good enough to make it in our field. And then, while we’re in the middle of moping and trying to forget about how useless we are - bam, the insight we need lands right in our lap.
Here’s a problem: at that moment when we give up (temporarily) on our writing and decide to do something else instead, we’re vulnerable. It’s a moment when we feel bad about ourselves. We might feel anxious about whether we’re ever going to make the sort of progress we need to make. At that moment, we’re wide open to doing something that is going to make us feel better about it all - to things that are going to take our mind off our writing. And, of course, things like social media, which thoroughly engage our attention and entertain us, are way more effective at taking our mind off things than staring around the room or going for a walk - even though they are much worse for fermenting our writing. The result is that, by looking for ways to comfort ourselves and relieve our anxiety - aims which are completely understandable - we find ourselves drawn to the wrong sort of non-writing activities, and make life difficult for ourselves. What can we do about this?
I have a few suggestions. First, take seriously what I said in the last episode: not writing is an essential part of writing. It really is. And that means that, when you feel like taking a break from your writing - that is, from the activity of consciously and effortfully working on your writing project - you’re not actually giving up on the activity of writing. You’re not stopping because it’s too hard, or because you’re not good enough. Your eagerness to beat yourself up is stopping you from seeing what’s going on here. The reason you’re taking a break is because you’ve taken the process of consciously and effortfully working on your writing as far as you can, for the moment. I mean, sure, you can grit your teeth and push on through, and sometimes we have to do that if we’re up against a deadline - but if you do that, you’re going to meet with diminishing returns. Better to walk away and trust yourself to ferment it all in the background. Anyway, because taking a break isn’t giving up, there’s no need to feel bad about it. You’re not a failure. You’re just shifting gears and working on it in a different way. This is the way writing works. If you can accept that, and try to stop worrying about it, you’ll be less tempted to jump at something that helps take your mind off it just to soothe the anxiety you feel about it all.
Second, ask yourself if you really need to run away from anxiety when you feel it. What if you were to sit with it instead, to probe at it and try to understand it? What, exactly, is making you feel anxious? Is whatever it is that’s making you feel anxious something that’s really worth feeling anxious about? What thoughts do you have about yourself when you feel anxious? I’ve talked before about the value of journaling the negative thoughts we have when we’re trying to write - if you haven’t tried it, I promise you’ll learn something useful about yourself if you do. Facing our anxiety in this way is the first step to taking back control from it. It can even help you be less anxious in the future: the psychologist Hans Schroder published an article in Psyche recently entitled ‘Set yourself free by developing a growth mindset towards anxiety’. He argues that it’s a mistake to think of anxiety as a fundamental, unchangeable character trait - something you just have to endure from time to time. By persisting in the face of anxiety, we learn that we can cope with it and we stop avoiding it, which eventually reduces it.
Next - so, you’ve accepted that taking breaks from writing is completely fine, and that anxiety isn’t the end of the world. Choose your non-writing activities wisely. Don’t jump straight from your unfinished draft to TikTok. Stare around the room instead. Go for a walk. Anything that gives you a break from writing without sucking up your attention and preventing your mind from wandering. Personally, I tend to go around with my latest knitting project, and I try to remember to pull that out when I need space to think. It’s fun, and it engages both hands and stops them creeping towards my phone. If that’s not your thing, think back to how you used to procrastinate in the old days. Keep it old skool. Rearranging your bookshelves? Dyeing your hair? Go for it, whatever it is. Way better than social media.
Something important that I want to address here is this: when I talk about taking a break from writing and doing something like going out for a walk or gazing into space, I know that it can bring to mind a leisurely existence in which your writing is the only thing you need to get done, and when you’re not doing it, you’re free to lounge about. Life isn’t like that for a lot of us. Our writing is often one of many plates we need to keep spinning. We have children to raise, laundry to do, food to buy, and so on. How can we find enough space f or mental fermentation when there are all these other things going on? Well, here’s some good news. In his book, Digital Minimalism, the computer scientist Cal Newport argues for the importance of solitude. And by ‘solitude’, he doesn’t mean shutting yourself away from the world and its demands - something that few of us have the freedom to do. He draws on a conception of solitude described in a book called Lead Yourself First by Michael Erwin and Raymond Kethledge; for them, ‘solitude’ means isolation from input from other minds. So, reading a book, watching TV, listening to podcasts, having a conversation - all these things involve dealing with input from other minds. But things like scrubbing the bathroom and taking out the rubbish can be done in this sort of solitude. You’re not dealing with other people’s thoughts while you’re doing them. They’re not the sorts of relaxing activities that spring to mind when we hear the words ‘take a break’, but they are what I’m going to call fermentation-friendly non-writing activities. You can get on with them without interrupting the subconscious mental processes that are important for making progress with your writing.
Happy fermenting, guys!
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook @AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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