The Beauty of Low Standards

The only way I can get anything done, as far as thesis writing, is to set the bar low. If I say to myself, "Okay self, once you have written your 100 words for the day, you can take a break." This helpful advice is from Shannon Hale, famous UT author of The Goosegirl and Austenland, who is expecting twins and has answered numerous questions about how she finds time to be author and mother.

Before I had such low standards, I found myself wanting to do everything except write. Instead of working on my thesis, I would much rather have:

a. scrubbed the toilets
b. braved the rush hour crowds at Wal-Mart
c. gone shopping at Lowe's with Jesse
d. folded laundry.

Why? Because, as Walter W. Smith says, "Writing is very easy. All you do is sit in front of a typewriter keyboard until little drops of blood appear on your forehead." The challenge of writing is further evident in Ernest Hemingway's conversation with an interviewer from Paris Review:

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?

Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times, before I was satisfied.

Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you?

Hemingway: Getting the words right.

Or better yet, look at Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" (1916). Pound began with 30 lines after stepping off a metro train at La Concorde in Paris (in 1913) and seeing so many captivating images that he had to put them down on paper. He said, "I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion." He threw away the thirty-line draft. Six months later, he pared it down to 15 lines, but later realized they had still not been "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." So at least one year later, he found his final draft:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

And I thought my job was hard...

In the past I have tried to reward myself for sporadic bursts of productivity by saying, "Okay self, once you have written today, you can take a shower. You can get dressed. You can eat lunch. Or go to Ross, or babysit the neighbor kids, or check the mail." These pep talks work 50% of the time. Which is why I've spent many a day in my pajamas, with swamp-thing-hair, sitting at the computer until 3 PM.

Hale's advice makes sense because if I say, "Self, you have to write for an hour," I can easily end up "thinking" for an hour, or finding another source to annotate, or staring at the wall, instead of actually writing. So, the fool-proof way to do it is set a word count limit. At least 100 words each day. This amounts to one short paragraph!

What's supposed to happen is that you get so into it that you inevitably end up writing much more. So this is my new theory--set standards so low that it's impossible to fail! It has worked since I started--yesterday. Only one week off schedule!