Last week, I wrote roughly 1700 words. That’s 5 more pages of writing than I had done in my life as of the week before.
Actually, I wrote many more than 1700, if you add up all the Word docs, emails, and texts I composed. But those 1700 were generated during the two hour-long sessions of my writing group. I’ve gotten into the habit of closing each hour with a word count. I don’t keep a running tally, though. It’s just an ad-hoc measurement of how that day’s hour has gone.
Generally, I try to avoid beginning a piece of writing by complaining about not knowing where the writing is going, or about having nothing to say. There is always something to say, even if it doesn’t feel like it meets the threshold of “important enough to share with other people.”
I remain convinced that my own writing process is driven by inspiration—when I truly feel like writing, I can work for several hours and the sense of time passing vanishes for me. Sometimes, I will show up for writing group early just because I can’t wait to get started. Sometimes, I have to set an alarm to remind me when the hour is up, because otherwise, I’ll just keep going. Sometimes, I’m watching the clock.
For a long time recently, years really, I struggled with finding the inspiration to write. I still don’t have a good answer for why I would volunteer (back in 2021) to join a writing group, when I had no particular projects to work on, no motivation to find them, and no personal history of successful participation in such groups.
Today, I came across Keith Leonard’s “Statement of Teaching Philosophy,” a poem about the limits of language, and I was struck by the very first line: “My students want certainty.” We all want certainty, and I wonder today if that’s why I joined that group. Language itself cannot grant us certainty, but the work of writing, of aspiring towards the idea that we can get closer, is something I’ve always believed in.
A writing group instantiates a habit, turning it into a ritual. Having committed to meeting once a week to write, that commitment began to anchor and to reorganize the time where I wasn’t. The momentary flashes of inspiration that come from conversation or from reading a particularly smart passage suddenly had a place to take root. “I should write about that on Xday,” I began thinking. The ritual of writing group shifted my writing habits slightly, from waiting on inspiration to something more akin to percolation.
“A ritual is a steady beat in the rhythm of life. Sometimes this beat drums within the ritual itself — a mantra hummed, a steady count of inhales. Even more importantly, the ritual is reinscribed over time: a cup of coffee brewed once a day, a candle lit once a week, a melody whispered once a year, a party thrown once a lifespan.”
In part, Ullendorff is writing about pseudonymous commenters who journal daily in the comment sections of YouTube videos. “I was witnessing the creation and performance of a ritual,” he explains. “And this ritual stood in sharp contrast to so much of what passes as such on the internet. Something about it felt like a set of instructions for potential online interactions that are more subversive, communal, and sacred: repetition, reciprocity, replication, resistance, reverence.”
The entire post is worth reading. For me, its energy passed through my own sense of the desire for certainty; those features describe my own path back to writing:
Writing feels more certain as I do it regularly
Writing feels more certain if I’m doing it with/for others
Writing feels more certain as patterns emerge across different instances
Writing feels more certain when I choose it over the other things I have to do
Writing feels more certain when it draws me out of the everyday
I’ve quoted Byung-Chul Han’s Disappearance of Rituals a bit over the past year. It’s a book that doesn’t indulge itself in nostalgia, but neither is it shy about what the shift to screen culture is costing us. “The cultural technique of deep attention emerged precisely out of ritual and religious practices.” The internet doesn’t force us to live and think shallowly, nor did it invent those practices, but it’s become a very effective tool for disincentivizing the alternatives.
I have found that I’ve (re)become better at being able to talk about the things that I write about, and that has helped satisfy my desire for certainty as well. It feels perhaps a bridge too far to say of myself that I’m thinking more deeply, but my thoughts feel less shallow to me. That’s enough.