Vacation work… not an oxymoron

Down time matters. It matters a lot, in fact; it is the space of stillness where ideas have a chance to bubble along, mixing and mingling their flavors until new combinations arise. Sitting in the car can be incredibly productive; as a driver, I’m happy to dictate, and as a passenger, my ever-ready so-much-scribbling notebook is there for me as my adult-level comfort blanket.

Some of this trip has just been list-building. Oh, no, not that kind of list building – back up three steps: not “what do I think,” but “what do I plan to do to make room for thinking (and when.)”

And that’s the joy of vacation time. No need to cross things off (except for the “take the treadmill out of the basement in time to throw it away. THAT got written down and crossed off, and I’m resting from that exertion now!). Just sitting in as close to idle as I ever get, planning a day at the beach, sitting in the quiet and reading for a while, and poking at my phone a bit, and then breaking into active list-making-planning for another bit, and then back to idle mode.

Jack is reading the newspaper; Nissa is doing her paperwork. Tom has disappeared into the back room after saying sharp, incisive things about printer updates, many of which can’t be repeated in polite company.

The reality is that ideas have remarkably little respect for office hours. They show up while driving. Or while somebody else is reading the newspaper. Or during a dispute with a printer driver. Or in the five minutes that immediately follow the decision (ha!) that you are absolutely not going to think about work for the rest of the day.

Which may be why I have stopped trying to draw a hard line between working and not working. There is concentrated work, certainly. But there is also the long simmer: reading, noticing, talking, scribbling, staring out the window, putting two things next to one another and seeing what happens. An email which surfaces a quote for the next article. An idea that would be fruitful when it’s time to work on that article-related blog post. An image that might be worth a paragraph in the next chapter. Or do I mean the other chapter. Let me think about it for a while.

And, happily, vacation gives the simmer more room.

The trick, for me, is not to mistake every blurping bubble a command-to-action. Some things need to be written down. Some just need to be scheduled. And some need to be left alone until they become interesting enough to come back on their own.

And some things, like obsolete treadmills, just need to leave the basement before the trash truck arrives.

Good pre-term holidays, everyone!

 YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN: 

• First Monday of a New Month: What to Write? — On keeping a “to-consider” list of possible projects without turning every interesting idea into an obligation.
• Writing is Momentum — On blogging, listing, staring into space, and other forms of thinking that count as part of the writing process—even when they aren’t producing the Official Important Words.
• The Whiteboard Where Big Things Live — On getting obligations out of your head, making priorities visible, and accepting small, humane, imperfect progress instead of heroic productivity. 

The Editing Horizon: Shaping the Argument First

The “write it perfectly” trap reached out and caught me yesterday. It’s hard to write when every sentence feels like it needs to be perfect. Yesterday wound up as a down day – a weekend, break, rest day, day at sea – and that was probably overdue anyway. Clearing mental space by dealing with the practical details of an impending snowpocalypse turned out to be the right match for my Friday. This morning I feel more refreshed.

To start back up, and to engage more productively with the happy intensity of editorial work <grin>, I have had to remind myself that this is the draft, not the final written word. The time to play with written rhythm and turn of phrase will come, but right now my horizon is narrower and more specific: the argument.

Note from the side-chorus: it is, truly, “happy intensity” once I get into my editorial zone, it’s just that sometimes it takes a long moment or two (or even hour or two) to get there. of writing is sitting with it until the writing actually happens. This is a separate problem from editing—but it often gets confused with it. See The Silence of Not Writing and What To Do About It or Starting From A Place of Blah for suggestions on handling the not-writing part of one’s writing practice.

That reminder matters, because “editing” often gets treated as a single, all-purpose activity. Sit down, fix everything, be done. But that’s not how writing (or revising or editing or making it better) actually works. Different kinds of editing ask for different kinds of attention, and trying to do them all at once is a reliable way to freeze. Tracking ideas across a chapter, noticing gaps or redundancies, and judging how a reader will encounter an argument require a different mental stance than choosing words or shaping sentences. Mixing those tasks usually means neither gets done well.

I think about it the way I think about practicing. You can play through a passage and tell yourself you’re working on everything at once. But real progress happens when you isolate each skill in turn, and give intonation, articulation, or pacing your focused attention. Tomorrow, it will be time to work on the same passage, but with the next skill in mind. Writing works that way too. You can “make it better” by flogging at it, but the best version will come by taking each task in turn.

So today I’m moving through the chapter segment by segment, and not in order. (I know enough about attention to avoid pretending it’s evenly distributed, and yeah, I should do section 7 while I’m fresh!) For each segment, I’ll ask the same series of questions. Does this make sense? Does it do for the argument the thing that needs doing? Might it better serve the chapter on reading, or does it belong here? When a section meets my standard for argument, I turn it green and move on. The polish can wait.

The goals for the weekend are simple: a lot of literal baking (is another “snowpocalypse” reference a cheat?), a lot of logic-checking (five sections today, five tomorrow), and some time with a few new readings that might reshape the argument itself.

That’s the lesson I wanted to share: set the right horizon for the work you’re doing today. When faced with editing, it's not failing if the draft isn’t elegant yet. You’re still drafting. Elegance comes later – after the argument knows what it’s trying to say.