#NaNoWriMo 2021: I Knew I Forgot Something
We’ll make this up later in the month, I promise. Maybe even this weekend!
I went to bed late Wednesday night with a half-formed feeling that there was something I’d forgotten to do, but it wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that I realized I hadn’t written a new newsletter. And yesterday proved to be a whirlwind of activity, although at least by then I was aware of how I was falling short.
But things are calmer today, and I can encourage you to read a wonderful profile of the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber that just appeared in New York. I’m very excited to read the book he had completed (with David Wengrow) just before his untimely death, The Dawn of Everything; in fact, I brought it with me to maybe plunge in over the weekend.
The part I want to tell you about tonight, though, the part I think could be especially helpful to you in your writing practice, is an anecdote about Graeber’s lectures at his first academic posting, at Yale. His approach was informal, maybe even playful, it behind the way he discussed the illustrious predecessors in his field, Molly Fischer writes, “there was a message:”
These thinkers “were smart,” [one of Graeber’s students recalls,] “but they were doing something that anybody can do if they read enough and think hard enough, which is creating theories about the world around you.”
I firmly believe this to be true, with the recognition that for many of us, “read[ing] enough and think[ing] hard enough” requires a significant amount of privilege as well as hard work. The world does not encourage us, as a rule, to step back and reflect on our condition, nor how and why it is what it is. It can take significant effort to wrest the time required to do that from our schedules; for academics, it’s really only possible because they are paying for, or taking out loans for, access to such time—or, for the lucky ones, because someone has agreed to subsidize their efforts.
Developing a steady writing practice won’t automatically confer academic rigor or discipline on you. But it will enable you to take moments here and there to contemplate the world and your place in it, and you can use those moments to refine your stories about the world, fiction or nonfiction.
A Ph.D. reflects a certain amount of prestige and authority, but you can, if you’re patient and diligent, attain similar levels of knowledge or insight or expertise without those official credentials. If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably at least willing to make the effort. I hope you will, and I hope you’ll keep at it.
If, as I’ve just done, though, you fall short on any given day, or even two in a row, know that you can pick things up again tomorrow.