#this episode sponsored by I dedicated 6 hours to thesis writing today and produced 1 (one) page of writing

[thatscarletflycatcher]

I was probably going to mention this on that post I wrote about the social dance episodes of The Nanny and Frasier, but going to dance classes has given me so many interesting insights, and one of them is the lie --we may call it imprecision, if we want to be precise :P-- that in order to dance well you need to relax.

Because that's not really it. Even from the most basic technical standpoint, dancing depends hugely on things like balance and precision, which you cannot really produce if you are relaxed, really.

What they mean by relaxation is actually that you need to un-stiffen in order to acquire elasticity. And elasticity in action is a form of tension, just not the kind of tension where all the movement stems from you as a motor, and you have a vice grip on. This becomes even more complicated if it is a couples dance, because the tension involved in leading is different from the one involved in following.

In any case I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of my thesis writing. I've always been a very tight, concise academic writer. I'm very used by method to only start when I have a clear scheme in mind not only of the general structure of what I'm writing, but of each part too. That's my only way of reaching flow in writing --I'm writing one section but my mind is already in the next section and is bringing them both to a neat connection. This my advisor with great kindness and elegance calls the metaphysical drive, but tbh with all of you, it's just being a stiff, white knucked gripping writer. And that's just not a viable way of writing something of the length and complexity of even an honors thesis.

(Amusingly, I did write 8 pages of introduction back in December, which advisor called excellent ,in a matter of a few days, which probably gave him the absolutely wrong impression about my normal writing speed. Hence his comments about me sending him 6 more pages whenever I have them, no matter how unpolished. He probably thinks I spend a lot of time polishing before I send. No, siree, my brain just doesn't conceptualize the first draft. I WILL stare at the page for 5 minutes then write two lines. Repeat ad infinitum. Yes, I'm working 15-60 minutes a day on my thesis. That does NOT translate to the reasonable number of words you'd expect from that time.)

So what I'm really musing and grasping after is... what is the writing equivalent to the elastic tension of dancing? Because ultimately when people advice me to "enjoy the process" and to "loosen up", they don't mean that I'll achieve flow when I relax (though they might think that that's what they mean), but when I finally acquire elasticity. The problem is that, in dancing, you have a dance teacher that models the elastic tension of dancing for you, that can even physically demonstrate and show you with actual touch what it means. I don't think there's such a thing for writing, not in any sense that is comparable. I guess part of the process of thesis directing is creating the sort of feedback loop of writing that gives you a mind opposite the way dancing gives you a body opposite, but of course the process is much less intuitive. A thesis director can correct your style, can also give you pointers as to how to cross some rivers and fill some potholes, but they cannot really model for you the skill of writing as a process.