Monthly Archives: June 2021

A beam of light, a mirror, or an axe: Writing as self-discovery

Cognition and writing, Cognitive process and writing, Creative writing, Dissertation writing, Inspiration and motivation, Motivation, Posts by Emily, Reading, Writers writing about writing, Writing resources

By Emily Arvay

Image credit: North News & Pictures Ltd. Creative Commons Licence.

“The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards” (Atwood, 176).

Margaret Atwood and Hélène Cixous suggest that all writing is motivated by a compulsion to explore the deepest parts of ourselves. Both authors argue that writing serves to illuminate “an underworld” to draw unacknowledged or unexamined insights back into the light (Atwood, xxiv). Whereas Cixous compares writing to plunging deep into the earth or ocean (5), Atwood compares writing to entering a dark labyrinth or cave with no opening:

“Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, often combined with a struggle or path or journey – an inability to see one’s way forward but a feeling that there [is] a way forward, and that the act of going forward eventually [brings] about the conditions for vision.” (xxii-xxiii)

For Atwood, writing is midwifed in darkness through which inspiration appears as a flash of light (176). Simply put, writers who enter this underworld serve to illuminate that which is already present but unseen.

For Atwood and Cixous, the process of reading shares many of the same properties as writing: a reader enters a text from a place of darkness, unsure of where that text may take them, and temporarily loses then regains their sense of self in the process. As Cixous describes, to be a reader is “to lose a world and to discover that there is more than one world, and that the world isn’t what we think” (10). Ultimately, both authors acknowledge that writing-as-self-discovery is not an easy process – that any attempt to write with integrity is “an exercise that requires us to be stronger than ourselves” (Cixous, 42). It is perhaps for this reason that Kafka once compared writing to “an axe” to break “the frozen sea inside us” (as cited in Cixous, 17). Whether understood as a beam of light, a mirror, or an axe, Atwood, Cixous, and Kafka teach us that the process of writing, however imperfect, may gift the writer with the means to ascend towards a more luminous, expansive, or magnanimous awareness of self.

Works Referenced

Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Cixous, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

About the author:

Emily Arvay completed her PhD at the University of Victoria in 2019 with her thesis “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism.”  Since then, she has worked as a Learning Strategist and EAL Specialist at the University of Victoria. She is currently conducting further research on the intersections between literary metamodernism and contemporary climate fictions.

 

 

 

Summer bummer and working to white noise

Academic Writing, Deadlines, Distractions, Environment, Focus strategies, Goal setting, Inspiration and motivation, Posts by Emily, procrastination, Procrastination, Productivity, Time management, Writing resources

By Emily Arvay

© University of Victoria

As the weather warms, it can be increasingly tempting to cast off thesis or dissertation work in favour of a strawberry gelato, or pick-up baseball, or a fluffy beach book. Ironically, it is often during the summer months that graduate students find themselves bogged down with preparing for major field exams, thesis or dissertation writing, or condensed language-requirement courses. For many, the intensity of graduate work during the summer months might mean having to forgo that picnic in the park or rousing beach bonfire. One tactic for warding off such tempting distractions is to pretend, at least temporarily, that summer doesn’t exist. To drown out the squeals of children leaping through sprinklers, you might try losing yourself to the quiet din of a busy library, steady rainfall of a winter storm, or smoothing balm of furniture music. Rather than bemoaning those mint mojitos you’re missing out on, you might try embracing your newfound status as a den-dwelling troglodyte by closing those curtains, silencing those devices, and riding out that tsunami of graduate schoolwork with this ten-hour loop of rainy-day jazz. Although it won’t be easy, you might approach your thesis or dissertation project as you would a sandy band-aid: by pushing through the short-term pain of getting those drafted chapters off to your supervisory committee as quickly as possible. Then, once sent, you can treat yourself to a much-deserved break. Long-awaited, that beach-side lemonade will taste all-the-sweeter.

About the author:

Emily Arvay completed her PhD at the University of Victoria in 2019 with her thesis “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism.”  Since then she has worked as a Learning Strategist and EAL Specialist at the University of Victoria. She is currently conducting further research on the intersections between literary metamodernism and contemporary climate fictions.