Another Writer's Block

I'm devoting most of my spring break to writing a paper analyzing how sixties rock critics helped to imbue rock with a sense of political importance. I had been really looking forward to writing this paper, but alas, it's eeking out all too slowly and uncomfortably. Alice has poked fun at me for my tendency to have more breakthroughs in terms of reflecting on general writing principles while I'm trying to write than actually getting anything on the screen (probably a more apt metonymy these days).

Lots of my reflection dwells on one of the most mysterious and fickle qualities of writing - flow. Flow is just as relevant to good academic writing as it can be to more literary genres, especially when you want academic writing to share at least some of the qualities of literary prose. I think the major factors that determine whether academic writing will seem just academic or move closer to a literary work has to do with "evocation." I take this ideas from Michael Hyde, tho perhaps I've distorted it a bit. But by evocation, I mean whether the writing calls forth something vivid - an image, a feeling, a tone. A perfectly logical argument or one that is backed by "good" (as in difficult to refute) evidence is not necessarily evocative in itself.

At first I was thinking that evocative writing is much more difficult than just writing good arguments, but I've come to think that assumption is flawed. One of the situations in which I write with the most ease is when I get to a section in my paper where I can write a narrative. Perhaps there is something deeply ingrained in the structure of human consciousness that makes narratives feel more natural. Narrative writing tends to be evocative and relatively easier to write than other modes that require careful planning to lay out a synthetic exposition of interlocking ideas. The hard part in writing academic papers can be finding narratives that actually fit in well with what you're trying to say. One reason I tend to like to read cultural history more than other forms of cultural studies is because historians rely more heavily on narrative. But it ain't easy to find the right narratives for good cultural history, as I'm finding out now trying to write about sixties rock critics.