Writing (and perhaps many other forms of creativity), in all of its genres, but especially academic, argument-driven writing, is rock climbing.
Standing at the base of the rock form – that empty page, often with the blinking cursor – there are many first handholds you might go for. The only thing to do is to start climbing up by trying one out. The only way to proceed, is indeed, hold by hold, thereby continuing to draw a line between two points over and over and over again, hoping that this process will continue until you can get to the top-out.
Similarly, with writing, you start with one idea and hang all your cerebral weight on it. You are delicately balanced there, aware of gravity’s resistance, while hunting around, hoping you can connected this holding-idea to some other idea in the vertical landscape of the page. And so you likewise keep on the climb, searching for the next idea ‘handhold’ to reach for from the one you are poised on right now.
But much of climbing (writing) is actually falling. You put too much confidence in your hold, or maybe got a little to bold, and over-reach, and then find yourself right back where you started. You feel you’ve spent too long going too short a distance, and now, on top of it all, it looks as if all that time you just invested in hard work and concentration meant nothing. Never happened. And this happens over an over and over again. The idea you had thought was well fortified, turns out to be porous sandstone, and crumbles in your grip.
This time, you finally manage to get pretty high up on the route you’ve been blazing, but now see that the route has gone cold. It has been swallowed up into vertical terrain (rude). The idea you have placed all your weight on has nowhere now to connect to next. You seem to have given into the blindness of your will, and pushed on too long, without regularly looking up for perspective, and although now much further along than before, you have come to see that what lies above and around you now is a completely flat surface. There are no other places to hold your weight, and you are still very far away from topping out.
So you have to repel back down, maybe even all the way to the ground and get some new perspective. You walk around in the dirt for a while, feel tempted to maybe even walk away, take your shoes off, lay down.
But, then, you see a fissure.
It is a bit far away from where you stand looking up at it, so you aren’t sure you can get to it. So, you’ll have to work your way up to it. You’ll have to retrieve some of the previous handhold-ideas you used during the previous failure, and recycle them in the new route, this new line of ideas you’re hoping will hold you all the way to this Siren-calling fissure (first), and then hopefully to the top-out.
Hopefully.
forestry odyssey 