How I Write - Mary Lou Roberts Transcript

How I Write - Conversation Transcript

Mary Lou Roberts
Mary Louise Roberts’ love of writing is infectious. As a historian, she knows that writing is crucial: she has delighted in writing ever since grade school; and she explains how this delight infuses her study of history.

But Professor Roberts is also a type of writer that others cannot imagine: she will write pages and pages until she understands what she is writing about or develops her argument – she thinks through writing. Along with this, she is quite content to toss out all those pages and start all over again – something which horrifies those who labor word by word and can’t imagine tossing out any of it. She has the gift that others envy: the ability to let the words flow – and, when necessary, she can toss out or file away all those pages without regrets. She loves getting involved in a question – such as the role of women in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century France – and digging in, getting preoccupied “in a really magical, frustrating, horrible, wonderful way,” and working through that preoccupation in her writing – even if it means she files away chapters because, once her direction is clear, they do not pertain. She also keeps a journal, “having a conversation with yourself about your work,” coming up with ideas all of the time.

Lou Roberts writes with very definite habits: she must clean up her area, she must be alone, and she listens to light rock on the radio – she doesn’t like light rock, but she keeps the music on for “white noise,” because if she does listen to music she really does like she is not able to concentrate. She confesses that she stops every half hour to play a video game: Free Cell. It helps her to concentrate. She even spent a year at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton – and taught the other scholars how to play!

Professor Roberts speaks with excitement, energy and great humor across a full range of topics: from the role of writing in history as a discipline to the art of writing concise grant proposals to the agonies of the dissertation. “I actually really love to write,” she admits, “even though I think it’s a really hard thing to do, probably the hardest thing intellectually to do. And it’s probably the thing that made me want to be a scholar in the first place.”

This was the very first “How I Write” conversation – and it certainly set the tone.
-- Hilton Obenzinger

Transcript of How I Write Conversation with Mary Lou Roberts

HO: This is the first, you’re here at the inaugurating day of what I like to call a new tradition at Stanford, a series of conversations, discussions with experienced writers, faculty and others part of the Stanford community to talk about “How I Write.” What you write, why you write: those things are very important and they’re never gone from any kind of discussion. But what we’re going to focus in on is how you write, what kind of work-style, work habits, how you deal with questions of revision, deadlines, writers’ block, other kinds of issues involved. Are you an obsessive outliner, are you an anti-outliner, all those kinds of involved in an intimate process of what it means to work as a working writer. And we’re going to start the first of these with Mary Louise Roberts of the history department. We’re going to videotape it for the purposes of research, and, as I was saying to Lou, you know, a year or two from now one of us will be on “America’s Most Wanted.” But, you know, we’re going to have some kind of record of what we’re doing. Ultimately after accumulating numbers of these tapes, we’ll see what kind of research we get from this, what kind of insights develop over time. I know that when I’ve worked with students in workshops on writing honors theses, I’ve always learned from faculty and from students: there are techniques about how to deal with different issues, as well as the various wide range of idiosyncrasies involved with writing, including various rituals people have before they start writing, various ways people inspire themselves to write, all those sorts of things. So what we’ll do is that we’ll talk for, you know, roughly 45 minutes between the two of us, we’re going to ask some questions. Then we’re going to open it up—there’s a microphone over there that can travel around—for you to ask questions to get a sense of, you know, what kind of other questions you might have. What’s interesting here is also that as a professor of history, Professor Roberts is also a professor of French history, and I guess some questions will be involved with whether or not you write in French, and whether there’s a difference in the way you approach it. So, how are you doing?

MLR: Fine, Hilton. How are you?

HO: We’re old friends; we’ve worked together for a long time. So, you know, do you enjoy writing?

MLR: Yeah, I do. Yeah, I actually really love to write, even though I think it’s a really, really hard thing to do, probably the hardest thing intellectually to do. And it’s probably the thing that made me want to be a scholar in the first place. Scholars are usually readers, writers, or teachers, and I like to read, but I like to write better. And I like to teach a lot too, but I really like to write.

HO: When did that happen? Was that something that…

MLR: Well, I’m a historian, so I would have to say it started in fourth grade.

HO: Fourth grade, really?

MLR: And I was educated in a French Catholic school, which had its many downsides, but one of the upsides of it was that it was a national order of nuns, and they were very into writing. So they would have these national contests about once every two months, once every three months. And the whole school would write on the same topic—and schools all over the country were writing on the same topic—and then if you wrote a really good essay, you got your essay sent to some kind of national competition. And you got off of classes; you could start work at nine in the morning and go ‘til noon. And I loved these contests. Everyone would be writing on the same topic, and I would always get my essay sent. And I really loved that. That was one thing that happened, and that happened really all through eighth grade when I was at this school. The topics—I guess the topics would be different for high school, the middle school, and the lower school—and they were strange topics: like they would take three totally unrelated words and you have to create a story about, you know, where these were the best three things. I kept thinking, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it was something like that. And the other thing that happened to me when I was in fourth grade was I remember our English teacher—and I was a really, very badly behaved kid. I was the kind of kid that was always torturing teachers, always getting kicked out of class, and so on and so forth. But actually one of the reasons why I didn't get kicked out of school was because I was able to write. So one time the English teacher gave us this picture of these two ducks—you know, I grew up in New England, so there’s lots of paintings of ducks around, stuff like that—and they obviously had been hit or something had happened to them, they were falling, and everybody wrote, you know, this is a picture of two ducks falling. And instead of that, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be the duck and wrote it from the duck’s perspective. And it was really exciting to do that. So in some ways writing was the secret side of myself that I kept it hidden from everyone because I really loved to do it, but I had appearances to keep up, I had a gang to run.

HO: [laughter] It’s not the history department, is it?

MLR: No, so the sisters knew that I was a writer, but they didn't tell anybody; they were conspirators. So that was that. And then the next really big writing experience I had was when I was a sophomore in high school, I had to do my first research paper. This is when I found out, well maybe I’m hooked because everyone in the whole class went to Spain over spring vacation, and I stayed home to write my paper on Elizabethan England, which, you know, of course had to be like seven pages. Mine was 85 pages long and had a bibliography of fifty books. But sitting down and writing that was incredibly exciting. And then when I was a senior I wrote the classic history paper, “Should we have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan?” And the thing I remember about that writing experience was I developed a culture of writing for the first time, which is that I was the youngest of many children, and my sisters had moved out so their bedrooms were free, and I decided when I wrote that paper I was going to set up a study. So I set up a table, I brought in a typewriter, and I would go and work every day. And it was a lovely experience writing that paper. But I didn’t really get hooked until I was in college. And for some reason my sophomore and junior year nothing happened, but my freshman year and my senior year . . . My freshman year I pulled my first all-nighter, and I wrote a paper on the Aeneid, and I’ll never forgot that like total high of writing that paper. And then like watching the sun come up when I had like spent the evening with Dido and Aeneas, and I was just so into it. And then when I was a senior I wrote a bunch of papers. And by this time the culture of writing had become important, where I always set up the table, I always put the typewriter out, and there was always some tape that I played endlessly. I remember one of them…

HO: Music?

MLR: Yeah, Marvin Gaye.

HO: What did you do with that?

MLR: I can't even listen to it now. So, but anyways, I remember in my senior year writing two papers, both of which were sort of off the wall but thinking, “I love this; I could spend my whole life doing this; this makes me feel really alive.” So it was really that experience of writing that made me want to be an academic.

HO: Well, now, somewhere in there writing got tied to history.

MLR: Uh-huh.

HO: Did it change because it got connected to history? In other words, from what you said, why didn’t you write fiction or other kinds of writing? I’m just curious about how that flowed into the area of concern.

MLR: Well, first of all I've always been sort of marginal to history; I never really fit into a discipline very well.

HO: Ah-hah, so that explains it!

MLR: So, you know, I kind of came to history late. I mean, I wrote, one of the papers I wrote when I was a senior—just to give you an idea of how whacked-out I was—was a comparison of Nietzsche and—I was like in my high feminist studies period then—so it was a comparison of Nietzsche and Mary Daly, who was a feminist philosopher, in which I took the poetry of Adrienne Rich to compare to the aphorisms of Nietzsche. And I did it with a Kierkegaard scholar, who later confided to me that after sessions with me he’d go home and have three stiff drinks. So, I mean, that’s not what I would call your average history paper. So I mean I went to a small liberal arts school where by the time I was a senior I could pretty much do what I wanted to do. I mean it was really pretty much, you could just kind of…So, in fact, the big fear—it’s actually an interesting question I bring up—the big fear about going to graduate school was that I had to do a more traditional history program. And I would be having a really hard time pinning in, I thought I would really have to pin in my creativity or my imagination, what I really loved about writing. I was really afraid of professionalization. So…

HO: Well, you know, you had talked about the writing culture. What is that like for you now? What’s your writing culture now?

MLR: I have a nice office and a nice study, so I don’t have to just like use my sister’s bedroom who’s gone to college. And my study has to be very neat. I can’t—I mean, you know, I do have lots of quirks, there’s no doubt about it, we all do—but unless the office is neat or the house is neat, I can't write, unless I just totally block everything out, close both doors and not think about it because sometimes, you know, it’s so messy that if I really cleaned it up I wouldn’t have any time for writing.

HO: Is it really messy?

MLR: No. It’s just everything has to be somewhat…there’s a kind of peace to it. So there's a tradition for me of coming to a desk and sitting down and feeling this incredible sense of peace, that’s a recurring dream for me. I’ll be dealing with a lot of chaos of some kind, and then I’ll arrive at a desk, and it’s a perfectly clean desk. So for my library study in Green Library, it’s completely empty. There’s just something about going into a completely empty, quiet space that is very, very appealing to me. I don't have any particular time of day that I write; I used to write at night, now I write mostly during the day.

HO: Can you write at all times?

MLR: I haven’t for a long time even tried to write at night, so…but it takes a tremendous amount of energy, so I’m actually kind of like a mid-day writer: get on, do your email, warm up, peak around two, come down.

HO: Teach class.

MLR: Teach a class, right.

HO: And do you write on the computer?

MLR: I write on the computer always. In fact, that’s the other thing that really changed for me is I started writing on a typewriter. And a lot of you probably don’t even have that experience, but that changeover occurred for me my first year of graduate school, and it was an amazing changeover because you can revise, suddenly you could revise endlessly. You know, if you were a professor you could always have someone type your manuscripts. And I’m actually a very fast typist, but just being able to add things at the last minute, and, you know, change the order of something. I mean suddenly I was so freed up as a writer in a way I hadn’t been before. What I would do before was I’d write a rough draft by hand, and then I’d type a rough draft, and then I’d do a final draft. But now I mean…

HO: You handedit, and add inserts.

MLR: Yeah, but I would never do that. The only thing that I have to say is sometimes if I’ve been revising for a long time, I have to print it out. Somehow it’s different when I print it out, and I’ll revise it in the way I would if it was on the screen.

HO: You do revise it on the screen?

MLR: All the time, yeah.

HO: All the time. Are you a sentence by sentence reviser, or . . . Do you follow what I’m saying?

MLR: Versus?

HO: You know, people who can’t move onto the next sentence until one sentence is perfect.

MLR: Umm…I would say I’m more of a paragraph reviser. You know, I like to look at the whole thing, and I can’t move on until I get that perfect. But I’m not a sentence person; I’m a paragraph person.

HO: When you’re working on an article or a large project, do you get an outline?

MLR: No; outlines never work for me because I used to make them, and then I would just totally throw them away, you know what I mean? Like, I’d get to 1A, and that would be like thirty pages, so you know 1B and C could be…you know what I mean? It just didn’t work for me. Something happens to me when I sit down to write: I think through writing. So I know students can do it, and I’ve always been amazed that they can, you know, that they can think through the whole thing before they write, but for me writing is this really organic kind of really almost mystical process that takes place when I am looking at the screen, so outlines have never worked for me.

HO: But you have some kind of picture of where you are going, right, in your head?

MLR: Ehh…you know what it is: I saw this painting at—I can’t remember—a long time ago at MOMA in New York, and today I thought, “This is my writing process,” which is this five panels, and the first panel was incredibly blurry—I can’t remember what it was, you know, it was actually unrecognizable—the second panel was just a little bit clearer, not much; the third was a little clearer; the fourth was crystal clear; and then the fifth panel had started to fade a little bit. So to me it feels like I always know what I want to say instinctively because when you go to do research, you’re making choices, right? You’re sitting down and you’re choosing some things and not others. And it’s pure instinct for me, and I actually tell my graduate students, “Don't think; just go on an instinct; follow your instincts” because I think instincts are a very underrated human resource actually. So I have an incredibly vague idea, and then when I start to write, it becomes a little clearer, slowly clearer, clearer, clearer, clearer. And then it’s like there. But it’s almost like I have to go along the road and then look back to see where I’ve come.

HO: So do you do a lot of major revision?

MLR: Yeah.

HO: You think it through, and then do sometimes, let’s say, you’ve written twenty pages, and you realize the first ten are to get to where you wanted to be?

MLR: I've thrown out whole chapters; it’s sad but it’s true. And actually I think that’s one of the hardest things because I’m a real type-A personality, and there’s a lot of waste in this process. That was the single hardest thing for me to come to terms with, is how much time I would waste. But if you don’t, you sacrifice quality. It’s like, you can’t justify all the time you spent on something by including it when it’s wrong, and so you just have to realize that nothing’s really a waste, though, which I kind of half believe and half don’t believe—but it is true that sometimes you’re getting from there…you know, the path from A to Z is never going to be straight. So you just have to go like this, and it just takes a lot longer than it should, but it’s never going to be like that. And I guess the way my writing has changed is I think it’s gotten better because—and it’s not just my writing but it’s my whole thinking as a historian, the whole argument as a historian—I've gotten a lot more patient than that, and I’ve gotten a lot more tolerant of waste. And because of that I think my work is better because I don’t…you know, what happened was, that was really sort of upsetting, was I would put it in the footnotes a lot of it. Well, you know, I’ll just put it in the footnotes. The footnotes became sort of the dumping grounds of my stuff. And when I put my manuscript in last summer for my second book, I realized I had become a real addict, you know, because I had never used the word count function on my computer, which was really a startling experience. Unfortunately my editor did, and I think my manuscript was 92,000 words and my footnotes were 62,000 words. And so he told me that was a no-go, so I had to cut out a lot, which was…

HO: You had to reincorporate some of the footnotes into…

MLR: Yeah, I did a lot of that too. But mostly I had to cut a lot of it out. Because it wasn’t…I used the footnotes to gossip, you know what I mean? Like, this doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but it’s really interesting and fun and you really should know it anyways. So that was where the waste was going.

HO: Some people actually put their real arguments in the footnotes.

MLR: In the footnotes, yeah. That happens a lot actually; yeah, I agree.

HO: And inadvertently.

MLR: Sometimes that’s happened to me; people have said that it’s in the footnotes in a draft I’ve given them.

HO: Well, you know, there’s a whole bunch of things to pursue in this, but one thing is about the writing culture that you have. You listen to music now?

MLR: I do listen to music, yeah.

HO: What does that do for you? Is that like hearing white noise? What’s the music now?

MLR: Well, Hilton is . . .

HO: I know. Share it.

MLR: Well, it’s really come as a shock to some of my students that somehow have found out about it: I listen to KOIT. And the reason I do…

HO: You should explain what it is because everyone doesn’t know what it is.

MLR: Oh, well, it’s like really bad soft rock, really bad soft rock. And the reason I do is because I can't listen to really good music. I mean, my favorite kind of music is jazz and blues, so if I’m doing something like footnotes I’ll listen to like Etta James or B.B. King or something like that. But that’s such good music that I get distracted. So I find that as a writer I’m best off when I’m a little distracted, you know, because if I get too focused I get stuck. I just am thinking too hard about it. And for me, I either need to go away from it and come back, which works really well, or I need to distract myself slightly by being slightly distracted. And KOIT’s perfect because the music, you know, at a certain level it’s listenable, you can listen to it, but it’s not so good that I'm not totally distracted by it. So that’s the…

HO: You can’t write in complete silence.

MLR: I can, actually.

HO: You can?

MLR: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

HO: Do you, when you do revisions do you ever, let’s say, go sit in a café or something like that, or, no, you can’t really, you prefer…

MLR: Solitary. Uh-huh.

HO: Solitary.

MLR: Yep, I’m in solitary. Although, sometimes it really helps to take something some place else, you know what I mean?

HO: That’s solitary.

MLR: That’s solitary, yeah.

HO: Work in the library…

MLR: Yeah, exactly, yeah. I actually get distracted by public places; I’m always listening in on conversations.

HO: You know, you also told me another thing: you take breaks working on a computer.

MLR: Yeah, a have another little quirk, and I actually recommend it to my graduate students. I think it’s a great quirk. For me, the only really hard thing about writing is chaos. I hate chaos because I’m a really anal person. But chaos is really important because if you stay with it long enough, again, something really good will happen. And if you don’t live with it, if you just want to tidy things up, you might not think about the most important or interesting story to tell. So for me, dealing with chaos is really hard; by chaos I mean, you know, standing in front of your screen thinking, “What the hell is this about?” You know? Just as an aside, when I was doing my dissertation writing, we had the five levels of depression. The first level was “I don't know what this chapter’s about”; the second level was “I don't know what this book is about”; third level was “I don't know why I chose this topic”; fourth level was “I don't know why I’m an historian”; fifth was “I don't know why I’m alive.”

HO: I’m stopping at two or three.

MLR: Right, right, so chaos is really hard. So what I do—it really works—there's a little game on your Windows; you all have it on your own computer, and it’s called “Free Cell”. I don’t know if any of you have played Free Cell? And basically the object of the game is you have eight—OK, you turn it on and it has eight columns of completely chaotic cards. And the object of the game—you have four free cells—and the object of the game is to get all the cards from ace to king in the top right-hand corner. And so what it’s all about is taking chaos and making it orderly. And I’m actually really good at this game; I win hundreds of games in a row. And I’m really bad at the minesweeper one; I can’t do that one at all, but I’m really good at Free Cell. So I feel this incredible sense of mastery, you know? It’s like, “I can do this; I can get this all in an ordered four columns.” And it really helps me; I get a break from the writing, and then I get to satisfy my need for mastery and control. And it’s really helped me a lot with my writing, I have to say.

HO: And then you go back?

MLR: And then I go back; I'm ready. You know? I can face it again. And I also think while I’m doing it too, you know; so it’s a really nice way to sort of get away. So actually I spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and I got everyone into Free Cell.

HO: This is advanced study?

MLR: Even Clifford Geertz was playing Free Cell.

HO: You know, so many things that you raised. One of them is, you said, you know, the chaos on the screen which indicates various things about how people get started and what happens when you get stuck and, of course, the worse thing, you really get blocked. Do you have techniques for dealing with that? And, you know, obviously some of these are techniques, but are there other experiences…

MLR: I think if you’re really stuck the best thing to do is just to leave it for a while—that’s what I always do, you know, whenever I feel like I am wrestling it to the ground. And I have felt that way. I mean in every chapter…in every book there is one chapter…I never get blocked like I can't work because I’m so driven and ambitious that I can always get myself to write.

HO: So that never happens to you?

MLR: Never. In fact, I think one of the reasons I have been so successful is way I deal with depression and life’s ups and downs is to work. So that’s never been a problem. What is a problem is that I get too intensely into it, and then I can’t…I get jammed sort of the way you’re describing now. And then I just need to take some time away for it.

HO: To get some distance?

MLR: To get some distance.

HO: Well, you know, when you’re revising, do you put it away and come back a week later, type of thing?

MLR: Yeah, definitely. Sometimes what I like to do actually is to get a draft of something done, and then go off and do research for six weeks and then let it percolate. And then I’ll come back, and I’ll think, you know, “This is a piece of shit.” I really will, whereas when I left I thought it was pretty good. But that’s the hard thing about going away from something is, you come back to it and realize that…

HO: And you may be right.

MLR: I know I’m right. I know I’m right.

HO: Are there sometimes that you’re wrong? You misjudge your sense of being negative about your own work.

MLR: I'm always more critical of my work than other people are. Definitely. But I get to a point where, you know, like I sent off my manuscript I finished last fall. I now I have it back; I’m copy-editing it.

HO: What’s this on, by the way?

MLR: It on the New Woman, in France. And it’s a group of women who were the first women in France to sort of do something other than be at home being wives and mothers. So, yeah, no, I mean, it’s bad, but looking at it, it’s not so bad.

HO: Do you get wonderful joy? You know, there are various stages of course in a book, you know, finishing it, you know, getting it accepted, and then smelling the print.

MLR: Yeah.

HO: Do you actually get pleasure in that…

MLR: Oh yeah, I mean, you know, having your first book published is like…I mean the copy-editing in this book’s like not that much fun. Although it’s fun to copy-edit; I like to copy-edit because, you know, someone’s gone over it really carefully, and I have to work and see what they’ve done and it’s really interesting. But the real thrill is when it comes back the next time and it’s a book. I mean, it’s not a book yet, but it’s the galleys, you know, so you can see…you know, it’s in print. And when it happened to me I was in Paris living on like the eighth floor of some place. And it was a Friday afternoon—I remember this so well. And I got what’s called a [French phrase], which means that someone’s come by and tried to deliver a package. But the post-office was going to close in fifteen minutes for the weekend, so I was just running down, and I said, I just got to get this book. So I got there and he said, “Well I’m sorry, we’re closed,” and I said, “I want my book! Please!” and he said, “Oh, I didn’t realize you’re a writer.” The French have such a weak spot for authors.

HO: This would never happen in America! Not at the post office!

MLR: And so he, you know, brought it out, and then I had to like run home and run up eight flights of stairs, and I just took it out, and it was, like, such an amazing feeling, just an amazing feeling, it really is. And then when you see it as a book it’s incredibly exciting too. It’s like you work on it for eight or nine years, and then you hold it in your hands and it’s this thick. To me, it’s really magical.

HO: Have you had the experience of reading something you’ve written a long time ago and not realizing that you wrote it?

MLR: Yeah, definitely.

HO: Or said, “What!? Did I write this book?”?

MLR: I definitely have had that experience. Yeah, in fact, my first year at Stanford, I had finished my dissertation the year before, and I hadn’t looked at it for several months because I was moving and getting involved with teaching and stuff. And then I had to present it at a workshop in Berkeley, so I thought I better, you know, read it. But I didn't understand it; it was too difficult for me. I said, “Oh my God; I don’t understand what I wrote!”

HO: At the time you were really inside.

MLR: Yeah, I could do it, but it was like, “What am I saying here?” You know, it wasn't that it was unclear; it sounded really smart, but I just didn't understand it. So that was kind of funny.

HO: Let me ask you; let me just shift gears a little bit here. You know, writing history often involves narrative; but history isn’t just narrative; there is some kind of argument. How have you, kind of, dealt with that? You know what I’m saying? Rather than just saying, “I’m simply going to tell the story of the New Woman,” but there’s an angle, there’s an insight, right, that you’ve developed, an analysis, a point of view. How has that emerged? And how have you been able to incorporate that in terms of your writing?

MLR: Well, I actually don't write narratives in my books. Both my books are on very tiny little periods of history, so I don’t have to write a narrative. And both of them are similar in that I get interested in a topic and then that leads me to another topic that I think it is related but I’m not quite sure how, and then that leads me to another topic. And my books never really…I mean, I think if I have a weakness as a writer it’s that my books don’t fully fit together. But I'm not very good at staying with one subject; I get really bored; I’m restless. So, you know, when I started writing this book, I started out with a group of women, an amazing group of women in France who wrote this daily newspaper for five years. And it was not like a feminist paper or feminine paper; it was like the New York Times, and they wrote it completely on their own. And only the male janitor was allowed on the premises. And so I thought, “Oh, I'll just write about them.” And then I wrote a chapter on the founder, and she’s extremely theatrical, and I found out she used to be an actress. And so I thought, “Oh, I'll try to learn something about actresses.” So I thought what do I know about actresses? Well, Sarah Bernhardt. So then I went over to Green, and I got a biography of Sarah Bernhardt, and I totally fell in love with Sarah Bernhardt. So then I had a whole two chapters on her, and I kept trying to figure out how was I going to fit that in. So I think in the end it all worked out, but it’s really about letting my mind wander in the period, and…

HO: It’s very serendipitous.

MLR: Yeah, and then I have to figure out how it all fits together, which is always a problem.

HO: Have you done archival work where you’ve been able to just like, something shoots out at you from the archive? You know, looking at someone’s letter or have you ever done that kind of research?

MLR: Yeah, definitely. But I can't think of an archive as being a really motivating…you know what I mean? I get motivated in the subject and then go to the archives, but the archives…It might be different this time because I’m thinking about doing the Second World War and there’s just an incredible amount of archives about that. But so far I have been more sort of a reader of books than going to the archives.

HO: Well, you know, what other, kind of, aspects of history—you know, in terms of historiography, theoretical-type, have you done theoretical articles about something like…?

MLR: No, but I think my history would probably be classified as post-modern, which is kind of a controversial approach in history. But I don’t put any theory…I mean, my feeling about theory is that you read it and you absorb it totally and then you write history according to that theory, but you don't talk about the theory in your work, especially for historians because they’re so allergic to theory. So a lot of it is for teaching.

HO: So you’re careful in how you…you have a theory but you don’t necessarily discuss it overtly.

MLR: Well, it’s more also that I think that theories are tools to be used: they create questions, right, big, big questions. And my experience about post-modern theorists such as Foucault is they raise really interesting questions about women's history and gender. So I’m really less interested in Foucault and defending Foucault’s, sort of, “viewpoint” or whatever than I am in asking the kind of questions that Foucault's theories allow me to ask and getting new kinds of answers, new kinds of viewsfrom them. So I’m less interested…I mean to me, I mean I’m thinking now Second World War, I don’t postmodernism’s going to work for that period so that’s the axe to that theory. You know, my real objective as a writer and, of course, historian is to try and you know make that period as truthful…to be as truthful to that period as I can; to ask the most interesting questions about it, ask questions that other people haven't asked, and then to try and figure out how to write it in a form that makes sense. So it’s very ad hoc; my method is very ad hoc.

HO: It sounds like you’re motivated by the thing…

MLR: Yeah, I’m motivated…

HO: …that interests you, and then everything’s sort of shaping the way that you write about it.

MLR: That’s exactly it.

HO: Now, let me ask you, have you—I’ve come up with other questions—have you ever collaborated? Have you ever worked with somebody else on writing?

MLR: No. I've thought about it; I think it would be a really interesting experience. My sister, Beth, is also a writer, and she collaborated on a book with her daughter, and I think that would be a really hard experience.

HO: Are they still talking to each other?

MLR: Yeah they are. There were definitely hard times. I mean there were times when they wouldn’t answer the phone on each other.

HO: Now have you written in French? I mean any kinds of writing in French, letters to people…

MLR: Well I do write in French. I write letters a lot, you know. But I always get a translator. There was one time when…I mean, if you get a bad translator, it’s just really hell. Because I mean the one time I got a bad translator I could tell it was bad French…I knew enough French to tell it was bad French, but I didn’t know enough French to correct it. So poor Philippe Buc, you know, I was laughing, he’s just like running the other way when he would see me, like, “Please, can I have two seconds?” So after that I just paid the money and got a really good translator. You know, the French are really fanatics about French. It’s too important to not have it be really good, when you have the French, be excellent.

HO: You know, with all the pleasures that you have writing, in your classes, you have to deal with other people's writing, as well, sometimes on tenure committees and have you been a reader for books for publishers? How have you been able to respond or how do you respond to other people's writing—undergraduate, graduate, and other historians?

MLR: Well, I think Stanford undergrads write really well. I’m really impressed with how well that they write. I taught high school for four years before, and so I know what it’s like when kids can't write. It’s really depressing to spend that much time on skills. And I really do find that Stanford students get a lot of support for writing in lots of other places, so I don't have to spend that much time doing the writing help for them, and I don't. I mean, I mostly grade—I mean, I definitely edit when I’m grading—but I don't spend a lot of time on their writing. Graduate students, yeah, I actually work a lot with them on writing because I think they have less support from writing centers like this, and particularly writing grants—that’s where I just kill them—I'll go through six drafts with a student because…

HO: They’re hard.

MLR: They are. It’s a really hard genre, and then if you don’t write it well it can make all the difference. And I know this from being on grant reading committees. You know, if something’s badly written, it’s just like, “Next!” You know? So I just tell them, you know, you’ve got to get it to a point where it’s so smooth that the reader does not have to work at all to understand what you’re saying. And I actually think good writing is hugely important to success, at least in history. I mean I know a lot of really bad historians who have gotten far because they can write well. So, you know, you read what they say, you’re so taken with it, and then you read it again, you think, “You know, there’s really not that much here,” but it’s so beautifully written. So it’s really crucial. For manuscripts I think I probably mostly focus on content and leave the writing to the copy-editor.

HO: Do you—I’ll just ask one or so more questions and then we’ll open it up—but do you ever—what’s the word?—kind of develop your style self-consciously? Do you ever read other people’s writing—historian, novelist, magazine—and then say, “Ooh, I want to do that,” or “I like that sentence”? And what has struck you; who are some of the writers that, say—in the field and outside the field—that you say, “Oh yeah, I want to steal that”?

MLR: That’s a great question because it’s such an important…I mean, we all have writers we love and we try to imitate. I mean, I think it’s a really crucial way…I always tell people, I always tell my undergraduates, if you want to be a good writer, just go read and read and read and read and don't read crap, read really good stuff because the more you read, the better you write. You know convince them. All the people I know who are really good writers are not only unbelievably prolific readers but they read things from all different branches. I'm a really slow reader so it’s something I would like to do more of, I’m not a big reader, but I don’t do very much. And I wish I did because I think I’d be a better writer if I did. But there are three people I can think of. One is Carl Schorske, who wrote this amazing book about fin-de-siecle Vienna. And I actually had it when I was a junior in college, and I remember coming back to my room and just reading…I mean now it’s too coy for me, and too tight, and too perfect. But when I was in college I just thought…you know, he’s one of these guys who just makes everything come together perfectly, and makes all these amazing connections, and just has got an incredible sense of the whole. And I think actually that’s kind of what I try to do. You know, I have sort of a wandering mind, and then I try to bring it all back together in some—at least ragged—whole. And the second person is Bob Darby, who actually…he’s one of the people I don't think is that smart, but he’s a really, really good writer. And one of the things that he does that I think is brilliant is he engages the reader in the process of historical investigation. So he always starts out with a problem, and it’s usually—and this is how I teach my students—it’s usually a counterintuitive problem. So I mean actually an article that I once wrote was about short hair in the 1920s, and I started out by talking about how it was just unbelievably controversial: you know, like, fathers murdered hairdressers and kept their daughters in the cellar for two months until their hair grew out. And so the problem was, “What's the big deal about hair?” And then not only do you raise a big question in the beginning with a counterintuitive problem, but then you engage the reader in the process of trying to figure out the answer. You know, “OK, well let's look at this and see if this will help. Well, it sort of does but it doesn't,” you know, beginning of the next paragraph, and so on and so forth. And I just find that very engaging as a writing-style as a reader because I’m involved in the process of figuring out the answer to the historical problem. And the third person who I think of is—I’m an avid New Yorker reader—and I just love the way Anthony Lane writes movie reviews because he’s so funny, and he’s just such a brilliant writer, and he’s so witty. And I don't think I could ever write like one eighth as well as him, but he’s just somebody who I just love to watch his moves. I could read anything he writes about any topic. And in general I think the New Yorker is like that: you know, it’s so well-written that I can read anything about anything.

HO: Great, well look, let’s open this up if you have any questions or comments, observations, that you want to add. Anybody want to kick in.

A: I’m dying to ask something. Was there a time in your career—maybe when you were younger rather than older—when you really consciously realized that you were inhabiting a genre of history writing, that it became second nature to you, you knew enough about the genre so that you knew a bunch of ways to start an article, or a bunch of ways to arrange the evidence, and so forth? Or did it just slowly, accretivelyhappen and you weren't so much aware of it?

MLR: Well, I guess what hooks me on that question you ask—it’s a great question—is I don't think I ever think of myself as thinking in one disciplinary term. I’m definitely a historian, but that’s not how…I would define myself as someone like a writer before I…I usually write about things that most historians are interested in. So, and I've always been like sort of marginal in some ways. But there was a period of my life when I began to realize that I had a style, you know what I mean? Like that’s kind of what you’re talking about, isn’t it? OK. Whether that style is a historical style, I don't know. But there was a period…and it was when I wrote my dissertation. It’s like, “I have a style,” and it’s the style that I have more or less kept. I think it’s gotten a little bit better. I’m hoping it gets better. But, yeah, that was it, the moment I wrote my dissertation.

A: Thank you.

A: I'm really interested by your last answer because I was a literature scholar in a not so long ago life, and I had always wanted to be a historian. I thought, “Oh God, I chose the wrong field.” I wanted to ask a question about what you were talking about earlier about having to lose text and wasting text. And I wonder if you’ve ever archived things, or if you have anything personal that you’d never think of publishing that’s extracted from what you had to throw away that you keep?

MLR: Yeah. For me, the funny thing is that when I was in Paris doing my research, I was so, again, driven, that if I got to the library at, like, 9:30 instead of 9:00, I was really upset with myself, and then I always stayed until 6:00, 6:30. And then I ended up not using two months worth of research, which was on feminism and suffrage. And I got through it, and I realized, you know, I was kind of just doing that because you’re supposed to do that when you write about women and I really was not that interested in it. And it’s still in my box in my office. And a couple of years ago another historian suggested to me, you know, “You really should write up that material,” and I thought, “What does that mean to, you know…” I mean, to me the idea that just because you have this research you have to write it up and give it to the world was alien to me because unless it’s part of some larger set of problems…so, but two months of research down the drain. You know, I try not to get too heart-broken about it, but it definitely rests on my mind. But I think the book would have not been as good if I had included it so in terms of the intellectual decision I made I feel completely at peace about that. Did I answer your question?

A: Uh-huh.

HO: It sounds like you’re driven by something that bugs you or a passion about something really of interest, rather than an agenda of what you think you should write now: “We should know about this thing” or “We should write about this.”

MLR: Yeah, I get really… I mean I just wrote the acknowledgements to my book, and I apologize to all my friends and family for ignoring them essentially, not answering Christmas cards, or birthday cards; and I get really obsessed with books. And it’s not about…it’s about ambition, but it’s also about an intellectual problem that I really want to solve. And I realize how much, how important it is to me because since I turned my book in I have just been so sad, so depressed. I just miss it so much. And it’s not even… I mean, now it’s back, but I’m sort of you know like looking for what, page numbers to articles kind of thing, which is like the most tedious thing in the world. And it’s finished. You know, there was a huge problem, it preoccupied me in a really amazingly magical, frustrating, horrible, wonderful way for eight years, and now it’s finished. And I don't have a new project yet, so I’m in a really sad period. And I realize I just get really obsessed with it. It definitely was being on a tenure-track at Stanford and all the pressure I was under. But it’s more than that too; it’s really about having a problem and really wanting to figure it out. And not having that is really hard for me, not having that now.

HO: And the problem, I mean, you know, it connects to something that is important to you personally, but important through you personally to the world.

MLR: Yeah, well, I don’t know, I mean it’s funny. My first…

HO: OK.

MLR: My first book was about crisis and anxiety, which basically describes my graduate school years. And my second book, which I just finished, is on performance, which basically describes my Stanford years.

HO: The third book should be about…

MLR: Yeah, I’m not quite sure.

HO: Yeah, that’s actually part of the process; you’ve got to figure out with you’re processing…

MLR: There’s absolutely no doubt. I'm completely convinced that people deal with topics that have some personal…

HO: For you.

MLR: Yeah. I mean, I’m saying that jokingly, but I’m quite sure that that’s why I did performance because Stanford’s felt like a really long performance to me.

A: I think I was very struck by this obsession, the term obsession because as a third-year graduate student, I just finished writing a set of grant proposals and watching the rest of the people in my cohortalso sit in this room, which has such a quality of “now we know” and edit and reedit and reedit over and over again until really the words lost meaning, signified and signifiers going all around and around, and also I’m writing about language so it becomes a little even harder. And it felt like it was an exhausting process and by the end we all sort of really needed a break and just stopped doing it. So the question I had for you is in terms of I guess editing more than the writing process is, when you have an idea and you’ve worked on it for a long time, how do you keep the momentum going, rather than just hit that wall where nothing means anything any more?

MLR: Well, I guess I have a number of ways to answer. First, we were writing a grant proposal, which is really the shittiest kind of writing in the world because, you know, I always tell my students, I mean I think what’s hard about grant proposals is for graduate students—and this has happened to me too—it’s also the time you’re defining your topic, OK? So you have these two things coming together that are pretty incommensurable: one is to market your topic and the other is to think it through. Because thinking it through makes it…and everyone goes through this, but really thinking it through means to make it really unmarketable for awhile, you know what I mean? Because I think when I used to have to write grant proposals—and I still do—it’s all about shutting things down to make them sound more packaged and neat. Do you understand what I’m saying? So I found that a really frustrating kind of writing to do. So to me that’s really different from this much more open-ended, kind of patient, tolerant waiting for the ideas to slowly take shape. So that’s the first thing I would say, is that if you really hated that, I don’t think you have to worry about the other kind of obsession.

HO: The dissertation will be a different kind of problem.

MLR: Yeah. But the other thing I would say is, you know I went through a really interesting process with one of my graduate students last summer. She had gone through grant proposals—even won a few—on a topic which I actually thought was not very good, but it worked well for the grant proposal. And then at the beginning of the summer I said, you know, you really have to—because in our orals we have to present the topic—and I said, you know, you need to really fill this out more, you need to really work more, and she got herself stuck, she couldn't do it. And I told her to listen to her instincts, you know, that little voice inside of you that says, “I hate this,” you know, or “This is really boring” or, you know, “This is really tedious” or…and we don't listen to that little voice. You know, when we were little kids, we had that little voice that says, “Mommy’s really angry.” You know? And then Daddy says, “Mommy’s not angry at all.” Or, you know, the little voice says, “Daddy’s really sad today,” you know, and he says, “No, I’m not sad at all.” So we don’t learn to listen to that; we learn to ignore that voice. And actually that is the voice which for me as a writer is the infallible voice. So if you’re getting a little voice saying, “This is really tedious,” you know? Because what happened with my graduate student was she knew that she was not going anywhere with this topic. Her metaphor was it was a relationship: you know, it’s like a boyfriend she thought she could change and make it better, and then she realized she couldn't, so she finally had to leave him. And so when she came to my office—and she finally gave that up—and she said, “Oh, there’s a lot of topics out there I’m dating,” and then she said, “It’s a funny thing because there’s this little voice in the back of my head”—I was like, “Yes!”—and, you know, “I would really like this” and she started doing it, and that ended up being her topic. And now she’s in France, and she’s having a great time. So I don’t know if you’re feeling like the little voice is telling you this is really a bad topic or I don’t like this topic, but sometimes that’s important to listen to.

A: I have a strange question, but I have to sayI’m in physics and I’m a Ph.D. graduate student…

MLR: We think you’re strange anyway, so…

A: How do you know—when a deadline doesn’t come into play—how do you know it is time to start writing?

MLR: I don’t. My students, I passed out paper topics today two and a half weeks before the paper’s due. And I said, “I know this is, like, off your screen for another two weeks, but I thought I would give it to you.” Because, you know, by the time they’re seniors, they start the night before, we all know that they do. It just depends on what kind of writer you are. I mean, some people can really like sit down two days before and, you know, just do it; they need a deadline, right on top of it to do it. But I'm the type of person who has to start at least a week before because I really do need to leave it aside for a couple days, and that’s what I tell my students to do, is to start enough ahead of time so you can write a draft and leave it aside for at least 24 hours and then come back to it. But I do think that there are…don’t you think there are people who can…like a last minute type of person.

HO: Yeah, and there are people who choke doing the last minute thing. And there are people who want to do it and say, “It’s due on Friday, but I am going to tell myself it’s due on Wednesday” and therefore get the adrenaline rush to get it done on Wednesday.

MLR: It’s like people who, you know, put their clocks fifteen minutes early so they’re actually on time. I live with someone like that. So I don’t know what kind of person you are, whether you’re a last minute type of person or…

A: No, I was just trying to ask so I can get to judge if you don't have a deadline. Like, when should Istart thinking about putting together my Ph. D. thesis? It’s been with me for years.

MLR: I got it, OK. Sorry I didn’t answer the right question.

HO: It was a good answer, though.

MLR: Thanks, Hilton.

HO: It was interesting.

MLR: You know, I have to tell you, I’m not the best person to answer that question because I’m pretty driven. And, you know, a lot of it for me is habit because I started graduate school late so I wanted to get through it really quickly—I didn’t start until I was 29—and I didn't want to be like 40 without a job, so I drove myself through graduate school. And then I got to Stanford—perfect place for writing—you know, I had to write a book and a half in seven years. So I’ve always had really far away deadlines which I drove for. And so I think it’s really part of your nature.

HO: Yeah, well, you know, if other people have their experiences to share around this, you know, please do. But one of the things that happens, people have different ways of approaching this. One is that you research and research and research until you are bursting.

MLR: Yeah.

HO: And then you start writing. OK? Another way people have approached this is you start writing right now: you start, you sit down, and say, “What am I supposed…What is my research?” The argument in physics, you know, of course has its own kind of characteristics. You know, “What am I trying to explain here? I am going to try to explain it right now” because it sounds like a little bit what you’re saying is that there’s a constant delay, procrastination-type thing, and an apprehension. And that’s really hard: how do you stop procrastinating? Well, you don’t procrastinate.

MLR: I don’t.

HO: You don’t know how to deal with that. Many of us know that very intimately. You know, you do have that in some ways.

MLR: I play Free Cell,

HO: And you have to clean up.

MLR: And email can be an incredibly procrastinator. We all know that. “Oh, I’ll just answer that and answer that.”

HO: “I’ll get my email,” right. So those are some—that there is to share with you—those are some techniques. You know when it’s right. But then if you’re a procrastinator, you better start writing right now. Whatever it is, even if you don’t know what it is that you’re talking about because that’s how you take assault.

MLR: Are you a procrastinator?

A: Yes.

MLR: You’re not being a procrastinator, are you?

A: No.

MLR: You’re here tonight; you’re probably procrastinating something right now.

HO: Anyone… Other things? Yeah, here we go.

A: OK, well this goes back to the grant writing process. And I’m coming just off of that having written my grant. I’ve been writing it for, like, a semester. So I’ve been going from—I always write too long—so I’ve been going from really long to, you know, mincing the words over and over and over again to get that concise, nice little, my first organization and having a dissertation and all that stuff. And now that I’ve been spending forever doing that, now I’m at a place where it’s like, “OK, I want it to look nice and pretty.” Like I’m completely stuck. There’s a couple weeks where I’ve finished; it’s like, now that you’re done with process, how do transition from the grant-writing kind of writing? So I am actually starting again. Everything, you know, like it looks right, and now I go, like, “Where do you start?” So I’ve had a number of like false starts, so I’ll like get it going, writing this part of this chapter, you know. I just wrote it; it looks good. Like, you know, I’ve worked on it, but it looks like how I found it four days ago. Where do you start? It’s actually kind of starting. How do transition from that kind of writing to, you know…

MLR: Yeah, now grant proposals are really killers for that because that’s where you’ve got to really use a word count. You know, you’re figuring out ways to make it smaller and smaller and smaller. So I guess I would…I guess that advice I’d give you is what you’ve already tried and doesn’t work, which is to just pick any part and start writing it. Why didn’t that work?

A: I don’t know. Somebody was telling me they will start outlining, like, you know, like a chapter, at least. Pick a chapter and then outline exactly what you want to say. Because I was thinking, “Well, I really liked the idea of this part”—at least I had known that in my head—I knew exactly what I was writing for this part. And I think I started that part and I just felt like I didn't know where I was going with it. And I was writing about what I knew but kind of without direction of like the argument I was making or where I was going and maybe that would help with the outlining. But finally, I gave that up for now because I felt like I was coming up with tons of pages, but in the end I would stop because I didn't really know where I was going with that part.

MLR: Yeah, I can’t even tell you how long I’ve spent at the computer not knowing where I’m going. It might be something you just have to kind of…that's what I mean by chaos, really. There's always one chapter per book that’s like that; you know, it’s the “Where the hell am I?” chapter. And sometimes they turn out really bad. I mean chapter seven in the first book—I think the only thing that’s great about that is that nobody ever gets to chapter seven—it’s bad. But, you know, you never get there so it’s not a problem. And the chapter for this book was chapter five, which people will probably get to. And I think I spent a year not knowing what I was going to do with that. So I would try to maybe work through the chaos a little bit. But if that doesn’t work, then I’d go and try to write something else. You know what I mean? Just to start another chapter that you feel pretty confident with, and see if it helps you with that chapter. But really, I mean, that’s why I like the Free Cell because chaos is really uncomfortable but I think it’s really part of the experience. I really do. See, because I discover the argument through writing; I don’t discover it ahead of time because a lot of what I do is very close analysis of text. And when I…you know, I was really trained by French people analyzinga text, you know? And so when I start actually paying attention to the material in it, I don’t know if this happens to you, but it’s like I see much more in it, especially because I translate…I see much more in it than I did when I was reading it, and so then all this stuff happens. So my process is to just kind of think through writing. So that kind of chaos you’re talking about is kind of the way I write. Sorry. But I think if you get really stuck, then I would start another…I don’t know, what would you advise? What would you do?

HO: Well, you know, it all depends. But the one thing is, is to accept the wandering, the wandering part of it, and not to get so anxious about it and feel like you’re failing. Find out what you really like about what your topic is, or your issue, or whatever, and start there; or what you really hate, or what pisses you off, and use your anger as a motivating…You may be angry about, let’s say, a historical character, a historical figure, and you want to get this person. You’ll do it in such a way that it won’t be nasty, but you want to get this person and that motivates. You see, there are various ways that people get motivated to get over the hump because it really is the grant writing, proposal writing, and of course, the academic job letter, those are deadly, difficult, very difficult things. They’re much more difficult in some ways than writing a dissertation.

MLR: You’re thinking about the difference between the two of them in terms of like, like the short grant proposal…

HO: A succinct four pages.

A: It seems like you’re going in opposite direction because you spend all your time going like this, and now that you’ve done that it’s time to build things back up again.

MLR: But I actually think that the contrast isn’t—it feels like I’m sure—but I think the contrast is also going from where you tie things up in neat little packages so you can win the grant to admitting to yourself there are no nice packages at all—in fact you’re opening up boxes and throwing things around the floor. So I think that’s a lot of the problem is just nothing is ever going to be as tight for a long time. I think my favorite stage of writing is when I—I call it—“Getting to the top of the mountain,” you know, when you finally have all of the chapters. It’s like, “God, I know what this is about! Yes!” You know? “Only after eight years!” And then you are just perfecting it, and, you know, all the chapters are coming together, and you work in a craze, and it’s like all under control, and it only happens like once every nine years. So you really have to enjoy it when it does, and then you are plunged into the depths of hell once again to you know scramble your way up the side of the mountain for that brief vista.

HO: While I walk through the “valley of the shadow of writing.” Somebody else had a question.

A: Do you ever find that the need to be truthful to your historical subject is really putting constraints on your writing, and do you have the desire to write fiction, more specifically?

MLR: Well, sometimes I feel like I am writing fiction in history. You know, and being truthful for me is really about—even if it doesn't fit your argument—right, you know, because you get an argument and it’s so beautiful and you just love it, and then you get a piece of evidence that just blows it apart. And you try to swing it this and swing it that way and swing it that way, and then finally you realize to be really honest you have to throw your argument out. That’s really being truthful for me. It’s really hard. But no, I've never really wanted to write a novel, I have to say. I just don’t…I mean, I live with someone who is a creative writer, and I could never do that with language. It would just be way far beyond me. And Hilton too; I mean, Hilton’s written a novel; it’s amazing. I just think it’s a different gift; I really do. I don’t think I could ever do it. I used to write poetry when I was young, but, you know, it was really bad poetry. It makes me cringe now. You know what I mean? But that’s that.

A: I just thought I’d make a plug for fellow procrastinators. Upon enrolling in grad school, I invested in several self-help books and evaluated all of them as a form of procrastination. I actually found one that I think is a really good motivator and it sort of breaks down the dissertation and grant writing processes very formulaically so you know, OK, here’s a starting point and here’s where you can think about going, and it’s called Getting What You Paid For. And I’m not sure who it’s by. But I think it’s a good investment.

HO: What are you some of the tips around procrastination?

A: In terms of just organizing things, just beginning a file system very early in your graduate experience, and just filing everything that you can, and then just every month or so getting yourself and setting aside an hour to write down questions that you might have that you could want to write your dissertation on, and, you know, questions stemming from those questions, and meeting with your advisor monthly to sort of update the list or refine it. So I think that process has been really helpful at Stanford.

HO: Well, part of that, for any long term project, is this one hour a day, it could even be fifteen minutes a day, to make sure that you do it on a regular constant basis rather than…and even if writing means looking over what you last did, and scratching your head. OK? But instead it’s the waiting until the time is right; because the time is never right. You know, you can make it happen. And the procrastination thing isn't necessarily like, “I don't want to do it,” you know; it’s like, “I'm scared,” or “I'm confused,” or “I don't know,” or “I'm not used to this fact of…” or “I’m a perfectionist”—my wife had to overcome this as a writer. She was a perfectionist. So you can’t write if you’re really a perfectionist. You’re doing this thing that like you’re going to throw it away or it’s not going to be… It’s very difficult. So those are the things that add up to what a lot of times we call procrastinating, there are other things going on. But if say, “Look, I’m doing fifteen, twenty, a half hour, one hour every day, even if it means just writing questions, notes, or whatever, or I’ll try and write one paragraph,” and keep it going. That often helps for a long term project until you kind of figure out what it is that is really getting at you.

MLR: I think the perfectionism is a real problem for a lot of Stanford students. I really do. Because the thing is that when you when you first write something, it’s really shitty, and it’s just going to stay shitty for a while.

HO: And you have to expect that.

MLR: And you do. And I think for a lot of students, they’re so used to writing really good stuff…they have that expectation in their mind of what it’s going to be, and you always do try to get up to that expectation, but you don’t usually get there. And it takes a long time and a lot of people get so self-critical somewhere along the way that they shut down.

HO: And there is an old thing: you know, “all writing is rewriting,” which is true. And even the second time is not good, the third time, the fourth, for a lot of times that’s what happens. You come to this peace within yourself that that is the way it is. It’s OK. I used to do a lot of—just to share this—I used to do a lot of writing for science and industry, and I wasn't a scientist, so I would have to work with somebody. I would get an assignment to write about microwave electronics, and it’s a really difficult field. And I would look at this stuff, and I would literally pass out. And every time I got a new job, I went through an enormous panic attack and would pass out or would, you know, spend a lot of time drinking, whatever it might be. You know, saying, “My God, I can’t do this. How am I going to this?” until I found out that that’s part of the process. OK? You go through the panic attack; then you say “OK, I can do this; I can figure this out. I’ll talk to somebody. I’ll figure it out, and I’ll do it.” And of course what helps in this is that my family needs to eat. So, you know, I’ve got to do this. And what ended up happening is that the panic attack never went away. It never went away, but I got used to it: “Oh, I'm going through the panic attack. You know, alright. OK. It’ll be gone soon, and I’ll have to do it because my family has to eat.” So, you know, you get used to that. It’s part of, you know…you just figure those things for yourself. Other things? Yeah.

A: Do you use a journal to discuss things with yourself? Or lather yourself up for your…

MLR: I do actually, yeah. My book was written over eight years, and I have maybe a little notebook for every year. And it usually contains sort of ideas…and these are really messy; it’s my messy notebook. You know, like, just writing down ideas, things that come to me that I might forget about, and then also sort of research plans for when I go to France, you know, because I always have a limited amount time. But it’s like my little world. I love these notebooks. You know? I have to say that probably if I had a fire and I had like ten minutes to take things out of my house, I’d probably get my pictures and those because they’ve become very…so it’s a place to jot things down. And the other reason why, as Hilton said, a reason to keep writing pretty consistently is you start to have a conversation with yourself about your work, but that doesn't happen if you only do it like once a week or twice a week. You know, and then like, you know, you’re walking the dog, you’re taking a shower, and then “Ohh!” You know, you answer some problem or something pops into your head. Writing consistently creates that, but I think if you don’t write consistently, it’s not going to happen. It’ll happen, like, for a day after you do it, and then it’ll stop for a week. So I do try to write a lot so I can have that conversation, and then because I have a really bad memory, I have to write it down.

HO: You raised a bunch of things. First of all, you write these notebooks by hand; it’s not something that’s done on the computer. So there’s something personal and intimate about it.

MLR: But they’re really…I mean, it’s not even…

HO: It’s not writing a paragraph, it’s like…

MLR: Exactly, it’s just like…yeah.

HO: You know, it’s like, I’ll think I’ll, “Sarah Bernhardt is too much!” You know what I mean?

MLR: That’s about what it is.

HO: Yeah.

MLR: Or even, “SB—poop,” you know? But it’s enough so that I’ll be able to remember it.

HO: Yeah, OK. Now, you also raised another thing, which is interesting. You know, having a conversation with yourself, which implies multiple personalities. So to speak, so to speak; this isn’t clinical.

MLR: Although, who knows!?

HO: The idea of, do you ever write imagining or hearing another voice? Who’s the voice in your head?

MLR: I think actually that’s a bad, that’s a bad thing because…

HO: Really?

MLR: Well, I used to have like, you know, my mother’s voice…

HO: Well, your mother’s voice or your professor’s voice in your head!

MLR: Or my professor’s voice, yeah. And that was bad because eventually you want to create your own voice, your own style.

HO: And is that, your own voice, the same person as your day-to-day life?

MLR: Yeah, yeah.

HO: OK.

MLR: And actually I think really good writing is like that. Like some students, you have to, you know, write like the professor, and it’s so stilted.

HO: Yeah.

MLR: Because they can’t really write like a professor anyways, so it’s sort of a bad copy. You know what I’m saying? So the idea is just to write in your own voice, and in a very…I mean, that leads to me to more natural, conversational, unstilted writing. And grant proposals is one of these places…one of the things that happens with grant proposals is for some reason those long sentences—you know, you get to define the whole project with one sentence—so it’s something you feel you kind of have to do: “So, this is what you do the da-da-da-da at the da-da-da, which is the da-da-da, which is the da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da,” you know? That’s kind of how they read; it’s amazing.

HO: That’s not really your voice.

MLR: Not really your voice. So I think actually finding your own voice is the right prescription.

HO: That’s the grant voice, so to speak. And it’s not Hugh Grant. And this thing about that voice in your head: some people have a positive voice in their head, and have multiple voices and have conversations in their head. You don’t. Other people…so there’s another element in this. But for a lot of honors thesis writers and dissertation writers—I have noticed—all of a sudden they start writing the way that you think the professor, the professor in your head is. And it’s an interesting phenomena because in some ways it’s good—it’s trying out something; it’s experimenting, and role-playing, and modeling—but it’s also stultifying. I hope that it didn’tget them stuck going off in directions that’s not you, not your voice. I keep kind of scrawls and notes and stuff, I keep a log of things so I can remember… I’ve reached a certain stage in life where I have to kind of write down things that happened because I want to know a year from now that something happened because I won’t remember it.

MLR: I’m having to write down where I parked the car.

HO: Now that’s a form of writing. There’s another form: we mentioned email. Now is email an altogether different experience for you?

MLR: Yes.

HO: Now are you a no capital, no grammar…

MLR: No, I’m not that way.

HO: You have to.

MLR: I have to. The only thing I’ll do is sometimes it looks like I just don’t have any space at all on the page, and that everything runs on together, as opposed to the paragraphs and stuff, but I definitely do the capitalization. Is there a theory of people who do and…?

HO: Well, I don’t know, except that an observation is that a lot of people feel that it’s very good to be casual in email. And, you know, some people don’t want to capitalize and feel it’s OK, and, of course, there’s all those btw and all those kinds of, you know, f2f, and those kinds of idioms that come in email type of stuff. Other, let’s see, other things people want to add to the discussion. Can you imagine writing after this discussion? Have you gotten energized? Some good ideas? Well, why don’t we then close it here? And, you know, we’ll stay around a little bit if you want to talk casually, and, you know, on February 13, Wednesday night, also 7:00 to 9:00, we’ll talk with David Abernethy. Now I know—having talked with David Abernethy—that he finished his last book in the shower, so this is another…do you get ideas in the shower?

MLR: Definitely, yeah, the shower’s a great place.

HO: Where do you…

MLR: But actually mostly—I have a dog that I really love and I love to walk her and I love to go to the park and throw balls with her—and somehow…

HO: So that’s who you’re having the conversation with!

MLR: Yeah, you’re right, it must be amazing, just inspiring.

HO: So you get ideas walking?

MLR: Yeah, I mean, anywhere.

HO: In the shower…

MLR: Shower.

HO: Do you get them at inappropriate times?

MLR: Definitely.

HO: I think this is obsessive behavior now. You jump out in the middle of the movies or something like that?

MLR: Noo…

HO: Do you take paper with you and pencil?

MLR: Sometimes I do, yeah. But, you know, like at dinner parties somebody will be telling me something and I’ll suddenly think, “Oh my God! That’s it!” You know?

HO: That’s very often…the inappropriateness is often a very important part of the creativity. It’s kind of like, you know, the life of adversity. That’s when you get the idea, you know, within an environment when you’re not supposed. Your brain…

MLR: Or sometimes somebody says something that triggers something.

HO: Yeah. OK. So, in any case, so David Abernethy I know will discuss this, finished his last book in the shower. And lots of people actually think and write in the shower, and there’s actually been, I think, some scientific research about hot water on the back of your head. I’ve been told this. I don’t know; have you heard about this?

A: I’ll be in the shower within fifteen minutes of this.

HO: Similarly, an honors student last year would write—in terms of, you know, writing culture—would always position—he had a little laptop—would always position—he wrote an honors thesis, award winning, OK—so that the sun would beat on the back of his head. And he would move around as the sun moved. I have the question he never answered successfully for me is, what happens when it’s cloudy? He doesn’t write those days, right?

MLR: He gets nothing done between December and February.