On Writing

On Writing

When I was a professor of philosophy working in a philosophy department, I used to jot down notes on ideas I had that seemed promising. I was too busy to write up the ideas properly, so I made the notes as reminders for later work. The exigencies of teaching had priority (a great benefit of AI will be mechanizing essay grading). Sometimes months or even years went by before I could get back to these nascent ideas. Upon retirement (if we can call it that) I had time to revisit some of these old notes and convert them into papers. It wasn’t always easy, memory being what it is. But when I had new ideas, which I often did, I had the unbelievable luxury of being able to write them up straight away. At first, I simply let the resulting essays accumulate on my hard drive, expecting to publish them in some form. But they quickly began to proliferate wildly and publication became more of an issue (other factors were also involved), so I decided to put them on my blog. That way they could get out there instead of just lying around in my house. Since I was writing at the rate of about two papers a week, the passage of time led to the production of a great deal of material. I haven’t counted what I have written in the last ten years but I think it is on the order of around a thousand papers. That adds up to about ten substantial volumes—far too many for a university press. I now just think of my blog as where I publish. A bonus is that I get to write the way I want to write not the way editors want me to write (tediously at best). I’m also glad that my work goes out to the whole world not just to a limited number of English-speaking countries. According to my website (which I don’t run), the countries that visit my blog include the Philippines, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Norway, Sweden, Italy, and Germany—as well as America, Britain, Canada, and Australia (it varies from week to week). It’s like the Top Ten. I never intended to publish my work this way, but that is how it has turned out. What would I have done without the internet? I don’t even think of the journals anymore, or the university presses. It is a welcome freedom. I certainly like what I write more than I used to, because I am freed from academic conventions that impede good writing.