Interview with Elizabeth Roberts
Just write Crap!
Elizabeth F. S. (Liz) Roberts is a medical anthropologist at the University of Michigan. Her research moves between Latin America and the United States, tracing the social, biological, and environmental forces that produce health and illness. Liz Roberts is the author of God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes and the recent In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World.
Rima Praspaliauskiene (RP): Liz, how do you write? What is your process?
Liz Roberts (LR): If there’s something new-ish that you have to write, there’s some angst going into it — how is new stuff gonna be formed? Since I was a grad student, [I practiced] this process of units. A unit is a 45-minute uninterrupted writing period. Over the years, I have developed this sense that if I write three units in a day for a while, something will emerge. For me, those units usually have to be in the early morning. The woman who taught me [this strategy] was Dorothy Duff Brown, a writing coach at Berkeley. She would give workshops to people writing their dissertations, but she didn’t tell you about the units. You had to go see her privately for that. I was raised Catholic, so I felt like I had to confess [to Dorothy] all the ways I was a terrible writer: here’s how I’m bad, because I don’t write an outline. I went and confessed all of this to her, and then basically she gave me papal dispensation: that’s the way you write, you’re just not gonna start writing outlines all of a sudden, that’s not what you do.
The process of being given units was about learning to spend uninterrupted time writing in an imperfect and messy way. It often feels anti-romantic. It is not about feeling: I want to write today, or I have something to say today. It’s a daily practice that adds up. Because I don’t work with outlines, I don’t know what I’m gonna say, so it’s the process of saying it and writing it over and over again. When people say: I write ten pages a day, or I wrote this number of words per day, that is some other universe of writing. I could barf out fifty pages a day, but it’s literally just repeating the same thing. People say: oh, I did four full drafts, and I think I did 25. It takes a long time. It’s all over the place, and [needs] moving stuff around and honing it down into something that is readable. I know a lot of people sit there and they’re coming up with each perfect word, and that is not what I can do.
It is not that I write better than I did twenty, twenty-five years ago when I was trying to write my dissertation, I just have a lot of faith in that process now. I can get out of bed really early in the morning and get those things done, and it feels good. Again, not in an I know what I’m doing way, or an I know what I’m gonna say way, but just getting the three units done is so pleasurable, and the fact that I’m in this process of not knowing where I’m going is really exciting.
Dorothy Duff Brown also taught me this tool called cycling, a thing where you have many parts, [It works for] a dissertation or a book. It’s a process that is set up to make it so you don’t get stuck in any one place. So you start out, and you might know there’s gonna be seven chapters, or maybe you don’t even know the number of chapters yet. They’re like containers, and you lay them out, and you create a schedule. It can’t be seven days a week. It’s all reality-based: when can you actually write? When can you do the number of units you’re gonna do per day?
You start out, look at the schedule, and create one cycle of all of those buckets or chapters, whatever they are, and you write what chapter you’re supposed to be in. It doesn’t have to be linear. You start long, so the first cycle might be up to nine days; you do an entire cycle moving through all the buckets. You get to the end of your entire cycle, you’ve done all the buckets. In the next cycle, you might have realized the buckets were wrong, they need to be different. By the due date of your dissertation, you’re down to a three- or two-day cycle. If something happens and you can’t do your units that day of that bucket, you do not add another day to your bucket. Instead of working on one chapter obsessively for two months and getting stuck, you just keep building the material in the buckets or the chapters.
By the end of the first or second through-cycle, you have a lot of stuff. You have seen way more interconnections between the stuff than if you just stayed in one chapter. And this is my favorite part, you have gone away from your stuff, so when you come back, all the things that you felt stuck on are often not a problem anymore. It’s just magical. I don’t tend to put it on calendars as much as I did before, although putting it on calendars is really satisfying. I would do a thing where every day I got three units in my cycle, I got a star sticker. I’d have all of my calendars with the little star stickers up on the walls, and it was so satisfying. I was potty trained with little candies, so I think it probably has something to do with how writing is, like, shit and death, or whatever, but it was probably something to do with that [being] so satisfying. And now, I don’t really need the stars, but it does feel like the way that I calm myself is making sure that I’m doing my units and moving through the cycles.
RP: Was the practice of writing In Praise of Addiction, which includes memoir, writing about your family members, and fieldwork, different in any way?
LR: From dissertation to book, you kinda know what’s gonna be in there — the materials stay the same, but the analysis changes, and maybe the structure changes. Most academic books have this structure where there’s an intro, and the substantive chapters, where four might be short, and seven might be long, and then you have a conclusion, and that’s the structure of the book. I started writing the addiction book like that, but it was a very different book at first. I thought that the book was going to be this rumination on chemical exposure and addiction; I had 400 pages of a manuscript. I was sharing it. And people were like, you know, the addiction part, probably a lot of people would read about that, whereas a geeky reflection on addiction and exposure, fewer people would be excited about that. I yanked out all the addiction parts and started working on it. There was already a little bit of stuff about my family, and given that all the exposure stuff was gone, it seemed like there was a lot of room to start the memoir.
One of the things that was exciting about Princeton University Press is that it’s this semi-trade thing. I was able to advocate for funds for a real developmental editor. I really wanted that. It was my fantasy my whole life. Someone would take the manuscript and do things to it. I’ve worked with a lot of editors as someone who’s dyslexic and feels like I need help with writing. Many of them are just so incredible. But I had never worked with someone who was gonna think about the structure of the book with me in the same way. The editor I worked with, her name’s Jacqui Cornetta. We went through a few passes, but the big first pass was her blowing it up. I was very excited. I’m very good at being edited. I love being edited. Just tell me what to do. And I don’t feel very precious about my words or prose at all. There are very few things that I ever feel I need to hold onto. It feels: okay, if you say so, then I’ll get rid of that, or I’ll change it.
I really write with a lot of people. I’m a big share-your-writing person. I’m dyslexic, and I think a lot of it came from that. I don’t really trust myself to see what I’m writing, and I need other people to reflect it back to me. It was so cool to see what connections Jacqui was able to see across those previous chapters. She blew it up and put it in this really different order to make connections between themes that I hadn’t really seen as being connected, and then she gave them a name. It’s also not structured like an academic book, because each chapter isn’t this argument world in and of itself. It’s more just a concept, and then you develop it with these three different strands throughout the book: the Mexico strand, the family strand, the cultural criticism strand.
RP: You write about your addictions; besides food, there is addiction to reading. You almost lose your daughter, Thea, while you’re reading an Octavia Butler book. Can you talk about writing as addiction or devotion?
LR: Reading was, probably besides food, one of my earliest addictions. [I talk in the book] about how I know it might seem very upsetting and unsettling to have something like heroin and reading put in the same frame. [As a child] I would get in trouble sometimes for reading and not doing my homework. Reading was such an escape. Like many of us, I didn’t always want to be with my family, and then as an adult, having kids: oh my god, just let me read a novel. And I remember breastfeeding and reading novels after my first one was born, and it was like: okay, I can’t really do anything else, I get to read, this is great. I do think reading is one of these obliterating things in a way that food is obliterating.
Would I think of writing as an addiction? When I don’t have it, I feel really unorganized and really at loose ends. When I don’t have this thing to get up for at 5:30 in the morning, I don’t feel very good. It feels a little weird to say that, because I know a lot of people that have what I guess gets called writer’s block, and they seem to be suffering, and to me, it always just seems like they’re being perfectionists, like, just write crap! That’s what I do! But I know it’s not that simple.
The dyslexia thing — I struggled in the phonics class, where you’d have to learn about sentence structure and diagram sentences, and then understand grammatical rules. I’m still so traumatized by phonics. I could read so fast, but trying to figure out what a sentence was: oh my god, that’s so hard. In college, even though I wrote an honors thesis and it won a prize, it was like, how did I do that? The process was so awful. Then Dorothy Duff Brown giving me this dispensation to just write in this crappy, messy way, that paved the way for it to become an addiction, or maybe the addiction is just the Yankee satisfaction [related to the concept of “Inner Yankee” that Liz explores in her latest book: the internalized moral voice shaped by New England-style values]. Getting to write some messy thing that I’m figuring out is totally exciting. It organizes me.
RP: You are writing about addictions like gobbling food, TV series, and novels taking you into the zone — does it happen with writing? Or do you get into the zone with doing units?
LR: Yeah, thank you! That helps me clarify what your first question was. I remember at one point, Jacqui said: oh, now that I’ve given you back these thirty chapters, I think you’re gonna think it’s really fun. I do think that’s what the units do. They provide a container to get into the zone. Units don’t work for everyone, and I’ve met many people for whom it is not the best thing in the world, but it’s very much about getting in the zone, and you’re giving me better language to help me think about it. I think that’s why I feel so unorganized when I’m not getting in the zone for a chunk of time every morning. I haven’t done this weird, obliterating thing that is so pleasurable. Learning to write and being productive just itches every scratch of productivity, but it is also this zone. I have my little timer, and then when you get going, and it’s like the timer goes off, and you’re like, what? I just got started, it’s so pleasurable.
And my sister and I (not the one who the book is mostly about, but my other sister who is a songwriter), we have endless debates because she is like, the muse must take me! God is speaking through me! And I’m kind of like, yeah, I don’t think God’s ever speaking through me, but I sit in my units. [Maybe] that is like God, because 45 minutes passed, and I don’t know what happened, I don’t even remember it, and now I’ve done three units, and I feel great.
RP: Do you add a fourth unit? If you are in the zone, you don’t want to stop, or you have the willpower to quit?
LR: You know, that’s a great question. I don’t actually think it’s a willpower thing. Dorothy always taught: don’t go beyond the 45 minutes, don’t keep writing, and I do mess with that sometimes, but my life is not set up in any way that I get to do a fourth unit. By the time it’s 10 o’clock, I now have meetings until 5 pm, or I have to go teach. I don’t have the willpower about things like a TV series I’m binging, whereas the fourth unit during the workday is not gonna happen. But I occasionally still do that while reading, staying up all night: wow, I just screwed myself over for work tomorrow.
I’ve done things where I’ve borrowed friends’ ADHD meds, and I talk about this a little bit in the book, and written for two days straight, and it was kind of satisfying: I am a productive Yankee, yeah! But [writing for two days straight] wasn’t maybe quite as pleasurable, although it was pleasurable to write three AAA papers in two days, but it just didn’t feel like those three units in the morning.
Karīna Vasiļevska-Das (KVD): There is definitely something about a ritual, a repetitive practice.
LR: I guess there is something in the repetition. I don’t know what my thoughts are until I repeat them a million times through this keyboard process. There’s something that organizes me and makes the idea a bit clearer. It organizes a dyslexic who can’t punctuate a sentence. If I gave you something that I wrote the night before… my texts are indecipherable sometimes when I’m writing something quickly. That repetition is partly also allowing the thoughts to emerge, but I’ve always felt somewhat less than the people who just can write. And I look at people like reporters, who can figure out: well, this is the important part of the story, and then they write it, it’s really impressive. And there’s something about that in relation to AI. We do have a value in the idea that people will sit with stuff, and even if you’re a fast writer, the process of getting it on the page is strengthening, honing, making you do your thoughts. And there’s something about AI that isn’t going to allow for the development of those skills and muscles. That is very threatening for us, or at least for me.
RP: So, can academics write what they like?
LR: Writing this book, which became a memoir about gobbling and compulsion and my family, was a new kind of pleasure, and that was a new kind of writing what you like. And when I gave it to this friend of mine who’s an assistant professor in a public health department, who works on addiction, he was like, oh, that was so great, and I could never write that, because I don’t have tenure. So you get to write what you like when you’re a full professor — maybe that is the answer. But I do think there might be some more room for [more creative writing]. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I really wanted all the memoir [in the book] to be tied into trying to carefully reimagine what addiction is. Hopefully it’s there for a reason, but it was very pleasurable to write. I think we often make ourselves like what we can write.