How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

Preface: The house of writing

In a poem titled “Air and Light and Time and Space,” poet Charles Bukowski addresses writers and artists who fantasize about moving into a studio where they will finally have “a place and a time to / create”: a large, beautiful room flooded with light. “No baby,” Bukowski tells them, “if you’re going to create / you’re going to create,” even if you work sixteen hours per day in a coal mine, even with “a cat crawling up your / back,” even while the city around you “trembles in earthquake, bombardment, / flood and fire”:

baby, air and light and time and space

have nothing to do with it

and don’t create anything

except maybe a longer life to find

new excuses

for.1

Bukowski’s portrait of the suffering-yet-productive artist hits home for many academics. The circumstances that sap our strength and hobble our writing—heavy teaching loads, tedious administrative duties, judgmental reviewers, looming deadlines—are admittedly less arduous than mining for coal and less devastating than flood or fire. But even if we don’t literally have to write with a cat crawling up our back, we often feel as though we do. We long for “air and light and time and space,” an architecture of possibilities and pleasure; instead, we find ourselves crushed under the weight of expectations and the rubble of our fractured workdays. And as the walls close in around us, we hear the voices of our department chairs, supervisors, and that annoyingly hyperproductive colleague down the hall: stop whining; just get on with it; if you wait for the perfect conditions to write, you’ll never publish a single word.

Are academic writers doomed to a life of misery, slaving away by day in the educational equivalent of a coal mine and tapping out our manuscripts by night in the dim glow of a computer screen? What if we were to bring air and light and time and space back into the picture, reimagining ourselves not as suffering artists but as artisans of language: skilled craftspeople who trade in the written word and draw delight and satisfaction from our craft? Like the nation of Bhutan, which measures not only the gross domestic product of its citizens but also their “gross national happiness,” perhaps we can learn to recognize productivity and pleasure as commodities that supplement and enhance each other’s value—or, to return to Bukowski’s architectural metaphor, as complementary features of the same building.

This book offers no ready-made blueprint for academic success, no skeleton key to a House of Writing where productive writing habits are quick to achieve and easy to maintain. Instead, you will find here a flexible, customizable building plan intended to help you design your own writing practice from the ground up, with words like productivity and success capaciously defined to include not just publication rates and professional kudos but other, less measurable, academic accomplishments such as craftsmanship, collegiality, pride, and even joy. Just as a house may be entered by different doors, the four sections of the book may be read in any order. I do recommend, however, that you orient yourself first by reading the Introduction and undertaking the diagnostic exercise on pages 8 and 9.

Whatever your route and your pace, I invite you to wander through this book in a spirit of optimism and curiosity, embracing the premise that creativity and craft thrive best in places where the windows are large, the ceilings are high, the outlook is bright, and oxygen and ideas flow freely. For writers in search of that sweet spot where productivity and pleasure meet, air and light and time and space have everything to do with it.