How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

9. Writing among others
Part three. Social habits

When we write for others, we engage in conversation with our readers. When we write with others, we work with colleagues toward a common product. And when we write among others, we create a community of writers. This chapter explores three varieties of writing communities, which I refer to as writing groups, writing retreats, and writing networks, although the demarcation lines among them easily blur. For example, the members of a writing group (two or more people who meet regularly to discuss or advance their writing) could decide to go on a week-long writing retreat (a time- and space-bound gathering devoted to intensive writing and conversations about writing); or a subset of the members of a writing network (a loosely bound group of colleagues who support each other’s writing in various informal ways) could decide to form a writing group and / or to organize a writing retreat. My aim here is not to define a specific set of practices but quite the opposite: to offer a sampling of the infinite variety of ways in which writing communities can support and nurture the work of individual writers.

Academics who want to establish a writing group can choose from a smorgasbord of possibilities:

Size. Will the group be large or small? Impersonal or intimate? Consistently populated or variable in size? (For example, a large group of participants could decide to meet in rotating pods of three to four people each.)

Frequency. Will the group members meet on a regular basis (e.g., monthly, fortnightly, weekly) or only as and when needed?

Duration. How long will each group meeting be? Will the duration of the meetings be consistent or variable?

Longevity. Will the group convene only for a set period of time (for example, until a specific project is finished) or indefinitely?

Venue. Will participants meet face-to-face, online, or both? On campus or off campus? Always in the same place or in different venues each time?

Composition. Will the writing group be discipline based or interdisciplinary? Expert facilitated or peer facilitated? Autocratic or democratic? Inclusive or exclusive? Will it consist mainly of friends, strangers, or both? Faculty, students, or both? Academics, nonacademics, or both?

Organization. Will the writing group be institutionally sponsored? Run by a group of peers? Managed by a single energetic individual? (Who will have responsibility for “holding the baby”?)

Process. Will the group’s meetings be formative (participants give and receive feedback on work in progress)? Reflective (participants discuss the challenges of the writing process)? Motivational (participants hold each other accountable for achieving specified writing goals)? Supportive (participants help each other cope with criticism and self-doubt)? Inspirational (participants cheer each other on)? Creative (participants undertake writing or brainstorming exercises together)? Productivity focused (participants come together in the same physical or virtual space to make progress on their own work)? Some combination of the above?

Purpose. Is the group mainly intended to provide participants with behavioral support (finding time for writing, keeping on track with writing goals)? Artisanal support (reading and editing each other’s work, discussing craft)? Social support (forging relationships, building community)? Emotional support (providing encouragement, making the writing process more enjoyable)? Support in other areas, such as building institutional knowledge, exploring methodological issues, or strategizing about publication venues?

Whatever the group’s function and ethos, the word support is crucial here. Academics have plenty of opportunities to receive formative feedback on their writing, whether by attending research seminars at their own institutions or by presenting papers at disciplinary conferences. All too often, however, such occasions can feel more gladiatorial than generative: instead of building each other up with thoughtful but encouraging critique, participants engage in the time-honored academic sport of puffing out their own chests while stomping on everyone around them. A genuinely supportive writing group demonstrates a collective concern for the growth, development, and well-being of every member, fostering the kinds of alchemical transformations that can be forged only in a crucible of trust.

“Like a sandstorm in the desert”

Mindy Fullilove

Department of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University (USA)

Mindy Fullilove cowrote her first book with her father, a union organizer, when she was still in college:

That was a book for people who were interested in African American communities and community building. It was a working-class text, written for the people of our town.

After earning her medical degree, she began to write and publish on the psychology of place and the role of cities in mental health. More recently, Fullilove helped her ninety-one-year-old mother publish a collection of autobiographical stories:

She had the most fabulous book launch anyone could ever have, and it turned out that she was secretly a writer all her life. This book just popped out of her like an overdue baby.

Fullilove’s own writing is fueled by “collaboration, confusion, and epiphany”:

When I was working on my most recent book, I had a two-month-long brainstorm that was like a sandstorm in the desert. It was mystical, transcendental. All the information was moving around in my head, and then I felt like I could see the sand pouring out of me, like in the movies where all of a sudden some magic happens and everything goes up in the air and whirls around and then it all comes down, perfect.

Fullilove has belonged since 1996 to a weekly writing group that has “nurtured six published books and four more in progress, as well as twenty-six dissertations and countless papers and presentations”:

The mechanics are simple: we meet once a week, and people sign up to send something out on the date they set. And then the next week people come and discuss it. If nobody has handed anything out, we talk about ideas. Sometimes we just work on sentences.

Her writing group has helped her develop the courage to take intellectual risks and the resilience to deal with rejection:

I’d take my negative reviews to the writing group, and everybody would just strategize. Adolf Chris, the founder of our writing group, is wonderful at walking us through rejection. I got very good training from him on how to decipher what people were saying, how to respond back. Up until then, I was just emotional about it.

Many of the academics I interviewed have been involved with writing groups of one kind or another, whether as participants, facilitators, or both. Nursing scholar Kathy Nelson joined an institutionally sponsored group for early career academics:

At the start of the year, we all had to have public goals, and my goal was to have seven articles. Everybody kind of laughed. But then I was assigned a mentor who asked me for a list of what I was writing, and it turned out there were twenty articles I’d started, ranging from 90 percent finished to more like 5 percent. So I meet with her every month and negotiate my priorities, and I report my progress back to the group. (Kathy Nelson, Nursing and Midwifery, Victoria University of Wellington)

Historian Ludmilla Jordanova organized a writing group focused on craft:

The first writing group I organized for PhD students was supposed to meet for eight weeks but ended up meeting for nine months. I would get the students to look at Raymond Williams’s Keywords, and I would say, “What are the keywords of your thesis? Can you talk to us about the history of those keywords?” So they would begin to get a sense of how the bones, the very skeleton of their work, functions. At another session, they all brought the table of contents of their thesis. We had a wonderful time. (Ludmilla Jordanova, History, Durham University)

Literary scholar Janelle Jenstad meets with a colleague for mutual cheerleading and frank feedback:

We commit to meeting once a week, even for ten minutes, to remind ourselves that we are researchers. We give each other pep talks: “You don’t have to be on this committee. How’s your beheading piece going? What about that critical introduction you were working on?” We’re not afraid to offer each other trenchant critiques. Honestly, it’s so great when my “writing buddy” succeeds. I’m genuinely happy when she gets something published—as happy as when I get something published. (Janelle Jenstad, English, University of Victoria)

Whether large or small, university-sponsored or homegrown, crisply professional or casually conversational, what nearly all successful writing groups have in common is a shared sense of generosity, pleasure, and even fun: “Everybody laughed” (Nelson); “We had a wonderful time” (Jordanova); “It’s so great; I’m genuinely happy” (Jenstad).

“Write on site” and “shut up and write” gatherings offer a low-stakes, low-commitment alternative to formal writing groups. At a typical “write on site” event, participants meet for a few hours in a café, library, or seminar room to write silently in the company of others. “Shut up and write” sessions provide a somewhat more structured alternative to this format: participants chat informally for a few minutes or do a quick introductory round—“Here’s what I’m planning to work on today” or “Here’s what I hope to achieve in this session”—before diving into an intensive “pomodoro” lasting for an agreed period of time, usually around twenty-five minutes. (The “Pomodoro Technique,” developed by author Francesco Cirillo, is named for the tomato-shaped egg timer that Cirillo originally used to time his creative writing sessions.)1 The potential variations on these two models are endless. Some universities even sponsor write-on-site “boot camps,” encouraging academics and PhD students with lagging projects or looming deadlines to leave behind their usual workspaces and write in a quiet venue elsewhere on campus, with meals and snacks provided.

Writing retreats take the “write on site” model to a higher level of intensity, physically uplifting participants from the distractions of everyday life and cloistering them in an atmosphere of scholarly sanctuary. Residential retreats may be as brief as a single overnight stay or as long as several weeks in duration; they may take place close to home or a day’s travel away; they may be institutionally supported or organized ad hoc; their demographic composition may be homogeneous (for example, female PhD students from a single academic department) or heterogeneous (male and female, students and faculty, multidisciplinary, even multi-institutional). However, it is worth noting that the most successful writing retreats—those that engender loyalty, return bookings, and rave reviews from participants—do generally have a few key ingredients in common. First, they provide a break from routine, so that the participants return to “ordinary life” feeling refreshed, renewed, and reenergized. Second, they are institutionally sponsored at least to some degree—whether financially, organizationally, or both—so that those who attend feel that their academic labor is being recognized and supported. Third and most importantly, they foster productivity and pleasure in equal measure, providing participants with “air and light and time and space” that they can internalize and carry back with them to their everyday lives. If the writing retreat itself should happen to take place in such an environment—a venue with comfortable bedrooms, inviting writing spaces, and beautiful surroundings—its benefits, both tangible and emotional, are likely to be magnified.

“Building bridges across disciplines”

Russell Gray

Director, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Germany)

As an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans areas including psychology, ornithology, linguistics, animal cognition, philosophy of biology, and the evolution of human and animal behavior, Russell Gray is mystified by tribal behaviors that narrow rather than widen academic inquiry:

For example, one thing that a lot of humanities people seem do a lot of is to mark who they are affiliated to and who they are affiliated against. I’m always amazed at just how much work goes into that.

For an evolutionary biologist, he admits, addressing an audience of linguists can sometimes feel “like speaking a foreign language you have acquired as an adult”:

No matter how hard you try, you’re almost certainly fairly rapidly going to be marked as an outsider, because you’re just not quite expressing things in the way people who have been trained in this for twenty years might.

Gray is “increasingly at pains to minimize those differences and find ways of building bridges across disciplines.” For example, he has organized several residential workshops for international scholars who have come together to share data, methodologies, and ideas around an interdisciplinary research project. The more memorable the venue, the more successful the event. At a week-long workshop in New Zealand, the visitors—many of whom had escaped the Northern Hemisphere winter for the Auckland summer—indulged in swimming, beachcombing, kayaking, and stand-up paddleboarding between sessions. One evening, however, something went wrong with the dinner arrangements:

We were renting a house with a big deck. So I went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of steak and salmon filets and some salad and bread and lots of good New Zealand wine, and we had a barbecue. It turned out to be the best meal of the conference.

Meticulous organization is essential to a successful workshop, Gray concludes, but serendipity can play a valuable role as well: “There’s a special camaraderie that develops when you all have to improvise to solve a crisis.”

In recent years, a body of scholarly literature has verified what just about every academic who has ever participated in a well-run residential retreat already knows: its effects on a participant’s individual writing practice can be galvanizing, even transformative.2 The benefits appear to be especially powerful for academic women, who, if statistics reported in the literature are anything to go by, are attracted to communal professional-development events in significantly greater numbers than men. Higher-education researchers Barbara Grant and Sally Knowles have noted some of the particular advantages of writing retreats run by and for women: a safe space; a meditative, labyrinthine mode; a time away from the demands of domesticity and children. (Some women even write in their pajamas.)3 But male academics, too, may long for such a productive haven:

We have so-called research retreats which tend to be extended staff meetings, really; it’s just management talking about research. But to actually go away somewhere where you have the chance to not have email or these other concerns and just to spend a couple of days writing collaboratively, I think that would be fantastic. (Matthew Clarke, Education, University of New South Wales)

Academics who take part in writing groups and writing retreats are often exposed through those group activities to new writing networks: informal or semiformal alliances among writers who support each other’s work in various ways, whether through collaboration, mentorship, interdisciplinary exchanges, or friendship. Writing networks are often associated with specific disciplinary communities:

Feeling part of a community is very helpful to my writing. The discipline of history is huge, but there is a subcommunity of people who are operating within the same frame of reference on similar topics as me. And so I try to envision them as my audience when writing, and I assume a tacit favorable reception from that ideal abstract readership which is rooted in a concrete community of real individuals. (Ann Blair, History, Harvard University)

Or with academic organizations and conferences:

I was one of the first people to use Foucault in nursing research, which was seen as a bit radical at the time. It put me outside the nursing discipline—but it also widened me out and sent me out in other directions, so that I’ve now built up a pretty strong network of colleagues from other disciplines with similar interests. And we run a conference every two years that draws people from Iceland and Canada and Australia and the UK. (Trudy Rudge, Nursing, University of Sydney)

“Without bodies being present”

Inger Mewburn

Director of Research Training, Australia National University (Australia)

Trained as an architect, Inger Mewburn was taught to write “by architects who themselves couldn’t write.” She found academic writing to be “extremely painful” until she discovered the writing-advice section of the library:

I became obsessively interested in refining my craft, discovering new heuristics: really simple little techniques like “use a verb in every sentence you write in your notes” or things that people have told me walking across the crossing at the traffic lights.

Her love of “talking shop” led her to start her popular Thesis Whisperer blog (www.thesiswhisperer.com):

Blogging gives you confidence, and you take more risks. The audience is listening, and they give you instant feedback. So now I’m trying to actively encourage other people to blog, and I’m mentoring other bloggers and publishing articles about academic writing practices in blogging.

Mewburn is particularly interested in the kind of “affiliation work” that occurs in the margins of academe—“the invisible articulation work that holds academia together, but we never give it recognition”:

For example, I’ve got a Tumblr blog called Refreshments Will Be Provided where people post and comment on photos of food served at academic events. And I recently published an article on “PhD student whingeing”: my conversational analysis showed that the students who whine the most are not always in trouble; they’re using their complaints as a form of bonding.

A self-described “cloud bridger,” she is constantly experimenting with new forms of networking. Not only does she organize weekly shut-up-and-write sessions in a local café—“it’s easily the most productive morning of my week”—but she also instigates them spontaneously on Twitter:

I’ll tweet, “I’m really having a hard time. I need to punch this thing out. I’m going to do a twenty-five-minute pomodoro. Who’s with me?” Other people will come back, “Okay, I’m in.” “I’m in.” “Okay, go. Go!” You know there’s someone watching, but they’re sitting in Canada or South Africa or wherever. That sense of “someone else is doing it, therefore I should be doing it too” is really powerful, and it can be re-created without bodies being present or cups of coffee or whatever.

Or with online forums:

On a website called www.russianhistoryblog.org, they did a special online event dedicated to my latest book, Gulag Boss. They organized it and asked seven other specialists to comment on the book, all on a certain day, and there were lots and lots of responses from other readers. It was a fantastic thing—the instant feedback about what people found valuable. (Deborah Kaple, Sociology, Princeton University)

But new writing networks can spring up whenever or wherever two or more colleagues share ideas about academic writing: for example, when the neighbor you play squash with tells you about the great new time-management software he recently installed on his laptop or at the conference where a star researcher in your field offers to write a reference in support of your next grant proposal.

Writing groups, writing retreats, and writing networks are all examples of what Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger call communities of practice: loose confederacies of colleagues who gain mastery of a craft or trade by sharing information, experiences, and ideas.4 At their best, writing communities do much more than merely help early-career academics acquire specialized knowledge and skills; they also offer intangible benefits such as professional affirmation, emotional succor, and support for intellectual risk taking. Indeed, far from mandating conformity, a flourishing writing community can inspire creativity and embolden individuals to follow their own instincts rather than bowing to disciplinary convention. Paradoxically, writing among others can give you the courage to stand out from the crowd.

Things to try

Start a writing group

“I’d really like to be in a writing group,” faculty and PhD students sometimes tell me. “Do you run one that I could join?” Their assumption, apparently, is that all writing groups are organized and facilitated by writing experts who lead everyone else to mastery. Such expert-facilitated groups do exist and are well worth looking out for, whether in your department, your university, or the wider community. But if you can’t find an existing writing group—or if the ones you do know about don’t appeal to you—consider forming your own. All you need are three ingredients: a defined purpose, a dollop of commitment, and at least one other person to join you.

Retreat in the company of others

Solo writing retreats—occasions when you withdraw from the world to write in isolation for a few precious days or weeks—work beautifully for some academics, especially those with abundant self-discipline and a tolerant partner or family. But time away on your own, however productive, can never duplicate the complex and sometimes mysterious dynamics of an intensive retreat in the company of others. Residential retreats need not be facilitated by experts (although many are) or professionally organized (although it can be a wonderful luxury to have the logistics of food, transportation, and cleaning taken care of by someone else). A weekend in a rented beach house with three or four colleagues may prove just as generative as a large, institutionally sponsored retreat.

Chart your networks

On a large piece of paper or a whiteboard, write down all the different professional networks, both formal and informal, to which you belong: the departments or institutes with which you are affiliated; the disciplinary conferences you regularly attend; the colleagues you chat with about university politics at the grocery store. Which of those networks currently support your writing practice, and how? How might you make better use of your networks to nourish your own work and nurture the writing of others?

Read a book

Whether you want to start your own writing group, organize a writing retreat, or strengthen your writing networks, there is a book out there to help you. Judy Reeves’s Writing Alone, Writing Together and Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and with Others explore the benefits of writing groups from a participant’s perspective; Julie Phillips’s The Writers’ Group Handbook and Barbara Grant’s Academic Writing Retreats provide you with a facilitator’s view; and Rowena Murray’s Writing in Social Spaces addresses the social aspects of academic writing more broadly. You might also consider sharing books about writing communities with your writing community, thereby transforming your writing group into a reading group (as described in DeNel Sedo’s collection Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace.) For readers seeking a critical perspective on writing communities, books such as Andrew Abbott’s Chaos of Disciplines, Anna Duszak’s Cultures and Styles of Academic Discourse, Ken Hyland’s Disciplinary Discourses, Michèle Lamont’s How Professors Think, Steven Mailloux’s Disciplinary Identities, and Tony Becher and Paul Trowler’s classic Academic Tribes and Territories may prompt conversations about the crucial difference between belonging to a supportive academic writing community and being “disciplined” into academic writing.5