10. The pleasure principle - Part four. Emotional habits

How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

10. The pleasure principle
Part four. Emotional habits

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

—ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH, “On Style,” 1914

If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

—WILLIAM MORRIS, “The Beauty of Life,” 1919

If editing is akin to infanticide, what other acts of violence and sacrifice does our writing demand of us? Arthur Quiller-Couch’s murderous metaphor has been quoted, misquoted, and misattributed by numerous authors, but seldom with any commentary to the effect that its morbid view of the writer’s craft might cause far worse damage than the demise of a few overblown sentences. What if we were to replace Quiller-Couch’s “practical rule” for writing with William Morris’s “golden rule” for living, which teaches us that practicality and beauty can be soul mates rather than enemies? What happens when we invite positive emotions and language into our writing practice—and encourage them to make themselves at home?1

I drafted much of this book during a half-year sabbatical when I was granted a semester of research leave free from teaching and administrative duties. By that stage, I had completed most of the research and data analysis, planned the overall structure of the book, and sketched out a few sample chapters. However, I was significantly behind schedule on the actual writing of the book and not entirely happy with what I had written so far. Drastic steps were called for. To rev things up and overcome my nagging anxiety that I might fail to finish the book by the date agreed with my publisher, I mapped out a rigidly structured writing routine for the next five months: I would write every weekday morning for at least five hours; I would spend my afternoons reading, editing, and attending to email; I would churn out at least one thousand words a day; I would complete a new draft chapter every week or two.

I should have known better. I hit the ground running on day one, like a marathoner determined to set a steady pace from the very beginning of a long race—and, like any marathoner who takes to the road without adequate conditioning and training, I soon crashed and burned. By the end of day two, I knew that I couldn’t possibly produce a thousand words per day; six and a half hours of writing time had netted me only about six hundred. By the end of day three, my back and neck had seized up from too many hours spent hunched in front of the computer. Although I did manage to pump out a new draft chapter by the end of that first week, I was a physical and emotional wreck by the time I got there.

“You should be enjoying your sabbatical,” a wise colleague counseled me. “It’s supposed to be a time of renewal, a time to slow down and take pleasure in intellectual activity. God rested on the seventh day, remember?” I tried to imagine what would happen if I used my sabbatical as a time for reading and reflection, rather than waking up every morning feeling pressured to write. While the idea certainly held a certain appeal—a truly stress-free sabbatical would be a beautiful thing indeed—I knew that a relaxed research leave was not for me, at least not this time around. The pressure that I felt to finish the book was motivated above all by my own desire to accomplish something concrete and meaningful during my time away. I wanted to finish the book; I wanted to run the marathon.

“Shift your focus from productivity to pleasure,” my colleague had advised. The breakthrough moment came when I realized that, for me, productivity is pleasure: the trick was not to exchange one for the other but to find creative ways of combining the two. What aspects of my work give me the most pleasure, I asked myself, and what pleasurable activities can I integrate into my work to support my productivity? I made a list: I love color, conversation, solitary walks, the sea; I enjoy sifting through data, plotting out chapters, writing author profiles, charting my progress; I relish experimentation, beauty, change. On the other hand, I become physically tense when I sit in front of the computer for too long and emotionally tense when the words snarl and stall (which tends to happen, unsurprisingly, when I sit in front of the computer for too long).

So I began to play with more organic, nonlinear ways of writing, paying close attention to my rhythms and moods at different times of the day. Some days I stayed at home and worked on a single chapter all morning. More often, however, I varied my tasks to suit my disposition: a fifty-minute pomodoro, a two-hour editing session, a half day of reading and note taking. If I felt myself losing momentum, I would allow myself the luxury of composing a new author profile, a reliably rewarding task (and what a relief it was to showcase someone else’s words rather than having to manufacture my own!) Alternatively, I might carry my laptop to the library for a shift of posture and a change of scene; or I’d head out on a long walk, using my cellphone to record voice memos to myself; or I’d use colorful scrapbook paper and sticky notes to help me visualize structural patterns and connections; or I’d meet a friend for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, either as a break from work or as an inspiration to work. The more pleasurable the activity, I found, the more likely it was to initiate a new spate of productive writing within the next day or two. Instead of marching through the manuscript in linear fashion as I had done for much of my previous book, I allowed this one to grow organically, like coral: a new paragraph or profile here, a “Things to Try” section there.

Along the way, I also made a conscious decision to recode potentially disabling emotions as positive opportunities for growth and discovery. If I, a scholar with a generally positive attitude toward writing and a track record of publication, was struggling to write my book, what must such a task feel like to an early-career academic belabored by isolation and inexperience or even to a senior colleague embarking on a single-authored book for the first time? My own experiences prompted me to reflect on the emotional challenges faced by so many of my academic colleagues when they write.

Among the most serious of those challenges, I came to realize, is the self-doubt that can arise when we undertake any kind of intellectual risk: a new writing style, a foray into unfamiliar disciplinary terrain. Writing this book has often felt risky; before I started, I had never designed a research questionnaire, interviewed a human subject, coded an interview transcript, or acquired more than a passing knowledge of the qualitative methodologies that “real” social scientists (or so I imagine) imbibe during their PhD studies like mother’s milk. On the other hand, I have taken such risks before: for my previous book, I assembled and analyzed a data set of more than one thousand academic articles, despite having no previous experience with quantitative data or linguistic corpus analysis. Not only did the skies fail to fall, but several reviewers went so far as to praise my “innovative” methodology.

I write now with the knowledge that even if my imagined worst-case scenario were to come to pass—if reviewers were to pillory my writing style, trash my methodology, and unmask me as the intellectual imposter that I, like so many of the colleagues I have interviewed, still sometimes secretly feel myself to be—I have deep emotional reserves on which to draw. My self-confidence as a writer and scholar is fed by many replenishing springs: by my own passion for my research, by the encouraging feedback of the people about whom and for whom I write, by the love and support of my family and closest friends, and by the strategies for redemptive “re-storying” that I have learned while working on this book. Indeed, my choice of metaphors in this paragraph—deep reserves, replenishing springs—exemplifies how figurative language inflects the stories we tell about ourselves and our writing. I could just as well have written that my fear of criticism saps my confidence, drains my energy, and dries up my courage—metaphors of depletion that risk becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.

Following William Morris’s “golden rule” for living rather than Arthur Quiller-Couch’s “practical rule” for self-inflicted violence, the three chapters in this section are furnished with material designed both to edify and to delight. “The Pleasure Principle” maps the emotional landscape of academic writing, tracing the dynamic relationship between positivity and productivity. “Risk and Resilience” explores the emotional dynamics of risk taking and the strategies that successful academics draw on to recover their equilibrium when things go wrong. The section rounds off with “Metaphors to Write By,” a meditation on metaphorical imaginings of all kinds: on mountains of self-doubt and valleys of shit; on playing music, playing by the rules, and playing chicken; on dry subjects and wells of pleasure; and on the transformation of “murdered darlings” into words and ideas that we can still cherish as our own.

10. The pleasure principle

When the participants in my two survey groups were asked to describe the main emotions that they associate with their academic writing, they found themselves at no loss for words. Overall, more than two-thirds of the respondents in both cohorts (72 percent interviews, 69 percent questionnaires) reported a mix of positive and negative emotions, an indication that emotional ambivalence about writing is the norm rather than the exception for most academics. This “mixed emotions” statistic held remarkably stable across a range of demographic categories, including gender (69 percent female, 67 percent male), academic role (71 percent faculty, 74 percent postdocs, 67 percent graduate students), and language background (71 percent L1 English speakers, 64 percent L2 English speakers).

At the margins of the data, however, a somewhat more complex picture emerged. Whereas the interview subjects were significantly more likely to report purely positive emotions than purely negative ones (17 percent positive only, 11 percent negative only), the questionnaire respondents showed the opposite pattern (13 percent positive only, 17 percent negative only). Moreover, the distribution of positive-only and negative-only responses varied markedly across demographic groups. Particularly startling was the substantial “emotion gap” exhibited by female PhD students, who proved three times more likely to report wholly negative emotions than wholly positive ones (see Figure 5). If the expression of purely positive or purely negative emotions can be taken as a proxy for a writer’s unusually high or low self-confidence, then the well-documented social phenomenon that journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman dub “the confidence code”—the tendency of highly confident people, especially men, to overestimate their own abilities and of under-confident people, especially women, to underestimate them—may well be at work here.1 Only after academic women have finished their PhDs and moved into academic positions does this emotion gap begin to narrow, although the prevalence of negative-only over positive-only emotions persists until retirement age. Male academics, by contrast, report higher percentages of positive-only emotions and lower percentages of negative-only emotions right across the board.

Figure 5. Percentages of female and male questionnaire respondents who reported positive-only or negative-only emotions (n = 961; graph shows data from PhD students and junior / senior faculty only).

Figure 6. Top forty emotion words for questionnaires (n = 1,223); word size is proportionate to frequency.

Many of the questionnaire respondents communicated their vexed relationship to writing by invoking extremist vocabulary (guilt, despair, self-loathing, hate), by bolding or underlining words (“I have to force myself to write. This makes me really sad”), or by inserting interjections that hint at emotional responses too powerful to be captured in ordinary language (“Aaah,” “Ummm,” “Aaargh,” “Yikes”). Overall, they expressed a wider range and a higher percentage of negative emotion words than the interview subjects, with frustration and all its variants (frustrate, frustrated, frustrating) occurring nearly twice as often as the next most frequently cited emotion word, anxiety (see Figure 6).

The interview subjects also reported their fair share of self-doubt and existential angst. However, although negative words such as frustration, anxiety, hard, and pain made a strong showing in their responses, pleasure and enjoy topped the frequency list (see Figure 7). This difference in emotional affect corroborated an impression that I developed early on in the interview process and that grew ever stronger as my research progressed: successful writers, by and large, draw pleasure from their writing and infuse their writing processes with pleasure; struggling writers, on the other hand, often labor under debilitating burdens of anxiety, stress, and self-doubt. A key theme that emerged from my conversations with successful academics is that they write not just because they have to but because they want to; the driving force behind their writing is not externally mandated discipline but self-discipline motivated by desire. Some respond best to creative stimuli such as beauty, color, and laughter. Others find satisfaction and even pleasure in self-control and order, like Paul Silvia with his Spartan workspace and progress-plotting spreadsheets; or in moderation and routine, like Robert Boice with his daily regimen of scheduled writing time; or in hyperproductivity, like Rowena Murray with her thousand-words-per-hour writing blasts. But very few, in my experience, would agree with Silvia’s recommendation that “academic writing should be more routine, boring, and mundane than it is.”2

Figure 7. Top forty emotion words for interviews (n = 100); word size is proportionate to frequency.

Instead, the colleagues I interviewed highlighted their positive experiences as writers. Writing, they told me, inspires in them a sense of gratitude and privilege:

The great thing about our work—and isn’t it amazing—is that the taxpayer pays us to pursue a hobby. (Miles Padgett, Physics, University of Glasgow)

And passion:

If you write on something you’re passionate about, the emotions are already in there because it’s something personal to you. That’s the motivator. The passion comes through in your work and allows you to focus on writing for extended periods as opposed to being forced to write something you’re not really comfortable with. (Poia Rewi, Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago)

And satisfaction:

Even when it’s painful and awkward, and I’m fighting with editors and menaced by deadlines, I try to remember that it’s a good thing that this is my job and that most people’s jobs are less satisfying. (Carlo Rotella, English, Boston College)

And even joy:

When I write, I hear these structures—they’re sort of Beethoven-esque. I think of “Ode to Joy.” Maybe it’s akin to when you run and your endorphins kick in. (Margaret Breen, English, University of Connecticut)

Some find special pleasure in particular stages of the writing process, such as researching:

I go to the library, and looking at all those books, I still think, “Wow, this is fantastic.” I just love working with these materials, and I would hope that would come across in the final book. (Ludmilla Jordanova, History, Durham University)

Or composing:

For me, writing is just the greatest pleasure in the profession. You get to not only think but to refine what you think. (Susan Gubar, English, Indiana University)

Or revising:

There is a lot of pleasure for me in revision, because that’s when I see what I’ve got on the page or on the screen, and I can start playing with it. I can move things around, change the vocabulary, and reorganize. (Ruth Behar, Anthropology, University of Michigan)

“Creative as a circus”

Brian Boyd

Department of English, University of Auckland (New Zealand)

As a young boy growing up in New Zealand, Brian Boyd sorted magazines at his parents’ little corner store: “I just read everything that came my way, from schoolgirls’ comics to war comics to multipart encyclopedias.” His thirst for knowledge sometimes led him to “go into things more deeply than is strictly required”; he remembers writing a twenty-two-page report of a movie when he was five or six. Even today, Boyd regards “work-life balance” as a false opposition:

I see my work as play, as creative, as everything I’m curious about, so anything I encounter outside the work can end up serving the work at some point—when I’m listening to music, going to an art gallery or traveling or reading outside my field.

He draws inspiration from a “wonderful” Jacques Tati movie in which the camera keeps moving back and forth between the circus acts and the audience:

The audience is just as funny as the performance. It’s glorious. Tati’s whole point is that life itself can be as creative as a circus; there shouldn’t be a separation between work and play.

A meticulous craftsperson, Boyd treats writing and editing as inseparable elements of a single creative process. In the past, his longhand drafts looked like “palimpsests with deletions and insertions and arrows and so on.” Now, however, he does most of his writing and editing on a computer:

At a very late stage, I’ll usually work in single space. Then I’ll go to double space. And then, after I’ve printed the text out and edited in double space, I’ll have two windows open and take the double-space version and copy a paragraph at a time over to the blank window on the right to make it go single-spaced again. And I’ll just look at one paragraph at a time intensely and see what I can crank up.

For this indefatigably prolific writer, lack of enthusiasm is seldom a problem:

I remember the typist who typed up my PhD said my thesis read pretty weirdly because it was so enthusiastic. I guess I didn’t have the usual subdued academic decorum. I think academic work is not worth doing if you don’t show your passion. If you’re writing about something that doesn’t excite your passion, you should be doing something else.

Others move beyond conscious enjoyment to enter that condition of utter absorption described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as flow:3

Once my writing has gone into that phase where I feel like I know how it’s going to work, I’m not sure I’m feeling anything at all. The beauty of it is that I’m right inside. I’m not reflecting on my own experiences. I’m kind of losing myself in it. Then at the end of each writing bout, there is this lovely feeling of accomplishment and almost exhilaration sometimes. (Cecilia Heyes, Psychology, University of Oxford)

Although the flow state is often described as a temporary suspension of emotion—“I’m not sure I’m feeling anything at all”—writers who have experienced it almost invariably report positive emotions after the fact: beauty, accomplishment, exhilaration.

This is not to say that all successful academics find writing pleasurable or that they find all writing pleasurable all the time. The writers I interviewed spoke candidly about their negative emotions as well:

Writing my PhD was like pulling teeth out. Fear was one emotion I felt. Another was guilt: what have I done today? Where are the words on the page? There was also frustration sometimes and anger and despair. (Ewan Pohe, Māori Studies, Victoria University of Wellington)

Many admitted to moments of existential doubt:

I love putting sentences together. That’s my favorite part. But there have been intervals where I’ve worried that writing was pointless. The audiences have been so small that you’re wondering what you’ve been doing. (Lesley Wheeler, English, Washington and Lee University)

And professional doubt:

Writing can be a bloody struggle, and sometimes I think, “What am I doing? Why am I kidding myself? Am I really an academic, or was that PhD from the back of a cornflakes packet?” (Michael Reilly, Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago)

“Completely new and absolutely exhilarating”

Douglas Hofstadter

Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University (USA)

For Douglas Hofstadter—whose interests and expertise run the disciplinary gamut from mathematics, physics, and cognitive psychology to languages, comparative literature, and music—writing and invention have always been joyful experiences. As a teenager, he often played a “droll story-writing game” with family and friends: “We all played with great gusto, and we would always erupt into enormous bursts of laughter when we were finished.” Later, Hofstadter fell “deeply in love with number theory” and became “intoxicated by the endless beauty of mathematics in general”:

Ever since I was a young boy, I had loved the mysteries of the invisible particles that constitute the fabric of the universe. When I was about eight years old, in fact, my big dream had been to become a zero-mass, spin-one-half neutrino.

While pursuing his PhD in physics, he read a book that revived his “earlier but long-dormant love for the twisty, paradoxical phenomena of mathematical logic”:

For the first time in many years, I began thinking about these beloved old matters very passionately, and it occurred to me that I might be able to teach a course, maybe even write a book, on these ideas that were churning like crazy in my mind.

One day, “in the white heat” of his “new passion,” Hofstadter penned the thirty-page letter to a friend—“it was literally written with pen and ink”—that eventually developed into the manuscript of his genre-busting, Pulitzer Prize—winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. He banged out an early draft on a little Hermès typewriter in a cramped student apartment: “This was all really heady stuff to me, completely new and absolutely exhilarating.” Expressions of pleasure, challenge, and good fortune suffuse his account of the book’s genesis and his subsequent academic career:

Fantastic new ideas were blossoming in my mind.… I was truly lucky.… I loved that challenge.… A fabulous number of crazy coincidences and wordplay discoveries seemed to come out of nowhere—bolts from the blue.… I didn’t think for a moment about taking risks.… I was simply doing something I was extremely excited about.… You can always figure out ways to work within constraints. Doing so is great fun, and it can lead to something beautiful. And beauty is what I live for. Yes, no doubt: beauty is really what I live for.

And social doubt:

I still hear the voice of my high school English teacher telling me that I’ll never be a writer. I often feel like I’ve gotten away with something. (Carl Leggo, Education, University of British Columbia)

And self-doubt:

Academic writing is my most ambitious encounter with my dreams for myself, and that’s why it’s terrifying. (Eric Hayot, Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University)

All the same, I couldn’t help noticing how often these same writers tempered their descriptions of negative emotions with the vocabulary of pleasure. In the interview transcripts, hate walks hand in hand with love:

I love to write, and I hate to write. Writing is something I consider painful and difficult. On the other hand, I love the pleasure I get out of crafting a really neat sentence, of telling a really compelling story. (Lee Shulman, Education, Stanford University)

Pain partners with exhilaration:

Sometimes the most trivial things have taken me an incredible amount of time—just fitting the ideas together, rethinking the order, making sure I could articulate what was on my mind in the best possible way. So it’s painful but at the same time exhilarating. (Eric Mazur, Physics, Harvard University)

Hell cohabits with heaven:

Writing is kind of heaven and hell, because there’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of pain and suffering—but then there’s also this euphoria when you’re actually able to get these words down on paper, and you look at them and say, “Wow. Did I write that?” (Stefan Svallfors, Sociology, Umeå University)

Agony flows into fun:

It’s complete bloody agony to start out with, at least for me. So I’m miserable and convinced that I’m a fraud and not ever going to be able to write anything ever again every time I start writing something new. Then when it gets to the last phases, then it gets to be flow, and it gets to be really satisfying and fun. (Alison Gopnik, Psychology, University of California Berkeley)

And guilt gives way to joy:

The strongest emotion I feel is guilt and regret that I’m not writing and not publishing and not completing things. But when I’m writing—when the bug has bitten me—then it’s just a really joyful experience. (Martin Fellenz, Business, Trinity College Dublin)

Even frustration—that most persistent and ubiquitous of negative emotions—was described by many of the academics I spoke with as a natural and even necessary part of the writing process. They admitted to sometimes feeling tongue-tied:

Writing feels great if it comes across okay, but it can also be very frustrating. It’s sort of knowing what you want to say but trying to find the words. It gets harder as you get older too, I have to tell you. (Michael Corballis, Psychology, University of Auckland)

And underproductive:

The negative emotions are simply frustrations that I’m not getting any more done and that there are too many things else that I have to do or that I’m not concentrating enough. (David Pace, History, Indiana University)

And self-critical:

You can get quite happy about what you’ve done, or you get frustrated that you can’t do it, get depressed that you can’t get it out on the page, get cross with yourself. (Trudy Rudge, Nursing, University of Sydney)

But wherever frustration sloped across the stage, a but clause nearly always waited in the wings nearby:

There’s an element of frustration when it doesn’t quite work, but when it does, I find that extremely exhilarating. It’s a source of happiness, certainly a source of contentment when I’m writing and when it flows. (Christopher Grey, Organization Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London)

Indeed, the words frustrating, frustrated, and frustration so often accompanied narratives of accomplishment and even ecstasy—exhilaration, happiness, contentment, flow—that I began to wonder whether, at least for some writers, frustration is a prerequisite for elation. Perhaps the pleasure of the breakthrough, the intensity of the flow, would lose some of its emotional force if writing were easy all the time.

As Alice Brand lamented more than two and a half decades ago, the role of positive emotions in academic writing is not just an underexplored topic but a repressed one:

Still threaded through contemporary psychology are assumptions about an intellect unaffected by emotion or about emotion as a complex disturbance, an interruption or defect in otherwise lawful, goal-directed mental processes. It is no wonder that anxiety, apprehension, and blocking immediately come to mind when writing specialists think of emotion.4

Brand’s 1989 book The Psychology of Writing remains, alongside Ronald Kellogg’s 1994 book of the same title, one of the few major research-based studies to address the constructive interplay of cognition and emotion in the work of successful writers.5 By and large, the academic-productivity literature either ignores positive emotional affect altogether or pathologizes positive emotions, as when Boice disputes the “romantic” belief that “the most original and esteemed writers necessarily work in great, long binges with euphoria and its inspiration” or when Silvia interprets aroused emotional states such as excitement and enthusiasm not as core ingredients of a successful writing practice but as warning signs: “If your collaborator is a binge writer, be skeptical of assurances about writing the paper quickly or expressions of excitement about the research. Enthusiasm isn’t commitment.”6 Nearly half of my interview subjects (46 percent) spontaneously used the word fun to describe some aspect of their academic work; yet, according to Silvia, “writing about research isn’t fun. Writing is frustrating, complicated, and un-fun.”7

In recent years, behavioral and cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that creativity, productivity, intrinsic motivation, and even luck can be influenced and enhanced through positive thoughts and actions.8 Positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has shown in a variety of experiments that negative emotions discourage innovation and suppress resilience, whereas positive emotions encourage exploratory actions that help create a wider repertoire of skills and deeper reserves of confidence—a virtuous circle that Fredrickson calls “broaden-and-build.”9 In a study with intriguing implications for academic writers, Fredrickson and her colleague Christine Branigan tested a sample of 104 college students who had been randomly assigned to watch two short videos, each designed to invoke one of five emotions: amusement (penguins at play), serenity (soothing nature scenes), anger (innocent people being treated unfairly), fear (a mountain-climbing accident), or neutrality (a screen saver showing falling sticks). When the students were asked to make a list of all the things that they felt like doing immediately after watching the video, those who had been artificially induced to experience pleasurable emotions (amusement or serenity) exhibited a broader “thought-action repertoire” than did participants in the other three groups: that is, they wrote longer lists and came up with a wider range of positive actions than those in the other three groups.10 This research suggests that academics who harbor strong negative emotions about writing might benefit from undertaking prewriting activities designed to shift their mood and kick-start a new “broaden-and-build” cycle of performance and pleasure—for example, by engaging in physical exercise:

When I was doing my PhD, I would often go for a swim, and after swimming I’d go to a restaurant or bar and sit and do a bit of reading and writing. This was all very nice, because writing became part of my happy life. (James Garraway, Higher Education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology)

“Laughing a lot”

Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge

Department of English, University of Victoria (Canada)

Before literary scholars Lisa Surridge and Mary Elizabeth Leighton started writing and publishing collaboratively, they both experienced academic writing as an emotional burden: “I found it hard to face writing” (Surridge); “My early writing experiences were characterized by a kind of crushing perfectionism” (Leighton). These days, Surridge says, “we have a lot of fun writing”:

We end up laughing a lot, and I think that’s because when you’re doing excellent writing together, you are pushing yourself to the limit of what you can engage with intellectually. That process is fun and sometimes almost hilarious.

Even the physical mechanics of cowriting can generate shared mirth: “I will type something—and I’m a very bad typist,” explains Leighton—“which is a source of great glee to us as we write together,” interjects Surridge—“and so that does introduce humor,” Leighton concludes, “but for me, having my hands on the keyboard is part of being able to write.” However, their collaboration is not all fun and games. Both women “ruthlessly” block out shared writing time each week, Surridge explains, and stick to their schedule no matter what:

So, for example, yesterday Mary Elizabeth’s son had violent stomach flu—diarrhea and vomiting—and I was quite tired too because my mother-in-law had just had her ninetieth birthday at my house, and I had been partied under the table by the ninety-year-olds. We had agreed that we were going to meet at two o’clock to write, but we couldn’t because Mary was home with Jacob, who was barfing in the toilet. So we got on the phone. I emailed Mary the document. She was on the computer. We started writing over the phone and just saying, “Okay, where do we go with this? What do we want to say?”

Leighton’s husband, a sociologist, insists that he associates no particular emotions with academic writing: “He says, ’It’s just routine. I do it every day. I set up my life so that I can write.’ ” For Surridge and Leighton, collaborative writing has a similarly neutralizing effect: “It takes anxiety off the board” (Leighton); “We never suffer; we’ve found ways of taking the worry out of it” (Surridge). But much more than that, their intellectual partnership fosters friendship and nurtures joy, which in turn motivates their writing. Our interview was filled with laughter as they told of hours spent together wrestling with ideas in front of a computer, lunchtime walks through the park, conference trips to Paris, and other stories of shared productivity and pleasure.

Or creative writing:

Sometimes I write a poem to get myself into the writing mood. I sit at my desk, think of something, write a poem or a draft of a poem, and then I tell myself, “Okay, now you’ve done something that is very relaxing; it’s time to do more serious stuff. Sit down and write your academic papers.” (Agnes Lam, Applied English Studies, University of Hong Kong)

Or pleasurable domestic tasks:

I like to be doing something all the time. So if I’m not doing work, I’m doing laundry, or I’m singing, or I’m baking. A lot of people get stressed out because they have all kinds of things hanging over them all the time. But for me it’s like, “I’m doing this now,” and everything else is just gone. (Kristina Lejon, Clinical Microbiology, Umeå University)

Or any other activity that puts them in a positive and creative frame of mind: gardening or listening to music or watching talking guinea pigs on YouTube.

For many academic writers, of course, such positivity-inducing steps are unnecessary. Their relationship to writing is already an affirmational one, and their occasional bouts of frustration are caused mostly by a thwarted desire to write more:

I don’t experience much in the way of anxiety or displeasure when I come to write, but it’s frustrating when you have to go back to teaching and you haven’t finished a piece of writing. (Robert Miles, English, University of Victoria)

But what about the many aspiring authors—especially PhD students, untenured or adjunct faculty, and other members of the “precariate” that makes up so much of the academic workforce today—who suffer from crippling negative emotions that in turn impede their writing? In the short run, the “unblocking” techniques recommended by Boice and his followers may prove an effective remedy: remove emotion from the equation; adhere to a daily writing schedule; just write. In the long run, however, the road to productivity will be a long and tedious one unless you can find meaningful ways to pave it with pleasure.

Things to try

Learn from the past

Recall a time and place in your life when you felt especially productive as a writer—or especially creative or intellectually engaged or articulate or passionate or even just happy. Identify the physical, emotional, and intellectual circumstances that enabled your positive experience. Can you build some of these same circumstances into your everyday writing life? For example, if you once drafted an entire article during a long plane flight, can you find a daily or weekly workplace that re-creates the narrow, concentrated, nowhere-else-to-go-for-the-next-few-hours environment of an airplane? If you have fond memories of writing poetry in a handmade notebook with a fountain pen, can you incorporate those tactile pleasures into your academic writing by using a pen and notebook for brainstorming or mind mapping?

Get frustrated

Frustration is a normal and natural part of the writing process. Can you turn frustration into a friend—or at least into something other than a paralyzing foe? For example, you could personify your frustration by drawing a cartoon or finding an image to tape to your computer. (What does your version of frustration look like—a bandit, a baby, a buffoon? What food keeps your frustration going? What threats, bribes, or narcotics might put it to sleep or shoo it away?) Or you could visualize frustration as a surmountable obstacle: a dam to burst through (the thicker the wall, the more powerful the flood), a mountain to climb (the higher the summit, the better the view).

Find your happy penguins

If playful penguins and soothing nature videos don’t get you in the mood to write, what does? A conversation with a friend about why your research excites and interests you? A run, a swim, a walk in the park, some quiet time in the garden?

Read a book

The words writing and pleasure are all too seldom found together in books by or for academics. There are some notable exceptions, of course; James Axtell’s The Pleasures of Academe offers a frankly joyous celebration of academic life; Kim Stafford’s The Muses among Us enumerates “the pleasures of the writer’s craft”; Roland Barthes’s 1973 classic The Pleasure of the Text illuminates the role of both plaisir (pleasure, enjoyment) and jouissance (ecstasy, transcendence) in the experiences of readers and writers. (Also not to be missed are Barthes’s musings on his “almost obsessive relation to writing instruments” in The Grain of the Voice). Overall, however, most academic writing guides convey the message that, if you want to enjoy writing, you’d better go and do it somewhere outside the university. Contrast this shut-up-and-eat-your-vegetables approach with the many books by novelists, journalists, and poets on the pleasures of language and word craft: for example, Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue, or Anthony Burgess’s A Mouthful of Air. If you really want to have some fun, visit the grammar and punctuation section of your local bookstore. Who could resist books with titles as playful and inviting as Roy Clark’s The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English, Karen Gordon’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose, or Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation? Enjoy!11