How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

2. The power of place
Part one: Behavioral habits

In our daily lives as teachers, researchers, administrators, and students, we are constantly shunted from one prescribed venue to another: lecture theaters, meeting rooms, offices, laboratories, classrooms. But writing is a movable feast, an activity that academics can carry with them wherever they go—and they do. The colleagues I interviewed write at work:

I’ve always done my writing in my academic office. I felt that once I started working at home, I’d never stop working. (Stephen Rowland, Higher Education, University College London)

And anywhere but work:

I’ve hardly ever written anything good here in my office. It always happens in the middle of the night or in the morning in a summer cottage or at strange places like the train. So I tell my students, “You should go to the forest or down to the beach to write.” (Thomas Aastrup Rømer, Education, Aarhus University)

And at home:

I have a lovely office on campus, but I basically can’t work there because it’s too distracting. (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosophy, Princeton University)

And anywhere but home:

I don’t and can’t write at home. It’s just impossible. My family would just never let it happen. My son will say things to me like, “I hate your computer,” which is devastating coming from a two-year-old. (Stephen Ross, English, University of Victoria)

And on the road:

A large part of all my books have been written on airplanes and then airports and hotels, when the rest of Japan is asleep, that sort of thing. (Keith Devlin, Human Sciences and Technologies, Stanford University)

And in the bedroom:

My computer is not far from my bed—it’s a laptop—so if I have a brain overdrive in the middle of the night, I’m up at two o’clock. Usually an hour of typing will put me back to sleep. (Poia Rewi, Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago)

And in beautiful, faraway places:

The year I was translating Eugene Onegin, I traveled a lot. For instance, I did some stanzas up in the Sierras in California while hiking. One in a meadow. I was sitting in a tree, on a low branch in the tree, by a lake with wildflowers. I did a bunch in Paris. I also did a bunch in Italy—Florence, Siena, Trento, and other magnificent spots. (Douglas Hofstadter, Cognitive Science, Indiana University)

And in venues close to home that remind them of beautiful, faraway places:

We can’t go to Paris every time we want to write productively (Paris being the site of our most productive writing / thinking sessions), but we’ve been trying to re-create what works for us on those trips: combining short, collaborative writing bursts with reading / brainstorming sessions and physically moving to different writing locations rather than our offices: Special Collections at the library, the Bibliocafé, other cafés. (Lisa Surridge and Mary Elizabeth Leighton, English, University of Victoria)

And whenever or wherever they can:

I’ll write on the couch. I’ll write while the TV is on. I’ll write while I’m at the table. I actually get itchy if I can’t write. (Inger Mewburn, Director of Research Training, Australian National University)

“Go a little wider”

Staffan Andersson

Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University (Sweden)

Staffan Andersson’s daily writing habits have been shaped by his family life. Even before he had children, he found it difficult to work in his university office:

If you sit in your office and write, you have to have a big, red light, kill your phone, rip out the computer cord, and shut down the wireless. You have to be unreachable, because if you don’t do that, you can’t write. You can start writing, but then after a maximum of forty-five minutes, someone turns up with a question about this or that.

Now, on a typical weekday, Andersson leaves his office around three p.m., looks after his children for a few hours before dinner, and helps prepare the evening meal with his wife, who also works full-time. Later, from seven thirty onward, he writes for an hour or two in a small outbuilding away from the household fray. Andersson and his wife have published a book together, an educational volume written in their native Swedish and aimed mainly at students:

Some people said, when we had our third kid at the same time as finishing our book, “How can you do it?” But having the kids actually helps you prioritize how you do things—a lot better time management. We’ve been juggling two careers for fifteen years, so to actually do the juggling together was nice.

Andersson brings a “copy-adapt” philosophy to his academic writing: “I learn the rules, and then I ask, can I transform it in some way? ’Go a little wider,’ as we say in Swedish?” Upon completing his PhD in molecular physics, he decided to make a “mad leap” and publish a reader-friendly version of his thesis:

I wrote a popular scientific summary, with a nice layout, some pictures, mainly for my aunts and parents, and printed one hundred copies. That actually that went out quicker than the thesis did, because people just grabbed it. You didn’t do that sort of thing back then—but I did.

Having initially trained as a journalist, Andersson understands the core principles of effective communication—“Begin with your audience, always”—and dislikes scientific conventions that demand the quenching of individual expression. He now publishes mainly in physics education, a field in which “you’re allowed to have a voice”: “It’s more narrative. It’s a lot more personal. I enjoy that writing a lot more.”

In her 1929 book A Room of One’s Own, novelist Virginia Woolf described the female imagination as a richly diverse collection of architectural spaces:

The rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers.1

Likewise, the physical and metaphorical spaces of academic writing vary as much as the backgrounds, habits, and emotions of those who inhabit them. Paul Silvia scoffs at unproductive colleagues who bemoan the lack of “their own space” for writing:

I’m not sympathetic to this creaky excuse. I’ve never had my own room as a home office or private writing space. In a string of small apartments and houses, I wrote on a small table in the living room, in my bedroom, in the guest bedroom, in the master bedroom, and even (briefly) in a bathroom.2

Yet the annals of creativity are filled with stories of writers who have insisted on working in solitude. Ian Fleming produced his James Bond novels during the two months he spent every winter at his cliff-top estate in Jamaica; Maya Angelou famously drove every morning to a rented motel room that she kept as bare and ascetic as a monk’s cell; Gustav Mahler, William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Carl Jung all produced some of their best work in stone cottages or towers, cloistered within elemental walls.3 “You can read anywhere, almost,” muses novelist Stephen King, “but when it comes to writing … most of us do our best in a place of our own.”4

Some writers say that they can write practically anywhere if they have to:

I remember once being in a motel in California somewhere. It was a very cheap motel—that was all I could afford then. I had to rearrange the furniture in order to get a space to work, but once I’d done that, I was away writing. (Brian Boyd, English, University of Auckland)

Others insist on the importance of establishing “the right place to write”:

I was on study leave and tried to write in Melbourne. I couldn’t write a thing. It was at a modern black-and-white hotel. All the furniture was black leather settees and white lampshades and white Formica desks. It was just the wrong space. I need an attic and a leather chair and an old-fashioned writing desk. (Tony Harland, Higher Education, University of Otago)

Cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg explains that spatialized rituals can amplify performance by inducing “intense concentration or a favorable motivational or emotional state,” triggering “retrieval of ideas, facts, plans, and other relevant knowledge associated with the place, time, or frame of mind selected by the writer for work.”5 When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues polled individuals from diverse populations around the world to learn the conditions associated with “flow”—states of high concentration and creativity—they discovered that, for 40 percent of respondents, “the performance of the activity was enough to trigger the experience.”6 For example, if you take your laptop to the university library every morning and write for an hour while sitting at a desk with a view of a courtyard garden, you are likely to get “into the flow” more quickly each time you go to that same spot to write. After a while, you may even find that sitting at any desk in any library or looking through any window to any garden or even just opening your laptop in any public place can trigger a similar response.

For many of the academics I interviewed, music has a similarly evocative function:

There was a particular piece of classical music—I can’t remember what song it was—that was about eight minutes long, and in the last throes of my PhD, when it was going really well, I would just play this while I was writing. It would be at a particular time of day or a couple of times a day, because it made me feel a particular kind of way and it gave me a high. (Kalervo Gulson, Education, University of New South Wales)

“Hunger for the time”

Rebecca Piekkari

School of Economics, Aalto University (Finland)

Picture the following scenario. Your family owns a summer cottage on a remote northern lake, a place where your writing flows freely. Your parents, who happen to own the cottage next door, have offered to look after your children in the mornings while you work. Your afternoons are spent berry picking with the kids, swimming in the lake, or relaxing in the sauna; at night, you share leisurely dinners with family and friends under the twilight glow of the midnight sun. Does that sound like a life of blurred boundaries and endless work stress—or does it sound like paradise?

For Rebecca Piekkari, summer holidays at the family cottage in Finland offer the best of both worlds: an opportunity for relaxation that is also a time for focused writing. Working in an academic field dominated by quantitative researchers, she brings qualitative methodologies and an experimental ethos—“innovation, creativity, pluralism”—to her writing:

For example, while teaching a research methods course to graduate students, I noticed that the discovery process is at odds with the format of a standard research paper; so I started to experiment with unconventional forms of research writing. I’m currently working with a student to write a theatrical play. And although I usually publish in English, I recently wrote a piece in Finnish for businessmen; that gave me a chance to let loose with a more playful writing style, to feel the wind beneath my wings.

In an article with the delightful title “Herding Cats from Uppsala to Sigtuna,” Piekkari worked with coauthors from seven countries to produce a collaborative research paper about the pleasures and challenges of writing a collaborative research paper with coauthors from seven countries.

Piekkari’s summer writing sessions are made possible by a supportive family economy even while they contribute to that economy. If she were to emerge at lunchtime each day in a terrible mood, her husband and children would almost certainly rebel and order her to take a break. But for Piekkari, writing is a break from her hectic routine as a teacher, supervisor, mentor, colleague, and (at the time of our interview) vice dean for research and international affairs at Aalto University. Sitting in her Helsinki office during a busy workweek, she spoke longingly of her “hunger for the time” to write—an appetite assuaged every summer at that cottage by the lake.

According to Don Campbell in his book The Mozart Effect, Baroque music with a pulse of around sixty beats per minute—Mozart, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli—can “raise performance levels and productivity by reducing stress and tension, masking irritating sounds and contributing to a sense of privacy.”7 But rap, reggae, or rock can have much the same effect:

I listen to music, often with headphones, and I turn off email and everything. I try to put myself in a cocoon. There are only five bands that I’ll listen to when I’m writing. If I’m listening to something I know really well, it drowns out all the other sound and allows me to focus and concentrate. (Eric Hayot, Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University)

Stillness, too, can be a kind of music:

I can’t write when my kids are playing the piano in the background or yelling at me or when students are knocking on my door. I know other people can write and have music on, but I can’t. I have to sit in total silence. (Deborah Kaple, Sociology, Princeton University)

For writers who dislike ambient noise, Mozart on the stereo may create as much of a distraction as a boisterous child or a demanding student.

The trope of the unplanned visitor appeared often in my interviews with successful academics:

When my kids were small, I often stayed home with them if they were sick. I realized that their naptime was a good time for writing, because I could use those free hours to produce as much as I would have if I had been here in the office and disturbed by people knocking on the door. (Christer Nilsson, Ecology, Umeå University)

I’m reminded of the proverbial “person on business from Porlock” who interrupted Samuel Taylor Coleridge just as he was writing down his visionary poem “Kubla Khan”:

On his return to his room, [the poet] found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!8

Coleridge’s unwelcome visitor has come to symbolize any unwanted disruption of creative inspiration: the student, colleague, or family member who demands our attention just as we were about to write something brilliant. (Or were we secretly hoping for a scapegoat on whom to blame our lack of productivity?) In the age of the Internet, of course, the new person from Porlock is email, which sneaks into our studies without even knocking:

I think email has been a disaster for all of us. The idea of letting the inbox determine your order of priority is utterly ridiculous, but it’s very, very hard to resist. (Michèle Lamont, Sociology, Harvard University)

Email tempts us with instant gratification:

We’re all waiting on those little bits of external validation that usually come in via our inbox—an invitation to something, a review, something nice. (Sarah Maddison, Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne)

And it ambushes us wherever we go:

I try to stay off the Internet when I’m writing. But then there’ll be the thing I have to check in an email message, and I’ll open it up—and, of course, all the other email messages will pop up. (David Pace, History, Indiana University)

Literary scholar Leah Price recalls how, during a research leave in California, she woke up every morning to find her inbox already full of messages from East Coast colleagues:

But then when I went on research leave to France a few years later, there was no new email in the mornings, so my time there was much more productive. (Leah Price, English, Harvard University)

That was when she learned the importance of “unplugging” to write.

Some academics find that the best cure for Porlock syndrome is to go “on retreat,” preferably to a place without Wi-Fi: a cabin in the woods, a campground caravan, a beach house, a motel room. A solo writing retreat lacks the collegial ethos of a group retreat (see Chapter 9, “Writing among Others”) but can provide many of the same benefits: protected writing time, a sense of freedom, a change of scene. Even when family responsibilities, teaching schedules, or budgetary constraints make leaving town impossible, overworked academics can rig up smaller-scale, close-to-home versions of what Bruce Rogers calls the “writing cloister”: a place where, monk-like, “you do nothing but write” for hours or days at a time.9 For example, if you once spent a productive sabbatical on an island (real or metaphorical) far away from the hurly-burly of your usual workplace, you may discover that you can achieve a similar sense of productive solitude by taking your laptop to an art gallery on a Friday afternoon or by renting a motel room for an intensive weekend of writing, sleeping, and take-out meals.

“Here at this very desk”

Robert Poulin

Department of Zoology, University of Otago (New Zealand)

Growing up in French-speaking Canada, Robert Poulin started reading English novels as a teenager, “because they were half the price of French books.” An influential high school teacher taught him how to structure a persuasive essay:

He would draw an upside-down triangle—that was the introduction—then there was a rectangle for the main body of the work and another triangle for the conclusion, which should end at about the same level of generality as the introduction. This is still how I structure my own scientific papers, and it’s how I teach my postgraduates to do it. No one has ever criticized the structure of my writing.

Later Poulin attended McGill University, where he made “all sorts of English-speaking friends—from the States, from the rest of Canada.” Now, he says, “I write much, much better in English than in French.” Poulin enjoys scientific writing and especially relishes the challenge of crafting a persuasive grant proposal:

I actually find it fun and exciting to sell your ideas and make sure the explanation is crystal clear. In one page, you have to convince people who are not expert in your area that, yes, they should give you a million dollars.

However, leading a research group of fourteen people leaves him little time for his own writing:

If I get an hour of free time to write, that’s a good day—that’s a good week, even. So what I try to do is find blocks of time, small blocks of maybe two or three hours. Ideally, I find several of those in a period of a week or two weeks, and that would be what I use to write. It’s all done here at this very desk. I don’t write at home. All my writing has been done sitting here at this computer during my normal work hours.

Although he often closes his office door when he is writing, Poulin does not turn off email:

I just let the emails come in, and I’m curious—I look at them every time I hear the little ring. It’s an addiction, but it doesn’t seem to interrupt my thoughts. I can just stop for five minutes, reply to an email, and get back to the writing. A brief interruption will not make me forget what I’ve been thinking about for days.

Just as our bodies all differ in their responses to physical stimuli, so too do the places where we prefer to station them. Voltaire wrote mostly in bed; Wallace Stevens composed some of his most innovative and influential poetry while walking to work; Ingmar Bergman retreated to a remote Swedish island to write his film scripts; Jane Austen surreptitiously penned her novels in between neighbors’ visits to her drawing room.10 Whether you work in an airy studio, a stone tower, a bathroom, or even a bed, there is no “right” place for writing. The best place to write is anywhere you do.

Things to try

Escape

The idea of retreating to an island every summer is all very well; but how can we dodge interruptions and distractions the rest of the time, in our everyday working lives? One strategy is to identify your personal Porlocks and allow them no opportunity to knock on your door. At home, turning off Wi-Fi for a few hours may do the trick. In a public venue or open-plan office, you could try facing a wall or window and donning a pair of headphones; not only will you be shielding yourself from visual and aural distractions, but you will also be signaling to other people that you do not want to be disturbed. Even in an academic department with an open-door culture, there is nothing wrong with closing your office door for an hour or two and posting a laminated sign proclaiming “Writer at work, please return at ___ o’clock.” Alternatively, try swapping offices with a colleague for the afternoon; your door will remain collegially ajar, but when people pop their heads in and see that you’re not there, chances are they will go away and come back later.

Beautify

Does clutter drive you crazy? Do certain colors nourish your senses? Do you write best in a room with a view? Forget all those people who tell you that “real writers” don’t care about the scenery. Indulge your aesthetic sensibilities by clearing your desk, decorating your study, or taking your laptop to a place where you can spend an hour or two in beautiful surroundings. If you work in a windowless cubicle, you can tack up some colorful postcards or display scenic photos on your computer desktop to encourage and inspire you while you work.

Take it outside

William Wordsworth composed much of his best poetry during long walks through the Lake District of northern England—and there are sound scientific reasons why. As Richard Louv notes in The Nature Principle, the benefits of physical exercise (which stimulates the senses and promotes blood flow to the brain) are multiplied out in nature: when we crunch over autumn leaves or face the sea breeze, we breathe in particulates that literally make us feel good.11 If long walks in the wilderness are not a viable part of your daily routine, are there places closer to home—parks, urban walkways, pleasant neighborhoods—where you can re-create that same winning combination of fresh air, exercise, and physical regeneration on an everyday scale?

Read a book

The physical world shapes our memories and stirs our senses—and so can books about writing and the physical world, from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s evocative Gift from the Sea to William Zinsser’s charming Writing Places. Before you start reading about space and place, however, consider the places and spaces where you read. A colleague of mine keeps a comfortable “reading chair” in her office—a daily reminder to sit down, take a deep breath, and let her mind shift into reading mode. My own reading habits, by contrast, have become increasingly itinerant in recent years; much though I love the seductive physicality of printed books, I now carry a whole library of e-books on my computer and keep a few audiobooks queued up on my smartphone. Recently, while traveling by ferry to spend a few days in my writing studio on New Zealand’s Waiheke Island, I pulled up William Butler Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree” on my laptop screen:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Later, walking on the beach, I listened to the opening passage of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.

The landscapes so evocatively described by Yeats and Thoreau have now become inextricably linked in my mind with the seascapes of another hemisphere: the ferry pulling into Matiatia Bay, the waves breaking on Onetangi Beach.12