How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

3. Rhythms and rituals
Part one: Behavioral habits

Time and place will remain empty containers for failed ambitions unless you fill them with your writing. But even once you have established when and where to write, so many other questions remain. How often should I write, and for how long? Should I shape my sentences as I go, or should I write first and revise later? Should I draw up a detailed outline, or should I plunge straight in and “write to think”? Should I separate research tasks from writing tasks, or should I write surrounded by my books and notes, looking up references along the way? Should I brew myself a cup of tea or go for a run before I get started, or should I resist procrastination and “just write”?

This chapter does away with should and focuses instead on may, a lovely old-fashioned auxiliary verb that connotes possibility and permission. May I discover my own writing rhythms and develop my own writing rituals? Yes, you may. May I be released from the guilt of feeling “less disciplined” than my colleague in the office next door, who writes to a daily schedule and posts a weekly word log proclaiming his progress? Yes, you may. May I ignore the advice of all those productivity-pumping books, articles, and websites that tell me I should write in a certain way, at certain intervals, for a certain length of time? Yes, you may. Alternatively, you may choose a prescriptive formula and follow it to the letter, if doing so works best for you.

The chapter is sequenced as a series of oppositional metaphors (some of which will return in different guises in Chapter 12, “Metaphors to Write By”). As you read, you may want to question and collapse these oppositions, probing the nuances and shadings in between. Day or night—how about twilight? Black or white—what’s wrong with shades of gray? Sink or swim—why not float instead?

Blast or sculpt?

“Write first, revise later” is a strategy frequently recommended by writing experts as a cure for the twin evils of procrastination and perfectionism. The idea is that you should turn off your critical internal editor, get some words onto the page, and leave the revising and shaping for another day—a process optimistically labeled “spontaneous writing” by Robert Boice, “generative writing” by Rowena Murray, “effortless writing” by Dorothea Brande, and “freewriting” by Peter Elbow.1 The academics I interviewed preferred explosive words such as “blast” and “breakthrough”:

I’m a fast writer. I like to blast something out and then go back and really work on it. (Andrea Lunsford, English, Stanford University)

Often there’s a breakthrough time where you write and write and write and write, and it’s very bad and there are lots of pages—fifteen pages or more. (James Garraway, Higher Education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology)

Or they imposed directional metaphors such as “flow” and “in the groove”:

I have ideas, I start writing, and the more I write, the more I get into the ideas. And it sort of keeps flowing. So once I get into a groove, it keeps moving in that groove. (Marysol Asencio, Sociology, University of Connecticut)

Or, less poetically, they called it “blatting” or “blgggh writing”:

I tend to sit with a blank Word document and try and blat some ideas out; then I leave it for a day or two and think about it at night, on the bike, walking around. Eventually a structure emerges, so that it all hangs together and has a bit of grace and style to it. (Sam Elworthy, Director, Auckland University Press)

I’m a “blgggh” writer, as opposed to a “fiddly writer.” A fiddly writer is someone who writes a sentence and goes back and checks the sentence is exactly as they want it before they go to the next one. Whereas I just write frantically and then go back afterwards and revise and edit and chop and change. (Bill Barton, Mathematics Education, University of Auckland)

Charles Darwin had an even less elegant description: “I scribble in a vile hand whole pages as quickly as I possibly can.”2

Many writing guides insist that you should (there’s that word again!) blast first and edit later, never fiddle-as-you-go:

Your first drafts should sound like they were hastily translated from Icelandic by a nonnative speaker. Writing is part creation and part criticism, part id and part superego: Let the id unleash a discursive screed, and then let the superego evaluate it for correctness and appropriateness.3

You should not, and cannot afford to, worry about concision when you are just starting to write.… If you cut and prune too early, you’ll slow yourself down.4

However, craft-focused writers—let’s call them “sculptors” rather than “fiddlers”—may prefer to revise and edit recursively from the moment they start writing:

I’m one of those people for whom words just don’t flow out in a whole sequence end to end. I spend a lot of time writing and rewriting as I go. (Michael Reilly, Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago)

And of course there are those who alternately blast and sculpt, and there are those who blast slowly or sculpt quickly, and there are those who neither blast nor sculpt but craft their prose according to a different set of metaphors altogether.

Bungee or map?

For many of the academics I interviewed—particularly those at the humanities end of the scholarly spectrum—writing is an essential part of the research process, a generative task, a form of thinking:

In literary studies, you cannot really separate out a phase where you do all the research and then you just put it down on paper. It doesn’t work like that—at least not for me. The writing is the research. (Claudia Bernardi, Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington)

“They have a map”

Kevin Kenny

Department of History, Boston College (USA)

Historian Kevin Kenny typically spends several years gathering, sifting through, and organizing his research data before he finally sits down to write a book. By that time, he has processed stacks of primary and secondary material into thematically organized files that represent future chapters or sections. He distills these files into a detailed, top-down outline that contains two columns, labeled “Content” and “Evidence”:

I lay out the book as a whole in considerable detail before I write any of it. The analytical building blocks of the book emerge organically through that process.

Determined to make his work accessible to a wide range of readers, Kenny also deploys some “old-fashioned literary techniques” that he learned years ago in a fiction writing course. His most recent book, for example, contains two tightly interwoven plots:

It has action that rises to a plot point and then falls away and moves to a second and culminating plot point. It has a subplot that is introduced early without the reader knowing why. The subplot recurs on occasion and draws closer and closer to the main plot until it converges.

With a fifty-page outline to guide him, Kenny once drafted an entire book manuscript over a single summer, writing in the mornings, editing after lunch, and joining his kids at the lake by midafternoon every day. So successful is his “outline first, write last” method that Kenny has trained his PhD students to work the same way. While their friends are sweating over draft chapters, Kenny’s students are still reading, taking notes, and outlining. But when they do finally start writing, they can be assured that they will finish:

The beauty of the method is that it demystifies the writing process. There would be nothing more terrifying to them than to sit down in front of a blank screen or blank page and go, “What do I do? Where do I start? This seems impossibly vast.” My students will write the dissertation in whatever order they wish, whatever order suits their mood and their emotional framework and their work habits. The one thing they know when they start this process is that they will have a manuscript at the end. They have a blueprint. They have a map.

Studies by cognitive scientists have shown that the physical act of writing, whether in longhand or on a keyboard, forces the integration of neural, kinesthetic, and manipulative processes into new forms of thought:5

Almost all of my writing is trying to understand something in the first place just for myself—just trying to figure it out. So if I wasn’t writing, I wouldn’t be discovering anything. (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosophy, Princeton University)

Yet plenty of successful researchers adhere to the oft-maligned strategy of “writing it up” instead:

I wouldn’t say I write quickly or easily. But I basically plan it all out in my head, and sometimes I jot that down as an outline. Then I just sit down and write it, and I don’t let myself leave my desk until a certain amount is done. (Russell Gray, Director, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)

This “plan first, write later” approach is common not only in the sciences but also in “book disciplines” such as history:

Before writing something, I need to bathe in the notes. There’s the deep-thinking moment where I may reorganize them; I consolidate, I separate. Then I use paper to outline something and pull out what I call “notes on notes.” (Ann Blair, History, Harvard University)

Here, the activity of “writing to think” has largely been displaced from the drafting process to the note-taking and outlining stages.

Cecile Badenhorst distinguishes between “mapmakers” who plan their route before they begin writing and “bungy jumpers” who dive straight into a project without really knowing where they are going, supported by a blind faith that they’ll eventually rise to the surface again:6 processes sometimes referred to as “plotting” versus “pantsing” (writing by the seat of one’s pants). Blogger Inger Mewburn notes the benefits of combining the two modes:

I’ve always taken great pride in being a pantser; I think I read Peter Elbow too early: “Plotting stifles the writing process” and all that. But now I’ve come to realize that if I ever want to write a book, I will need to plot it first, to figure out the interweaving threads. Then I can plunge in and write each chunk the way I write a blog post: bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. (Inger Mewburn, Director of Research Training, Australian National University)

Lines or boxes? Roots or rhizomes?

Compositional strategies such as plotting versus pantsing may or may not map neatly onto structural strategies such as linearity versus modularity (do you write straight through a piece from start to finish, or do you tackle the various components of a project nonsequentially?) and hierarchy versus chaos (do your thoughts branch off from each other in a logical manner, like the root structure of a tree, or do they spread and propagate haphazardly, like a rhizome?)7

I try to create a structure for the whole text, like little boxes you can throw things into: this is a box, and this is a box, and this is a box. After that, I can basically start writing anywhere in the text. (Stefan Svallfors, Sociology, Umeå University)

I don’t start writing until I know exactly what I want to say. But it’s recursive; I always go through several iterations. Quite often when I’m writing up the statistical analysis, I have a new idea that forces me to redo the whole thing. (Fabrizio Gilardi, Political Science, University of Zurich)

Eviatar Zerubavel, author of The Clockwork Muse, recommends distinguishing between “A-Time” writing, when new words are produced, and “B-Time” writing, when you undertake tasks that are directly related to your writing project but require less focused concentration, such as reading, note taking, or editing.8 Depending on your way of working, A-Time and B-Time sessions could be either planned (“I write in the mornings and edit in the afternoons”) or spontaneous (“I don’t feel like writing the discussion section right now, so I’ll work on the graphs.”)

Snack or binge?

“Snack writing” is the practice of writing for short, unscheduled periods of time between other tasks—for example, while you’re waiting for your children to emerge from their piano lesson or during a twenty-minute gap between meetings:

I can start writing at any old time. I really don’t believe in that “clearing a whole day to write” thing, because I’ve wasted many a whole day on writing when I could have got more done in ten minutes. (Julie Stout, Psychology, Monash University)

“A threshold to step over”

Maja Elmgren and Ann-Sofie Henriksson

Division for Development of Teaching and Learning, Uppsala University (Sweden)

Trained in physical chemistry and law, respectively, Maja Elmgren and Ann-Sofie Henriksson work with faculty from across their university on a range of teaching-related initiatives. When a publisher invited them to coauthor a textbook on educational development—the first of its kind in Sweden—they seized the opportunity, even though Henriksson’s teaching contract included no provision for research time: “I officially couldn’t write it.” Their solution? Snack writing. Most of the book was produced, Henriksson explains, “in odd bits of time left over between meetings or something”:

When I had half an hour, I wrote. I took every half an hour and quarter of an hour or whatever I could get, and wrote on the book, and got as far as I got. That’s different from what I used to do earlier, because earlier I was under the illusion that there’s no point even starting if I don’t have at least a week or more.

Elmgren adds that they were both “thinking about the book all the time,” cross-fertilizing ideas even when they were not actually writing:

We got feedback from each other all the time in many different ways. We learned from each other’s way of thinking. It has really been good to come from two such different subject domains.

Despite their mutual support, both authors encountered frequent moments of hesitancy and doubt; for example, starting a new chapter or section could feel “like a wall to climb over” (Elmgren), “a threshold to step over each time” (Henriksson). But when one author got stuck, the other took over, with Henriksson’s “inspiration to write a lot” complemented by Elmgren’s careful “weighing of words.”

Elmgren and Henriksson both worked on every page of the book, gathering feedback along the way from colleagues whom they invited to take part in seminars focusing on the structure and content of each chapter. “We’ve worked with teachers from all over the university,” notes Elmgren, “so we knew our audience well. But we really wanted to make sure we included all their voices. That was a challenge.”

Experienced snackers say they suffer no major transition issues when they dip in and out of their writing, because they never really leave their research behind. However, many of the colleagues I interviewed insisted that snacking, pecking, and sound bites could not possibly work for them:

I need to write in chunks at a time, and I need a chunk of time to get into it and do it—and that doesn’t just mean days. (Gillie Bolton, freelance writer in literature and medicine, United Kingdom)

Instead, they prefer to dive deep and stay underwater for a while:

I find it almost impossible to peck at my writing. I need a week off or a month off to do it and do nothing else. (Alison Jones, Education, University of Auckland)

Proponents of daily writing label this underwater approach “binge writing” and warn in dire tones against its evils:

Avoid writing in binges. Abandon the notion that writing is best done in large, undisrupted blocks of time.9

Many scholars still hold stock in BIG BLOCKS OF TIME, INC. To write daily, you must sell your stock.10

Yet academe, I discovered, is full of successful binge writers:

When I’m seriously writing—a grant proposal for example—I will sit for twelve hours without moving. (Patricia Culligan, Engineering, Columbia University)

The pieces I’ve been most happy about writing were always written when I was in a tunnel—when I was so excited by an idea that I got deeper and deeper into it. (Martin Fellenz, Business, Trinity College Dublin.)

I like writing intensively. I pick a day to start a project and then do nothing else until I finish (except exercise), working day and night, seven days a week until it’s done. (Steven Pinker, Psychology, Harvard University.)

Rowena Murray notes that combining these methods—writing in occasional concentrated bursts but also chipping away daily—can be “an effective strategy for making time for writing in academic or professional schedules, and still having a life.”11 However, the very vocabulary of “snacking” and “bingeing” (or even the less pejorative “feasting”) suggests erratic patterns of behavior rather than a healthy relationship with writing. Perhaps a different set of metaphors is needed?

Sprints or marathons?

Recast as a sporting metaphor, “snacking versus bingeing” becomes “sprints versus marathons” or “speed versus staying power” or perhaps “Hare versus Tortoise.” Which mode should you favor in your writing practice? Any athlete could tell you the answer: both. Fitness in any sport requires cross-training, whereby you undertake a variety of workouts in order to build up your strength, endurance, agility, and mental focus. Studies by Hartley and Branthwaite (1989) and Kellogg (1994) suggest that the most productive writers typically write several times a week for one to three hours per session:12

One of the things I’ve learned about myself as a writer is that even if I have twelve hours for writing, I can’t write productively for twelve hours. I can write productively for three or four hours. (Victoria Rosner, English, Columbia University)

But you may be in better shape to make the most of those “Goldilocks” sessions—neither too short nor too long but just right—if you have also practiced working in other modes and at other paces.

Carrots or sticks?

Do you respond more readily to threats or to rewards? To punishment or to praise? To pressure or to freedom? Many of the academics I interviewed noted the motivational force of deadlines:

My main pieces have mostly been finished at the last minute. I get a lot done when I’m on a deadline. (Johanna Moisander, Business Communication, Aalto University)

“There is always a fixed cost”

Wim Vanderbauwhede

School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow (Scotland)

Computer scientist Wim Vanderbauwhede believes that writing for short periods every day is inefficient, because shifting gears requires too much “context switching”:

It’s a term from operating systems. If you have to do several things, in little bits, and each of these things has a lot of context—things you need to think about to do them—then you have to always change your mindset to do the next task and reacquire the full context of that task mentally. That takes a lot of time to do; there is always a fixed cost.

He prefers to concentrate on a single task for several hours at a time, preferably away from the office:

I like a change of environment, so I will go to a coffee shop or something and work there. There’s no email to respond to or calls and so on, so I will be able to focus quite well. I’ve never really believed in doing lots of overtime, but I try to be very focused when I’m working.

A native Flemish speaker who developed his English-language skills by reading English novels (in particular, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy), Vanderbauwhede structures each paper in advance and works out what his “story” is:

When I start writing, I mark each section with square brackets, and I write whatever I think about. Otherwise, I will sit there and try to formulate each sentence exactly in my mind, and that doesn’t work so well. If I get the ideas down in bullet points—this is what this sentence should contain, and in the next paragraph, this is the key idea—then it’s easier for me to write the full sentences later.

He believes that academics who spend long hours working are not necessarily any more productive than those who do not:

I do a lot of thinking outside work hours. When I walk home, I’ll be thinking about my work, or when I’m just doing the washing up or whatever. So the mind is kind of defocused, and then some thinking goes on at a different level. I feel most of the connections I make are when I’m not actively trying to crack a problem but when I’m relaxed from it.

Robert Boice once persuaded a group of unproductive colleagues to write out personal checks to a hated political organization under the threat that the checks would be mailed out if they failed to meet their weekly writing goals.13 Writers who respond to this kind of motivation-through-punishment might benefit from visiting Write or Die (www.writeordie.com), a website that “puts the prod in productivity” by offering a sliding scale of admonishments ranging from polite pop-up reminders soon after you stop typing (“Gentle Mode”) to an unpleasant sound that shuts off only when you start writing again (“Normal Mode”) to a particularly punitive feature that erases everything you have written (“Kamikaze Mode: Keep Writing or Your Work Will Unwrite Itself”).

Writers who prefer carrots, on the other hand—or, better yet, small, fluffy animals—might try Written? Kitten! (writtenkitten.net), a website that rewards you with a picture of a kitten every time you type a predetermined number of words into a text box. (“We like positive reinforcement,” explain the site’s originators, “so we decided to make something a bit like writeordie but cuter and fuzzier.”) Alternatively, for a more sophisticated range of feedback options, you can subscribe to 750 Words (www.750words.com/faq) and earn animal badges:

If you write [750 words daily] for five days in a row, you get a penguin badge.… There are birds associated with long streaks of writing. For writing quickly, or without distraction, many days in a row, you might get a hamster or a cheetah.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld is said to practice a low-tech version of this technique, sans penguins or hamsters. He advises budding comedians to go out and buy a large wall calendar, make a big X with a red marker every day they get some writing done, and take pleasure in watching that chain of Xs grow: “Your only job is to not break the chain.”14

March or dance?

Some academics, especially those who struggle to make time for writing, perform best under the rigors of a daily routine: a measured march to the drumbeat of a ticking clock. Others prefer the ceremony of a ritual for getting started:

My ritual is to get up early in the morning, put my computer on a huge table, make a cup of coffee, and start writing. Midmorning I have another coffee, and I always have toast with the coffee or, if I’m lucky, a croissant, if there’s a croissant in the house. (Tony Harland, Higher Education, Otago University)

Rituals offer comfort and ballast in a chaotic world, investing routines with symbolic meaning: “Without them,” muses novelist Anne Lamott, “I would be a balloon with a slow leak.”15 They can be used not only for getting started but also for winding up a writing session, a technique sometimes referred to as “parking on the downhill slope”:16

Every day when I finish writing, I write myself a note. I write it in third person. I say, “Eric, here’s what you’re thinking. This is where you are. These are the problems you’re leaving yourself with. This is what you think might come next.” (Eric Hayot, Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University)

Like marching and dancing, routines and rituals share some common features. Both are intentional activities rather than passive states; both can be either communal or solitary; both involve not just repetition but change. (Marching takes you to new places; dancing transforms the places where you are.) The point of this chapter is not that “anything goes” but that, within the spacious parameters of a successful writing practice, nearly anything is possible: marching, dancing, swaying, skipping, or even standing still to feel the wind blow past. Whether you prefer polar oppositions or sliding scales, rules or ambiguity, both / and and / or either / or, there is no “right” way of writing. The best way to write is any way that works for you.

Things to try

Refine your rituals

Chronicle your writing rhythms and rituals over several days or weeks, paying particular attention to unconscious or habitual behaviors. Do you quickly check your email every time you sit down to write, even though you have vowed not to let email intrude on your sacred writing hour? Do you get up and go in search of food every time you hit a conceptual block, even when you’re not hungry? In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg shows how undesirable habits can be broken down to their constituent parts and rerouted in more positive directions. For example, instead of heading straight to the fridge whenever you hit an impasse, you could develop a ritual of first recording your thoughts on a sticky note and placing it on your computer screen to await your (refreshed) return.17

Interrogate your needs

Academics often describe their writing routines in terms of predestination rather than preference, compulsion rather than choice: “I need to carve out big blocks of time”; “I need to be surrounded by my books and notes while I’m writing.” What happens when you recast your narrative of need as a tale of possibilities instead? For example, “I prefer to carve out big blocks of time for writing, but when the semester gets too crazy, I can push my writing forward by dipping in and out for half an hour at a time”; or “I usually work at my computer with my books and notes close to hand, crafting each sentence as I go, but occasionally I sit down in a café with a notebook and pen and ’write to think’ instead.”

Find your own metaphors

Concoct some new metaphorical pairings to describe your work patterns, for example:

Stew or marinate? Do you tend to work on a project obsessively every day until it’s finished, or do you sometimes park it in the back of your mind and leave its flavors to develop? (Other metaphors of gradual transformation: composting, percolating, fermenting, alchemy.)

Juggle or bowl? Do you juggle multiple writing projects at once, or do you prefer to knock down all the pins in the bowling lane before you pick up the next ball? (Other metaphors of workload management: bringing in the big jets first, rocks in a jar.)18

Track or float? Do you plot your writing sessions and track your progress, or do you write whenever you feel like it and keep no record of time spent and words produced? (Other metaphors of invigilation versus freedom: boot camp, coaching, improvisational theater, play.)

Cloisters or commons? Do you like to sequester yourself in a private place, or do you prefer to write in the company of others? (Other metaphors of social isolation versus interaction: cocoon, web, burrow, hive.)19

Read a book

The writing processes of successful authors can make for fascinating reading, particularly for aspiring writers who are still trying to figure out their own best ways of working. Memoirs such as Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Stephen King’s On Writing, Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing, and bell hooks’s Remembered Rapture offer a compelling mix of autobiography and authorial advice. Alternatively, you might prefer dipping into anthologies of authorial interviews and anecdotes: for example, Robert S. Boynton’s The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft; Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham’s Critical Intellectuals on Writing; Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work; the New York Times’ Writers on Writing series; or Hilton Obenzinger’s How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience. Books by or about full-time professional authors do not necessarily reflect the daily realities of academic writers, who must often balance demanding teaching, supervision, and administrative loads with the publish-or-perish imperatives of scholarly research. However, reading about the rhythms and routines of other writers may inspire you to attend more closely to your own.20