It’s November, it’s #acwrimo, it’s that time of year when we academics are looking for best forms of practice when it comes to our academic writing. Karen Strickland, Senior Lecturer & Senior Teaching Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University reflects on her experiences of face to face and online writing groups for providing support and time for writing. You can view her Linked.in profile here and follow her on Twitter (@strictlykaren).

Do you struggle to write on your own, watch deadlines pass you by and never quite get round to turning that thesis or conference paper into an article? Collaborative writing might be just the approach you need. Collaborative writing groups are a useful approach which can help you develop your experience of writing for publication and help you meet deadlines and targets for writing.

Writing groups offer the potential for shared experience of writing together either on the same article as co-author, or as a buddy experience, working alongside each other to develop unique articles. I have been interested in collaborative writing approaches for some time, as I think they are useful approaches which help to develop capability of newer writers and thus develop capacity. There are a number of ways you can write collaboratively such as co-authoring, writing in groups or signing up to a writing workshop or retreat. In this blog post I will share my experiences of a few of these approaches and suggest ways in which you can create opportunities for group writing. I have split these broadly into face to face and online groups.

Earlier this summer a group of staff from Edinburgh Napier attended a three day residential writing retreat.  The retreat was facilitated by David Baume PhD SFSEDA FHEA who is an independent international higher education researcher, evaluator, consultant, staff and educational developer and writer. The retreat allowed participants time to focus on preparing articles for publication or papers for conference presentation without the usual interruptions of daily working life. The format was a structured, facilitated retreat with opportunities for peer and facilitator support throughout giving a very supportive and collegiate feel to the event. The facilitator used his experience to guide participants in the peer reviewing and publishing process, from choosing the publication outlet to dealing with reviewer’s comments.

The first morning of the retreat, after a little discussion around the focus of our articles we were challenged to go away and write 500 words by lunchtime. We had to come back and report our progress, so the pressure was on from the start! The focus and setting of goals was crucial to the success of the retreat as we worked though the three days, revising and re-drafting our papers. By the end of the three days the participants all completed advanced drafts of their work. Overall this was a very enjoyable and productive experience.

The legacy of this retreat is that we have also continued to meet on a monthly basis on the first Wednesday of the month on the top floor of the library which has a computer room and easy chairs with uninterrupted views of Edinburgh Castle. This helps to provide on-going time for writing and the chance to meet up and discuss writing and peer review. Peer support really is the key to this writing group.

The value of face to face groups are that you get the immediacy of the group interaction, however you need to set ground rules, such as, how long to set aside for social chat at the beginning and end of the sessions. The social aspect of the writing group is worth emphasising but care needs to be taken not to let this eat into writing time.

It is not always possible to meet face to face, and it also limits the reach so how about online writing groups?

A colleague of mine at Edinburgh Napier University leads an open online writing course which has been offered over the past two summers for individuals who are interested in writing for technology enhanced learning.  This initiative was called WriteTEL and was led by Dr Keith Smyth. This initiative invited writers to plan, draft and review an article for publication, whilst being supported by a member of the WriteTEL team. A series of online webinars were provided, with guest experts who had considerable expertise to share in how to write for publication and get published.

This approach worked really well for individuals who perhaps had recently completed a project or had an idea for an article and just needed some support and guidance along with way. We also had participants from all over the globe. Time zones are an obvious challenge for synchronous webinars but recording the webinars meant that participants who were unable to log in could catch up whenever it was convenient.

What do these approaches have in common?

Goals for writing are set at the outset, for example:

• Deadlines; short and longer term deadlines with goals along the way
• Opportunities for review by a critical friend
• Peer support and sharing expertise

What can you do?

Find colleagues with similar interests and set up your own local group, you don’t have to meet face to face, why not use a blog or twitter like local #acwrimo?

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

I’m afraid of writing because my idea is very controversial or emotional.

Again, this is a very real concern. As one of my students put it, “sometimes I’m afraid my idea will come back and bite me.” One student had done a study on earnings and ethnicity, hypothesizing that salaries would be lower for a minority group in a certain profession. Her analysis of the data revealed that there was no significant difference. This finding went against her own experience and was disturbing to her advisor. Whenever she thought about writing, she felt shut down. Even if her initial findings were true, were they what she wanted to associate her name with? She felt an obligation to the truth, but also to justice and her career. How could she write when she was caught between such hard places?

As is so often the case, she found her way out through writing. She used the discussion and conclusion section of her article to suggest some alternative approaches to understanding the findings. She then used them as a platform for extending her future research to incorporate a more detailed investigation of earnings by adding qualitative in-depth interviews to her previous quantitative approach. In other words, she used an obstacle to become a better scholar. If you find yourself in a similar position, talking and writing can be the cure.

Or do you have trouble getting started on your writing? Click here to seek help.

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

DON’T OVER-PREPARE. Do not self-sabotage by putting so much time into preparing for something that A) you lose confidence in your abilities, constantly second-guessing the choices you’ve made or B) you run out of time for all the other things you need to get done. Spreadsheets and Gantt charts can be useful ways of reminding yourself you have multiple commitments and need to allocate the right portion of time to each. And besides, if you’re clever (which we’re guessing you are), even if you feel under-prepared you’re really, really not!

What else does it take to be a Hackademic? Click here to find out!

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

I just can’t get started.

Many students find sitting down at the computer and starting to write to be the most difficult challenge facing them. Indeed, the horror of the blank page is a frequent theme of literature. The literary scholar Richard D. Altick talked about “First Paragraph Block” (1963, 190). Francoise Sagan described writing as “having a sheet of paper, a pen and . . . not an idea of what you’re going to say” (Brussell 1988, 618). Getting started is painful. One of the reasons for this, as one of my students put it so well, is that “if I never start, then I never fail.”

An excellent way of dealing with the difficulty of getting started is to make a preferred task contingent on a non-preferred task, as the behavior management experts put it. In this case, writing is the non-preferred task you have to complete before you get to something you prefer. For instance, do not allow yourself to read the morning newspaper or check your e-mail before you write for thirty minutes. Tell yourself that you will call a friend or watch a favorite television program after writing for an hour. Most students flip this and tell themselves “I’ll watch TV for an hour and then write.” But it is better to make the pleasurable activity a reward. Turn your procrastination tactics into productivity tools.

One warning on this tool. A friend of mine, when invited to socialize, always told us that she couldn’t get together because she had to write. When we called her the next day, however, she usually admitted that she had just watched bad television. It’s better to feel guilty about really enjoying something than to feel guilty about misspending your time and not writing. Denying yourself a real pleasure in order to force writing rarely works. Delaying a pleasure does.

Another method is to start by writing something else. Some students begin by typing a quote from their reading. Others write a plan for what they would like to do in that writing session. If you really feel shut down, it is useful to start by writing down the thoughts of your inner critic. You know, “It’s hubris for me even to pick up a pen, I haven’t a prayer of actually finishing this article in time,” etc., etc., etc. When you get bored with this inner critic and think, “Oh come on, things aren’t that bad,” then you can start writing your article. Eventually you get bored with this voice. It’s not very good company and writing becomes preferable to whining.

Another method is to focus on writing badly. If you can’t get started because your first sentence has to be perfect, this method can be useful. For fifteen minutes, write down every thought you have about your article without stopping to edit. Just let it all hang out. This is writing what Ann Lamott has celebrated as “a shitty first draft.” I could use the more alliterative word fecal, but shitty gets at the real feelings of shame and revulsion many have about writing. If you set out deliberately to write something horrible, this roadblock is erased. Again, eventually you write a sentence or have an idea that, despite your best efforts at producing ghastly work, sounds pretty good. And then you are on your way.

Still another method is to have a phone or e-mail partner. Arrange with another prospective author to agree to write at the same time. Check in by phone or e-mail when you are supposed to start, encourage each other, and then get started writing, knowing that someone else is going through the same horrible suffering, I mean, wonderful process that you are. Lots of my students have found this really helpful. It seems to be more helpful than the plan of meeting at someone’s house to write together, which often ends up being a talking session rather than a writing session.

A final method is to plan the agenda for your next writing session at the end of the last one. That way you will know what to do when you sit down to write. This will also help you stay focused on your article as a series of small tasks. Some authors even recommend that you always stop in the middle of a sentence, so that you have somewhere to pick up. I prefer to recommend pushing a bit into the next section.

Want more tips on writing obstacles? Click here.

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

I have to read just one more book.

Many of us tend to bog down in research. We find it difficult to get to writing because we are lured into the forest of no return, otherwise known as the library. Each article leads to another and then another, especially online. We wander deeper and deeper into this forest, rarely finding a path out. Why do we do this? While we remain in the forest, we are safe from the perils of writing. The idea that just one more article is going to give us mastery is an illusion. If such a thing as mastery is possible, it comes from writing not reading.

The best way I know to get out of the research bog is to do your writing and research at the same time. Do not take endless notes and underline huge sections of books, and then feel overwhelmed because you have to go back through all of those notes and texts. Read and then write an actual paragraph, however loose, about what you have read.

The point here is that you do not have to “finish” research before you start writing. You do not have to complete your literature search or finalize your data analysis or even read your advisor’s book. You do not have to know everything on the subject. Start writing and find out what you must know. As Boice puts it, “Writers who learn to leave holes in manuscripts to be filled later master valuable skills in writing: they learn to proceed amid ambiguity and uncertainty” (1997, 29). I know a graduate student who claims that she finished her dissertation by posting this quote on her computer and looking at it every time she wanted to reach for another book.

Erich Auerbach’s masterpiece Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is a good example of this principle of research. Discharged from his university position in Germany by the Nazi government, Auerbach emigrated to Turkey, where he wrote Mimesis from 1942 to 1945. In his epilogue, Auerbach explains that the book lacks footnotes and may assert things that “modern research has disproved or modified” because the libraries in Istanbul were “not well equipped for European studies.” Then he adds a fascinating note. “It is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing” (1953, 557).

Don’t feel bad about not having done enough research. In the twenty-first century, it is no longer possible to be comprehensive. As knowledge expands and ways to communicate that knowledge explode, accelerating ignorance is an inevitable state. The best future researcher will be someone who learns to make a path through this immensity without getting overwhelmed.

What else is common writing obstacles ? Click here to find out.

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

I couldn’t get to my writing site.

“Living in limbo” is the graduate student’s theme song. One is always standing in some line, stuck in some meeting, stranded in traffic, lingering for delayed public transportation, or sitting around until someone shows up for an appointment. Whole days can be frittered away in waiting. If you find these times useful for planning your day or just relaxing, then all power to you. Most people, however, waste this time on feeling frustrated. It can be useful to carry a draft of your article everywhere. You can review the draft and make notes to yourself on improvements or do line editing. Many students I have worked with get their fifteen minutes a day done during these down times. There is nothing like doing two things at once to give you a marvelous feeling of efficiency!Perhaps this is also the obstacle you are facing. 

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

The myth that writing should be a solo activity is just that, a myth. Yet, the popular image persists of the writer as someone who works alone for months in a cold garret, subsisting on bread and cigarettes while coughing consumptively and churning out page after page of sui generis prose. It’s a lonely, hard life, but that’s what writing takes.

Academics in the humanities persist in believing that texts spring fully formed from the mind of the writer. In the sciences, this myth is not so prevalent since most science articles are the result of a team of researchers who publish as coauthors. Students in the sciences work as secondary authors, contributing sections or data to faculty members’ articles, long before they ever become primary authors. That is why the rate of writing dysfunction in the sciences is so much lower. Scholars in the sciences consistently see writing as a form of conversation. When this idea of collaboration is lost, many of the writing problems so common in the academic community arise—writer’s block, anxiety over having one’s ideas stolen, the obsession with originality, the fear of belatedness, difficulties with criticism, even plagiarism. All rise from the myth that writing should be private and isolated.

Just look at the host of reviewers, friends, and family members thanked in any published book. This is not just civility on the part of the author; authors are usually understating the case. Those thanked may have performed research, suggested theses, recommended resources, and actually written conclusions. This was especially true in the past, when faculty wives not only typed and edited manuscripts, but also sometimes wrote sections of their husbands’ texts. The recent legal suit against the Da Vinci Code for copyright infringement suggests that such wives are still around. According to Dan Brown, his wife Blythe Brown did most of the research for the Da Vinci Code, suggested the idea of centering a book on the suppression of women in the Catholic Church, and insisted that the book include a child of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene (Collett-White 2006). Because the myth of originality is so strong, authors rarely give these laborers coauthor credits. This variation on the repressive silence discussed at the beginning of this chapter is the result of not recognizing that writing is collaborative labor.

A useful corrective to the myth of the solitary writer is the experience of Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was Southeast Asia’s leading contender for the Nobel Prize. Toer spent fourteen years as a political prisoner on Indonesia’s infamous Buru Island. Denied paper and pen, from 1969 to 1973, Pramoedya composed oral stories for the eighteen prisoners in his isolated camp, who would whisper the latest installment to other prisoners during their only daily contact, in the showers. These stories were so rich and human that many prisoners attributed their survival to them. Pramoedya himself has called the Buru novels “my lullaby for my fellow-prisoners, to calm their fears, they who were suffering so much torture” (Belcher 1999). The prisoners, in turn, did his work and gave him their food to enable his creation. When his captors finally allowed him to write in 1975, “it was like a dam breaking.” Toer wrote continuously to capture the stories from memory, sitting on the floor and writing on his prison cot. Only four of these books were smuggled out; six others were destroyed by prison guards. The first, This Earth of Mankind, is one of the best novels of colonialism ever written in English. The quartet of which it is a part is a defining work of this century. Is Toer’s story unusual? Yes. But his experience of writing highlights a persistent truth: The best writing is created in community with a strong sense of audience.

So, work to make your writing more public and less private, more social and less solitary. Start a writing group. Take a writing class. Convince another student to co-write an article with you. Meet a classmate at the library or a café to write for an hour. Attend conferences, participate in electronic discussion lists, join journal clubs, and introduce yourself to scholars whose work you admire. Do not get distracted into reading yet another article when a conversation with someone in your field can better help you to shape your ideas and direction. You should be spending as much time on establishing social scholarly connections as you do on writing, for the best writing happens in active interaction with your potential audience.

The more you participate, the better your experience of writing will be. This is partly because others give you ideas and language. But it is also because you must relate your ideas to others’ ideas. You must know what theories professors in your discipline are debating, what their primary research questions are, and what methodologies they consider appropriate. You can only know this if you are an active member of the community.

Students usually experience several problems with making their writing more social.

1. Many students feel real horror at the prospect of networking. Some feel awkward or invasive attempting to contact someone they admire. Others experience deliberate attempts at befriending others as superficial or brown-nosing. Certainly, reaching out socially takes courage and tact. Yet, you will find that others are often interested in meeting you and even grateful to you for taking the first step. Many established scholars enjoy being asked for advice on the field. So, whatever your comfort zone, try to push outside it.

2. Many students are hesitant about showing their writing to anyone. The university environment can encourage students to see their colleagues as adversaries rather than advocates. Classmates and professors can appear too busy to read and comment on your work. Students can be afraid that sharing their work will reveal them as impostors and demonstrate their deep unsuitability for the academy. Fortunately, if you manage to share your work, you usually find that others are happy to help and that you are not as much of an idiot as you thought you were. Moreover, others can quickly identify omissions and logical breaks that would take you weeks to figure out. Of course, some readers will be too critical and others will give you bad advice. But an essential part of becoming a writer is learning to sift useful criticisms from useless ones. The more often you deal with others’ subjective reactions to your work, the more readily you will be able to deal with peer reviewers’ comments down the road.

3. Some students are good at sharing their work, but only when they consider the article complete. Avoid waiting until your manuscript is “done” before sharing it. You will be disappointed when you share it with others, expecting compliments. Instead, you will get recommendations for revision that you are little interested in addressing. The point of sharing is to improve your writing, not to convince others of your talents. So, share your writing in the early stages. Show outlines to classmates, faculty members in your discipline, or even journal editors. Exchange abstracts. Give out drafts and ask for specific comments about aspects of your writing that you suspect are weak. Learn to share your writing at all stages.

4. Students fear that sharing their work will lead to their ideas being stolen. Like so many of the anxieties named in this book, there is a rational reason for this fear: students’ ideas are stolen. Stories are always circulating among graduate students about stolen intellectual property. But hiding your work will not solve this problem. In fact, getting your work out to a number of people will protect it. Furthermore, no one can articulate your idea like you can. You may suspect that anyone could do a better job of presenting your ideas than you could, but my book will help you see that’s not true.

All these activities will help you counter the myth of the lonely writer. Nothing is as collaborative as good writing. All texts depend on other texts, all writers stand on the shoulders of other writers, all prose demands an editor, and all writing needs an audience. Without community, writing is inconceivable. My book will help you to develop social writing habits and to share your work. If you are working with a writing partner or in a group, you are making excellent progress already!

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

I’m going to make writing my number one goal in life.

This may seem counterintuitive, but focusing all your energy on writing will not result in more productivity. In fact, research shows that whatever goal you make your highest priority you most likely will not attain. That’s because “the most valued activity” always “carries demands for time and perfection that encourage its avoidance” (Boice 1997, 23). Writers who make writing a modest, realistic priority are more productive.

Do not establish self-defeating writing goals that relegate everything else in your life to mere backdrop. Aiming for a forty-hour writing week will only make you feel guilty, not productive. Furthermore, the feeling that you should always be working will haunt every pleasurable moment. You do not resolve desires by suppressing them entirely. Make time to go to the beach, meet a friend for dinner, or play basketball. A well-balanced life—with time allotted for friends and family, games and sports, movies and light reading, as well as writing, research, and teaching—is the best ground for productive writing.

Making writing your last goal won’t work well either. In some cases, you may need to think long and hard about what your real goals are. You may need to work on seeing your number one goal as completing your dissertation, not perfecting it.

Or do you have trouble getting started on your writing? Click here to seek help.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rvoegtli/5940070493/

In Clare’s fourth post for PhD2Published she explores how she has tried to recover what she calls ‘the lost art of reading’. In the spirit of AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) she also makes those all important connections between good reading practice and academic writing.

For fear of sounding like a precocious child, my mother says I read from the time I could physically pick up a book. This means that I have had plenty of years to perfect this fine art and could surely claim to be fairly proficient. After all, it is not only my job to read and engage with scholarly texts, I am (like the rest of humanity) bombarded with words all day from my morning Twitter check to my evening bed book.

However, I recently came to the shocking conclusion that I can’t read or rather have forgotten how to read. This alarming realisation has been a moment of anagnorisis in what has otherwise been a wonderfully restful sabbatical term of conferences and writing. I am not suggesting, of course, that I cannot comprehend sentences (although there are certainly some mornings when this would be true) but rather I have lost the art of sitting with a book and really engaging with it. I am an accomplished skim reader and a consummate finder of useful quotes, but I am not a reader.

If November was AcWriMo then perhaps December should be BoReMo (Book Reading Month), although that acronym sounds a little more ‘street’ than I intended. December could be a four week pre-Christmas training session, a chance to regain my reading abilities. In this, my fourth article for PhD2Published, I wanted to simply share my experiences over the past few months as I have tried to recover the lost art of reading:

1)   Setting challenges: I started in relatively relaxed fashion with E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, a classic readable text with pictures! I then moved on to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, both texts that influence my field without being central to it. I began by reading for just an hour of so and then cordoned off a couple of hours. I found that in setting myself reading challenges like this (whether time-based or text-based) I began to enjoy the power of a well-written sentence and the chance to grapple with large ideas.

2)   Reading every word: When my reading crisis first hit, I noted that one of my primary problems was that I was actually physically unable to read every word on a page, unless those words belonged to Elizabeth Gaskell (my love of Victorian literature cannot be abated). I got the general gist of the page (mostly) but didn’t really work through sentences and follow the path the author had so pain-stakingly laid out for me. There are times, of course, when this is unnecessary – perhaps you are looking for a certain idea or cross reference or are only interested in one chapter. But there is pleasure in really getting to grips with the whole argument of a book.

3)   Writing and reading: I’ve tried to develop a new habit of writing notes even for books I am not going to directly quote from. I now have an even more complicated notebook system than previously, and have acquired a book journal which makes me sound like an Edwardian lady but is extremely helpful when you want to remember what you’ve read. It is not a matter of writing quotes, but also jotting down my initial response, intertextual references or (in fear of sounding a little like a book group of one) simply noting how I feel about an idea. I’m also carving out time to go back over these scribbles, prompting my brain to remember what I’ve read and forcing me to become more active.

4)   Writing what I read: As AcWriMo has progressed you may well have found yourself once again focusing on the way you write. Through Helen Sword’s magnificent Stylish Academic Writing (Santa should carefully place a copy in every academic’s stocking this Christmas – preferably adorned with useful sticky notes) I have been rethinking the way I write, who I write for and how I might create engaging scholarly work. While reading through my sabbatical book list I’ve become just as interested in the way scholars write as in the themes they might focus on. One of the wonderful things about Gombrich, for example, is that despite being an Oxford academic and accomplished scholar, The Story of Art is as engaging and accessible as it is complex and challenging. Currently I find that the more I read, the better writer I become, challenged by the marvellous prose of many and disappointed by the stodgy syntax of others.

5)   Enjoying reading: This might seem very strange but academia often disables our ability to actually enjoy the written word. We are reviewing a book for a deadline, trawling through new books because we have to keep up with our field, searching for texts that might inspire our students or reading out of obligation. We might even feel somewhat frustrated with the reading process, particularly if we are desperate to get on with writing the next paper, book or thesis. Perhaps we feel guilty for spending hours sitting in a chair reading with a cup of tea (NB this guilt is absolutely justified if you are reading Hello or Fifty Shades of Grey but less so if you are wrestling with Adorno). Unlike writing, reading is far less easy to evaluate. We can formulate aims for the former – word counts or numbers of pages – but it is far more difficult for the latter. For when reading, one page might take us half an hour as we ponder the ideas fully (I certainly found this with Emerson) or we might crash through a book in a morning. So, I’ve been trying to learn to simply enjoy the act of reading, being rigorous about my use of time and guarding it as jealously as I guard my writing time.

As I near the end of my sabbatical, I am determined to continue on with my reading schedule as the pressures of teaching, admin and general university life return. Learning to read has been both a shocking and an illuminating process, akin to those first steps with Enid Blyton, Janet and John and the Malory Towers books. If reading is, at its heart, a quest for knowledge and a vulnerable opening of oneself to new ideas and challenges, then it is a discipline that must be vital to all academics.

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

Samuel Eliot Morison, author of several academic classics including The Oxford History of the American People, had the following literary advice for young historians, “First and foremost, get writing!” (1953, 293).

It may sound tautological, but the main key to a positive writing experience is writing. Most students’ negative experiences of writing revolve around not writing (i.e., procrastinating) and most students’ positive experiences of writing revolve around actually doing it. That is, when students write, they feel a sense of accomplishment and the pleasure of communicating their ideas. In this sense, writing is the same as exercise. Although it may not be easy at first, it does get easier and more pleasurable the more you do it. As the very productive academic writer and my colleague Chon A. Noriega tells his graduate students when they embark on their dissertations, “One usually gets better at whatever one does on a regular basis. If one does not write on a regular basis, one will get better at not writing. In fact, one will develop an astonishing array of skills designed to improve and extend one’s not writing.”

Those who do not write often claim that they are “too busy.” Indeed, people today are very busy. Some students have long commutes, others have full-time jobs, and still others have young children. So, here’s the good news and the bad news. Lots of busy people have been productive writers. Are they just smarter? No. If you pay attention to the way you actually spend time, you will find that you may not be quite as busy as you suppose and that writing doesn’t take as much time as you fear.

Robert Boice, the leading scholar on faculty productivity, proved this by finding faculty members who claimed to be “too busy” to write and then following them around for a week. With Boice staring at them all day, most had to admit that “they rarely had workdays without at least one brief period of fifteen to sixty minutes open for free use” (1997a, 21). His subjects spent this free time in activities that were neither work nor play. Boice also found that those likely to describe themselves as very “busy” or very “stressed” did not produce as much as those who were writing steadily. In other words, you are not too busy to write, you are busy because you do not write. Busy-ness is what you do to explain your not writing. (If you skimmed over those last two sentences, I recommend you go back and read them one more time. It’s essential.)

No matter how busy your life is, make a plan for writing. Successful academic writers do not wait for inspiration. They do not wait until the last minute. They do not wait for big blocks of time. They make a plan for writing every day and they stick to it.

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

I’m too depressed to write.

This is a very real problem and should not be underestimated. Depression among graduate students and faculty members is a common reason for under-productivity. Depression is variously defined, but some causes are useful for academics to remember.

Depression is an emotional disorder usually triggered by environment. Some researchers believe that continuous stress over a long period tricks the brain into responding to all events as stressful, which in turn triggers depression (Blackburn-Munro and Blackburn-Munro 2001). Since there may be no better description of graduate school than operating continuously in stress mode, it is not surprising that depression is such a common problem in academia. Although the trigger is environmental, the effect is chemical—an imbalance in the neurotransmitters called dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Low levels of these natural brain chemicals prevent the nerve cells in the brain from transmitting signals normally. This slow down makes people feel that performing daily activities is like struggling to walk through mud.

The terrible curse of depression is that it impairs the very faculty you need to solve that problem. So, if you suspect that you are depressed, go to your campus clinic and ask for an appointment with a doctor. If you don’t have such access, e-mail a few people for references and make an appointment with a doctor. This is the easiest step I know of to start moving beyond depression. The doctor can then refer you to a counselor, whose services are often provided free for graduate students, or can recommend an antidepressant. Taking any medication is a serious step, but antidepressants aren’t designed to make you feel euphoric or to take away your blue feelings. They are designed to help you get up in the morning and complete tasks. They are about escaping that feeling of moving through mud; they are not about escaping your life. The doctor may also recommend exercise, which has been found a good antidote to mild depression.

If you are depressed, I know how hard it can be to take the steps to take care of yourself, but you simply must. Your academic future and maybe your life depend on it.What is better than to set up some goal for your writing.

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

STAY AWAKE. Learn to live with getting less sleep. If you have children you’ll already be familiar with this feature of adulthood. It’s all well and good insisting that you need eight hours sleep to get stuff done, but how on earth can you get everything done in the sixteen hours you have left if some of that time is taken up by eating, washing and doing chores? Your years of pulling all-nighters are over, but so too are your years of long uninterrupted sleep – if you want to be really successful that is. Two solutions to this can be either getting up just half an hour earlier and/or going to bed half an hour later and using that extra pocket of time to race through email correspondence, thus freeing up more of your day for more productive work. Alternatively, try an afternoon nap. This of course won’t work if you’re supposed to be teaching or seeing students in your office, but many people find just twenty minutes of sleep in the afternoon reinvigorates them like no double espresso ever could, resulting in an afternoon/evening of faster and more targeted work. Pulled too many all-nighters already? Starting to lose the ability to string a sentence together, let alone write a book? Maybe you’re better off with this tip.

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

I will write just as soon as (fill in the blank).

Many students explain to me that they will get to writing just as soon as some more important task is completed. This list is varied and fascinating; that is, as soon as the apartment is clean, my lecture notes are organized, exams are over, the divorce is final, my advisor comes back from sabbatical, my medication kicks in, and so on. Only you can tell if these situations really do demand a break from writing. I suggest to you, however, that if you have not been writing regularly, none of these is an adequate excuse for not writing fifteen minutes a day.

Oddly enough, the most common “important task” of this sort is cleaning the house. Apparently, it is a common fact that many people simply cannot write if the house is dirty. My advice to you: Clean your house! In fact, if the way you get yourself in the writing mood is to spend fifteen minutes of cleaning before you spend fifteen minutes of writing, I’m all for it. Many of these same people feel that once they start cleaning they cannot stop, however. If so, I recommend that you reverse the order and do your fifteen minutes of writing first.

In other words, you don’t have to “clear the decks” before you can get started on a writing project. Writing seems to thrive on messy decks.

But you sometimes be stuck at your writing.

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

Teaching preparation takes up all my extra time.

A common complaint of graduate students (and faculty) is that teaching preparation takes up the time they had hoped to use for writing. Certainly, preparing for class can devour time, especially if you have rarely taught before and want to avoid appearing like an idiot in front of thirty undergraduates. There is always more preparation and reading you can do for any class. Teaching assistants in the humanities can easily spend a forty-hour workweek just on meeting with students and grading.

The best solution for this very real problem is to set limits on your preparation time. You should learn to do this if you plan a career in academia since preparation will be an ongoing reality. Schedule your writing time before your teaching prep time. For instance, do not start to prepare for class until you have done half an hour of writing. That way, teaching preparation cannot spill over into your writing time. Now that you know that writing does not have to take hours and hours, and can be done daily, you should be able to fit writing in before other tasks.

Finally, if you are dedicated to being a good teacher, you should know that, among untenured faculty, having a commitment to your students correlates positively with higher rates of writing productivity (Sax, Hagedorn, Arredondo, Dicrisi 2002). Being well-rounded matters!

Maybe this is another difficulties you are facing.

This month of #AcWriMo we’re featuring heaps of advice from the book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. She’ll offer a wealth of information on carefully planning your writing and getting over obstacles – practical and emotional.

I really am too busy!

If you really are too busy to fit in fifteen minutes of writing a day, then I cannot help you. I recommend that you plan, in the very near future, a weekend away from it all where you can really think about your life. If taking this time off means you cannot meet some obligations, do it anyway. Serious thinking about the quality and direction of your life is in order. Perhaps this is also the obstacle you are facing.