Jessica Wildfire's Blog, page 472

Just getting to this comment.

Just getting to this comment. Thanks, and I’m glad it helped! It took me a long time to reach this point, too. Just being honest about it helps a lot.

Agreed! Many people are happier than ever after cutting off ties with certain family members.

Agreed! Many people are happier than ever after cutting off ties with certain family members. I don’t mean short-lived or frivolous happiness, but the kind that lets you move forward and build a meaningful life. They had to overcome the guilt and self-doubt to do it. Not everyone has to reach this point, but we shouldn’t shame people who make that choice.

What’s going on in your life that you feel compelled to read an article you hated “again,” and then…

What’s going on in your life that you feel compelled to read an article you hated “again,” and then tell me “again” how much you hated it? Thank god you’re not related to me. But if you were, you’re the exact kind of asshole I wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving behind.

Thanks! Comparison to Salinger is quite a compliment.

Thanks! Comparison to Salinger is quite a compliment. :) I think we all seek out family, whether it’s genetic or otherwise.

Success, Failure, and Writing

Sometimes, people ask me how the hell I manage to blog so much, and write so much other crap, while keeping up my academic job responsibilities. They might mistake me for one of those professors who gets lost in the wilderness of publishing, and winds up devoting too much energy to side projects that have nothing to do with tenure. Not so. I’ve already exceeded my university’s requirements for tenure, and I have it all in writing. Go me.

The craziest thing? I enjoy the boring academic research and writing just as much as I do telling wild drinking stories on my blog. I call academic research boring because that’s how my readers probably think of it. Believe it or not, I find research fun. A pain in the ass at times, but always a challenge. Plus, I get to use the big words that I paid forty grand to learn.

Organization and purpose is key to writing a lot, and doing it halfway well. You just realize that time is short; there’s no time to bullshit. Say what you mean, and get to the point. This blog post? I wrote it in 45 minutes. Maybe it sucks. Or maybe some people will find it useful. We’ll find out tomorrow. I’ve just learned, the hard way, that endlessly revising your work usually doesn’t improve it. You either have a good idea from inception, something that needs some polishing, something meaningful. Or you don’t.

When I was 21, I spent all summer drafting and revising a romance novel. Five friends of mine read three drafts. Each draft sucked more than the last one. Why? Because I had nothing to say about romance. Finally, someone asked me why I wanted to publish a romance novel. I just stared at her and said ummmmmm. Truth: no idea. Finally, I had a moment of clarity and threw the whole thing in the trash, then deleted the files from my computer.

That moment wasn’t sad. It freed me. After a couple weeks off, I sat down and wrote a short story in the space of a few hours. My friends loved it. I did a few minor revisions, then sent it off to the campus literary journal. A couple months later…acceptance! Compared to my shit-pile of a novel, the effort I put into that short story paled in comparison. That’s when I learned a few huge life lessons:

Too much effort is a sign that something’s off.It’s not a waste to write something bad and throw it away.Sometimes, you have to write something bad in order to write something good.

Of course, I’m here to talk specifically about academic and nonfiction writing. I’m not much of a novelist. Even my “novels” are really just memoirs where I get bored and start making shit up. So it makes sense that I excel at the academic. If you’re an academic, a graduate student, or a young professor, maybe this advice will help you.

Spend more time in the planning stage, at least a couple of months. I find summers great for this stage of research. For academics, you don’t have shit until you have a solid research question, a theory to hang your ideas on, a body of research to explore, and a method of data collection. Lock those down first. Figure out what kind of data you’ll need and how to obtain it. Will you need IRB approval? Diving in without a plan will waste a lot of your time and stress you out.

Let your plan incubate as you read into your topic. Let go of the pressure to start writing. Your journey is just beginning.

Organizing your sources into an Excel spreadsheet. Keep your PDFs sorted in a way that works for you — subtopic, journal, year, whatever. Sure, you can use one of a dozen fancy apps or browser plug-ins to keep your readings straight. But why? I like to keep my sources simple. One column for author names, one for the article title, one for the journal, one for the publication volume and date, and then a column where I type my summaries and notes. When you manage your sources that way, it’s easy to track of what you’ve read, what you own, what you’re still waiting on a scan of, and so on.

Keep a research journal. Update it every day until your project is done. You don’t have to pour your heart into it. My journal is where I make notes of problems I’m working through, either in terms of theory, methods, or data collection and coding.

By early August, I’ve got my plan all set up. I have a big list of sources in a spreadsheet. Have I read them? Maybe a few. But that’s fine. As the semester gets rolling, I can always find a couple hours here and there to read and annotate an article, update my spreadsheet. Interruptions don’t bother me much as long as I can at least read a handful of sources a week, marching down my list.

At some point, I’ll start outlining my article and filling in some of the basic introduction and literature review.

In September, I’ll start collecting my data — whether that’s sending off surveys and letters, or scraping words off web-pages.

Writing happens in a loop of reading, note-taking, drafting, revising, and jotting. You might stumble across more sources while you’re collecting your data, or even drafting. Don’t get lazy. Keep updating your spreadsheet and writing in your journal. You’ll thank yourself later.

Failure happens more than you even know. One article, just accepted recently, took me two years and four journals. Why? The article was pretty fucking good, actually. The problem was that the peer reviews all disagreed on what I should do. So I just kept writing, revising, and trying new things until the stars aligned. It wasn’t blind refusal to accept reality. Each time, the journal editors wrote me encouraging words and recommended another venue. Did I cry and gnash my teeth? Yes, but always in private.

Other times, I’ve given up on academic articles too. But they were pure crap. I’ve realized there’s two different states of mind when it comes to failure:

“This is so hard. I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to give up. Please, someone let me give up on this article.” That’s when you’re onto something. Don’t ever quit because something’s hard.“Dammit, another rejection. Why didn’t they see the genius in my article? I know my work is good. I’ll show those assholes. I’ll just tweak this thing and send it to another editor.” Oh, hell no. Don’t do that. That’s a sign that your heart isn’t in the article. You just want to see it published.

Here’s where I’ve found the biggest difference between academic and other forms of writing: If I’m struggling too much with a piece of fiction or memoir, then it means I should probably just trash it and go back to the starting line. With academic writing, a logical reason exists for my difficulties, something I can usually track down and solve if I just get some sleep and then review my literature again. I’ve had some true epiphanies just by reading over a key article again, finding some key to make everything fit that I just hadn’t seen before. Maybe that happens with other genres, but not for me yet.

Put your research and writing first. Don’t become a complete shut-in, but you should feel comfortable arranging your schedule around your writing. As an academic, I had to find a partner who would understand my need to work on nights and weekends. Good ideas don’t respect a 9–5 workday, and sometimes you need to lock them down. If nothing else, that’s why you have your research journal. I’ve had to sacrifice less personal time during the past year or so, but early on it was essential.

Some of my friends have spouses who “won’t let them bring work home.” Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, those poor souls barely finished their dissertations and haven’t published much at all. They’re seriously stressing over their careers. It took me longer to find love, but it was worth the wait, and I don’t regret putting my career first.

Lastly, know your process. Maybe you’re the kind of writer that works best in the early mornings, a few hours a day. Me, personally? I used to be the kind of person who worked steadily in the early stages, and then locked myself in my apartment for entire weekends during final drafting and revision. Just come up with a time management system that works. Be honest with yourself when your system doesn’t work. Recently, I’ve had to reinvent my process. The old ways of working 10 hours a day Friday through Sunday don’t work anymore. Why? Well, I have a spouse and a job with a lot more responsibilities than I did in graduate school. Strangely, I look back on grad school as the era when I had the most time. Poor in money, for sure. Rich in time.

Publishing through Amazon doesn’t cost a dime.

Publishing through Amazon doesn’t cost a dime. You can get images from Shutterstock for pretty cheap for your cover, take your own photo, or hire someone. That’s basically the only cost, other than the time investment.

I’m glad to finally see a post like this!

I’m glad to finally see a post like this! I’ve been seeing a lot of these articles, too, about daily habits, etc. I’m not super famous or rich, but I got a tenure track job with only one key to my day: wake up and then work your ass off. I’m still doing it to some extent, though I’m close to earning tenure, and I’ve started to mellow some while I plan out phase 2 of my career. It’s kind of nice.

Take a chill pill or 5

Some people need a huge dose of motivation. They might find it in a venti coffee, self-help books, or inspirational slogans. Others suffer the opposite problem. We lack the innate ability to relax.

Workaholics struggle to embrace the Netflix and Chill. We promise ourselves that after this article, this meeting, this trip to the gym, we’ll indulge ourselves in a weekend of rest. Well, it’s fucking Labor Day weekend — the holiday designed to force us to let loose. And I still can’t do it. Not completely. No matter what we workaholics try, we turn everything into work.

Why? Because effort makes us feel good. The intoxicating high of accomplishment numbs the pain of whatever’s missing from our lives. Plus, our culture rewards work far more than it does other addictions. Nobody ever received a promotion for most lines of cocaine snorted, or ounces of heroine injected. Of course, that makes sense. At best, addiction is a metaphor we use to understand people who like to work all the time. An overdose of work carries zero legal consequences. The health risks associated with longterm workaholism are unclear. We see tons of “before” and “after” PSAs about meth addicts, not so many for the 60+ workweek.

Most of the time, endless drive is a good thing. But sometimes you have to relax. The human body needs it. So does the mind.

Let me tell you about graduate school. For about a year, I took on a full course load, taught two classes, and tutored online for about 12 hours a week to make extra cash, all while writing a short story collection and maintaining a long distance relationship. One of my graduate classes was a PhD-level linguistics course at a prestigious school that participated in a consortium with our humble state institution. Attendance alone added three hours of driving to my weekly schedule.

My life was a constant, sleepless juggling act. At least once a week I stayed up for 27+ hours to get everything done, only to crash into a beautiful deep sleep on Friday nights. Five-hour energy became my best friend. At noon on Saturdays, I would wake up and work for about 12 hours straight. Then my regular week began early on a Sunday afternoon by grading papers, class prep, and so on. Somehow I managed to keep up a rigorous fitness routine. Every other weekend, I drove three hours to see my boyfriend. My candle was burning at both ends, and the middle too.

My epiphany didn’t involve a car crash or some kind of aneurysm. No, quite the opposite. I finished that year having accomplished everything I’d intended. My linguistics class practically gave me a standing ovation after my seminar presentation. The professor said, “It’s truly amazing what you’ve done, coming into this class from another discipline.” My peers, the ones whose respect I’d been dying for the last three months, invited me out for a drink. But I had to decline. I was exhausted, and I knew one beer would probably put me in a coma.

Another professor recommended I prepare my seminar paper for publication. “One of the best papers I’ve read,” he wrote. My long-distance boyfriend had mailed me an early birthday present, and was talking about marriage. On top of that, another article I’d written got accepted for publication.

Here’s the epiphany. All that good news, and I was just wading through each day like a zombie. It was mid-May. The semester was over, and all I wanted to do was sleep. For about a week, I slept 12 hours a day. When I woke up, I watched Netflix and ignored the entire world. It wasn’t even a content staycation.

I was just spent, like a stale French Fry. What good was all this achievement if I was too dried up to enjoy it?

So began my life-long struggle with relaxation. Ever since then, I’ve struggled to find ways of relaxing. I began designating one night a week for friends, and another for solo movie night.

They say it takes your stomach 20 minutes to tell your brain it’s full. There must be some residual period like that for us workaholics, too. I’ve learned to spot that feeling we get. If you’re like me, you know what I mean. That mood when your brain ticks off all your accomplishments, and yet you want to do more. “But I could finish one more thing if I just….” That’s how I know when to force myself to have a drink and pull up my Amazon watch list, or go for a walk. Like I’m about to do right now.

Take a chill pill or 5 was originally published in The Hit Job on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome aboard!

Welcome aboard! This reminds me of at least three times I should’ve been invited or accepted to something but it was delayed due to some mixup. Honestly, the anxiety just means a greater rush in the end. :D

Actually, I wrote “ He might be a loser.

Actually, I wrote “ He might be a loser. Or he might be the next Stephen King.” That was the whole point — you don’t know, and trying to judge is futile.