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.