Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

by Joli Jensen

My book project files usually include Outlines (various overviews); Questions (that I want to answer through the project); Next Steps; References; Chapter X Notes (ideas and outlines for each chapter or section); Submission Plans; To Be Added; and the absolutely essential Ventilation File (see below).

What we really need to do is to secure writing time. We don’t find time (it’s always there) or make time (it’s not ours to make), but we can learn how to organize and protect the hours we are given every day.

Design a writing plan calendar that designates specific times during the week for writing; then count the number of these you actually have per semester or summer. Use this calendar to block off travel times, grading times, and other writing disruptions so you know approximately how many writing sessions you have before a specific deadline or benchmark like the end of a semester or summer.

Productive scholars don’t disrespect their own work, and they don’t waste their time in chronic diminishment of the work of others. In my experience, contemptuous colleagues are embittered idealists—they project onto others the gap between what they want their own scholarly work to be and what it actually is. They become cynical and unproductive, sometimes for the whole of their academic careers.

Acting like a jerk is another strategy academics use to hide feeling of inadequacy. I’ve had colleagues who live their lives in attack mode—relentlessly criticizing students, their department, administrators, and each other. They attack, I presume, to feel a few moments’ superiority and thus relief. They deal with their own impostor fears by heaping scorn on others.

Especially early in our careers, we are flattered to be asked, or feel obligated to a senior scholar, or are tempted by what we are told will be a reputation-enhancing opportunity.

Like many others, I have become entangled in collaborative projects that have hindered the pursuit of my own work for precious years. The fact that someone asks us to edit or coauthor (even with promises that it will be quick, easy, or career enhancing) is never a reason to commit to a scholarly project. Why agree to do projects that are only vaguely interesting to us, or that yoke us to the work of others at the expense of our own, or that use the same data and methods to support familiar arguments? Far too many of us find ourselves, often with the best of intentions, agreeing to what we don’t really want to do. Of course we eventually lose momentum. Who wouldn’t?

We obligate ourselves to see it through and squander precious writing time and energy trying to work on an uninteresting topic, often with distracted or unmotivated colleagues, while our own scholarly work gets delayed or pushed aside.