Finding Time for your Scholarly Writing: Short Guides, #2
By Jo VanEvery
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About this ebook
Finding Time for your Scholarly Writing addresses the problem of juggling writing alongside your other responsibilities. I identify three kinds of time: full days, longish sessions, and short snatches. In this Short Guide, I explain what kinds of writing you can do in each, and suggest ways of combining the three to ensure that you make the best use of the time available at different points in the academic year.
Volume 2 of the Short Guides Series. See Volume 1, The Scholarly Writing Process for further details of the different kinds of writing tasks you might do in each kind of writing time.
Approx length: 13 700 words including notes & references
Jo VanEvery
Jo VanEvery transforms academic lives from surviving to thriving. She used to be an academic sociologist and then a program officer for a funding agency. Now she helps you juggle your myriad responsibilities, provides a structure so you can get more writing done, helps you clarify your vision and make a plan for the next part of the path towards it, and boosts your confidence so you can do the work that makes your heart sing. She has been supporting scholarly writers through A Meeting With Your Writing and the Academic Writing Studio since 2011. You can read more of her writing on her website, http://jovanevery.ca; follow her on Twitter, https://twitter.com/JoVanEvery; or like her Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/JoVEAcademicCareerCoach/ .
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Finding Time for your Scholarly Writing - Jo VanEvery
Everyone struggles with making time for writing
There is nothing wrong with you. You are not lacking willpower, planning ability, or motivation. Finding and protecting time for writing, especially during the parts of the year when you are teaching, is difficult.
While writing is a core activity for academics, you have a lot of other demands on your time and energy, many of them equally important. Those other activities often have more immediate impacts and involve other people in more immediate ways. Someone will notice if you do not turn up to teach, or if you are underprepared when you do, in a way that is just not true for your writing on any particular occasion. The fact that writing may be more important to your career can get twisted so that it seems selfish to devote time to it. The impact on other scholars, students, or anyone else happens a long time after the act of doing the work, and the relationship between sitting down to write and some future impact is rarely direct. It’s more like flapping butterfly wings and weather events in distant places.
Some of your other work has the benefit of immediate outcomes that you can tick off a list in a way that writing doesn’t always have. Scholarly writing projects are long term projects, with few real milestones. In the first Short Guide in this series, The Scholarly Writing Process, I argue that writing begins with exploring your curiosity and extends through identifying possible outputs and refining them for publication. Parts of the process don’t look like writing at all, and yet reading and deep thinking are crucial to good scholarship.
While some writing advice makes a distinction between pre-writing tasks and writing, I find it more helpful to think of writing as encompassing everything that moves your projects forward. Sometimes, moving your project forward requires you to do tasks that seem like not-writing: reading, reanalyzing some data, freewriting about your ideas, etc. It’s hard enough to find time to write. I don’t want your project to get stalled because your gremlins are telling you that you can’t do this kind of work during your writing time. If you are doing a particular task as a way of calming your fear that what you have to say isn’t worth saying, that’s procrastination. The line between the two isn’t always clear but you will get better at spotting the difference with practice.
I advocate establishing a writing practice. Make writing something you do regularly, rather than something you do only when you have a specific output to produce. The relationship between time spent focused on your writing project and visible outcomes isn’t direct. Some days it feels like you have accomplished practically nothing, but struggling with your ideas impacts what you are able to write another day. The writing process will also generate new ideas which more writing will help you articulate and develop. In that sense, it never ends, though you will decide that particular outputs of the process are finished and can be submitted for publication.
I also advocate making writing a priority when you plan. This is not selfish. The idea of blocking time for writing will seem less daunting when you consider the different kinds of time available. While certain kinds of writing may be impossible in certain kinds of time, there will always be something you can do to stay engaged with the writing process.
This Short Guide is structured around three kinds of time: full days, longish periods that are less than a full day, and short snatches of time. I’ve kept it short so you can spend your time writing instead of reading about writing. I begin with a bit more explanation of what I mean by writing practice
and some thoughts on planning and goal setting. Then I look at each type of time, examining both what can be achieved and how you can fit it into your workload. Annotated references can be found at the end of the book organized by chapter.
Read the whole book straight through once to get a sense of how it all fits together. My hope is that you will then come back to specific sections as you need them: for ideas when writing time seems impossible to find, for reassurance that whatever time you can find will be worth using, and for help making the best use of the time you have.
What is a writing practice?
The term writing
(as I’ve