"Writing is fun and publishing is easy"

A lot of us have had the experience of wondering why something that comes relatively easy to us is seen, in the academic culture, as a form of torture. The blogger Profacero has startlingly excellent set of posts on this issue. She states seemingly counterintuitive axioms like "writing is fun and publishing is easy." Crazy, right? But I happens to agree with her.

Graduate school consists largely of training in research. Every course I took, except a single one in pedagogy, was designed to train me as a scholar. Even people who end up working in jobs where they don't do much research have had training to be scholars. The PhD remains a research degree. If, after completely such a degree, you still don't know how to do research, then something has gone wrong. Writing itself is easy. The only hard part is sitting down to do it regularly. Once that regular schedule is established, all it takes is working systematically to solve certain problems. There will be easier and harder days, as with anything else. Publishing is also very easy, since journal editors actually want to publish good articles. Once again, "easy" does not mean a total absence of rejection.

So what makes it hard? Part of it is the "volvo" culture denounced by Stanley Fish in this classic essay. We don't want to admit that it is fun because our claims of moral superiority are based on suffering. Of course, the working conditions of academia often crowd research out. Excessive teaching loads, lack of leaves and sabbaticals, an explosion of service and committee work, and sometimes an outright hostility toward (or envy of) research combine forces. The idea that research is hard provides the convenient excuse in such cases. Profacero also notes that the mantra about how hard it is serves a gate-keeping function.

I recommend you read all the posts in this on-going series. Since I have always taught at a an R1, I always feel like someone is going to answer, "sure, easy for YOU." So I'm glad someone else said it first.

Busy-ness or Accomplishments? (II)

Being busy means being occupied or preoccupied. Business means other things are in the way of what we want to do. It is negocio, or the negation of otium or leisure. Scholarly writing is best conceived as a kind of leisure: the mind needs space in which to work. It cannot be pre-occupied by other matters.

So the ordinary guy in the street who complains that professors are lazy is correct. We put our energy into extra tasks to avoid the work that is not really work. Research is either so hard that we would do anything else to avoid it, or so easy and pleasurable that it produces guilt.

Lazy Man's Load

Suppose you had to carry a certain number of cans of paint up from the basement. What we used to call a "lazy man's load" consists in trying to carry all of the burden at once rather than taking two trips up and down the stairs. The result might be objects broken, hazardous liquids spilled, or bodies injured. Taking more trips with a more comfortable load each time is much preferable.

Paradoxically, a lazy man's load is larger than recommended, not smaller.

The lazy way is not easier; it may be quicker, but it is more perilous. Laziness is not an avoidance of work, but rather a misguided sense of ease or efficiency, like trying to use a high gear to propel a bicycle up a hill, on the theory that your legs don't have to go around as many times.

Effortlessness

It takes a lot of hard work to get to the point where you can write without too much extra effort. You might have a stake in keeping writing difficult for yourself, but you can allow yourself to give up the fetish of exertion for its own sake. It doesn't have to feel like work all the time. Think of it as being put into the game when you want to play, or being given a solo in the band.

***

Imagine a sentence that you just can't get right. You've written it and re-written it and it still doesn't sound like it should. Is the solution more work, or less? What you probably need to do is re-write the sentence in a simpler form, making it sound like a sentence that was easy to write.

***

A student "worked hard" on a paper that, nevertheless, still has a grammatical mistake in every sentence. As a reader, I don't really care about effort. If the house is still cold, it doesn't matter how much fuel was burnt to heat it. In fact, if the house is cold despite a huge expenditure of energy, then I have two problems: a cold house and a high gas bill.

***

Obviously, there will still be times when exertion, or effort, are necessary. Difficulty, in fact, is part of the fun of what we do.

Tiredness

Have you ever been really tired when all you've done is attend pointless meetings where you did not have to do very much, or wait for a plane, or wait around for other people to do things so you can complete the next step of a process? You can expend energy in those activities; you might even call them work, if they are part of your day at work and more or less mandatory. You are tired afterwords, yet you did not even try to get anything done. You are not tired from working, but from not working, which is extremely wearisome. You could say: "I did not work very hard today, and as a consequence I am very tired."

In contrast, you might write for two hours first thing in the morning and not feel tired at all. If you are doing it right, you might have even more energy for the rest of the day to go out guiltlessly and do other things unrelated to your writing. It might sound like heresy, but you do not need to be mentally fatigued and emotionally spent after writing for a few hours.

If you sleep well, then you will be well-rested and be ready to write the next day. There is no point in bragging about how over-worked you are, so much that you are losing sleep. That's like boasting about not being able to work, since chances are that your work after an unrestful night will not go as well. When I am sleep-deprived I barely get through the day, through the classes I have to teach, and nothing more. Nothing to brag about.

***

A related point:: if you exercise for an hour, you will more energy, rather than less, the rest of the day. The exercise will not tire you out physically the way waiting in an airport will. Fatigue comes more from not exercising or from overdoing it. After exercising, rest is more restful.

Best Laid Plans

I found this document on my computer:

"2006 article plan

1. Valente/Beckett. Sent to Hispanic Review January 10. * 2nd choice Comparative Literature.

2. Intravenus. Finished March 22, 2006. Sent to Revista Canadiense: March 24, 2006. [email] March 25, snail mail.

3. "Apocryphal Lorca"

4. Gamoneda's poetics. Finish by April 30.

5. Heriberto Yépez and Borges. Have ready by May 30.

6. June: Clark Coolidge?

7. July. Review article? Books on Spanish poetry.

8. August. Something for Revista de Libros?

9. September. Translation theory? Our theory doesn't match our practice. Machado.

10. October. polyrhythms?

11. November. Coral Bracho?

12. December. Formalism and historicity? Cultural studies."

I had planned to write an article every month in 2006. Number 1 worked: it was rejected by Hispanic Review but accepted by Comparative Literature, which I had as my 2nd choice. My article on Intravenus was rejected by another journal. I never published it in the end. #3 mushroomed into my book Apocryphal Lorca. Not much ever happened with 4-12, because Lorca took over the rest of 2006 and 07, although #4 might have worked its way into an article that finally came out in 2010. With some of these ideas, I don't even know any more what I was thinking. I do have a clear idea about #9, but have never sat down to write it. About #12 I have no idea at all, except that maybe it was about how literary formalism is more historicist than a cultural studies that fails to pay attention to form.

Do One Thing a Day

Ok. I know what you're going to say. I can't do just one thing a day, I have twenty or thirty things to do each day.

What I mean is this: COMPLETE AT LEAST ONE SIGNIFICANT TASK each working day. Let's break this down.

"complete": finish it OR make substantial progress (it it's a long-term task)

"at least one": not half of something.

"significant": A large chunk (significant) of an article, the writing of a syllabus, a complete revision of the cv., the grading of an entire set of papers, a peer review of an article...

"each": not every other working day, not every three or four days...

"working day": a day on which you are working, a day that counts toward your total number of working days.

Now this is going to be very hard, though it seems easy. You say you need to do twenty things a day, but you aren't currently doing that many truly significant tasks, right? I thought not. You're going to concentrate on bringing something to completion or doing a definable portion of a larger task. If you do at least that then you'll be set. Imagine a 5 day work week. Suppose in that week you've made significant progress on an article, you've graded an entire set of papers, you've written a letter of recommendation, you've read your colleague's tenure file... You've had a very productive week.

I'm wondering about whether task management or time management is the key. In other words, is time a distraction, when what we really want to do is get things done? More on that later.

In Rotation

I've settled into a pattern of having two articles / chapters in rotation at any given point, and trying to complete one of them every month or two. I have a deadline of October 1 so I have one that's near completion for that, along with a chapter that I've been plugging away at. The idea is that the completed piece will drop out of rotation on Sep. 30 and I will add a new one.

My aim is to strike the perfect balance between focus and distraction. One is not enough because if I get stuck, then I waste time. Three is one too many, because I am not likely to make substantial progress on any one of the three.

I Just Want to Do My Work (Dammit)

I don't want to read an email from the Chancellor about parking for the football game. I don't want to fill out a form telling the university my ethnicity and other demographic details. I just want to do teaching and research, research and teaching, and then some more research after that. I'll do essential, meaningful service as well, helping to put together tenure documents, mentoring junior faculty, doing peer reviews of articles. I'll suffer through meetings. Most of what is "work" aside from that, however, is just a drain on energy.

***

Since teaching is highly structured in time and research is highly unstructured, service cuts into research much more than teaching. Service is also like research in that it takes place in less structured time frames, and can be infinitely expandable. There are people with the same teaching load who do four times more service, just as there are scholars who publish four times more than their colleagues.

What if research was structured: you had to sit in a room and do it for so many hours a day for so many weeks (like Thomas's 16 week plan) and you had to be accountable for that time? What if, at the same time, teaching was totally unstructured: you would meet with random groups of students who wanted to see you on random occasions? In other words, what if we inverted the relation between research and teaching? Obviously a lot more research would get done, but more significantly the relation between the two activities would change. It seems rather odd that our too main activities should be so asymmetric in the way they are organized and rewarded.

***

It's also interesting that scholarship is communication upwards, where the intended audience consists of specialists who know as much or more than you, and that teaching is communication downwards, where the intended audience knows vastly less than the instructor. It shouldn't be too surprising that the best at communicating upwards wouldn't always be the best at communicating in the other direction, or that those that are best at planning 15 weeks of classes aren't the best at working in a less structured way.

Graduate teaching is a special case, because the instructor has to decide when to go down and when to go up.

9 to 5

I was talking to a friend of mine who teaches four courses a semester at a local college. She treats her job as a 9-5 one, putting all instruction, preparation, and grading - along with committee work and other service - into 40 hours a week. Then her own writing, of which there is a lot, gets done outside those 40 hours- weekends, evenings, summers.

I teach 2 courses a semester, so I could do all my teaching and service in 40 hours a week and still have time to write and do research during the actual work week. Yes, I could be one of those people who brag about how many hours they work, but I'm not that guy. An hour of work for me can be extremely efficient and productive and I'd rather work 30 good hours than 60 mediocre ones.

One Thing I Learned on my Vacation

was that I didn't have to sit in front of the computer when I wasn't working. That lesson can carry over into everyday working life. Try to only use the computer to do what you have to do. No random surfing or facebook. Don't go into your office, turn on your computer for an hour, and avoid work during that time.

Fetish and Flow

You want to seek out those flow states of intense concentration, cultivate that ability in yourself. But you don't want to be so dependent on those states that you can't work unless you are in the flow. The flow can't be your fetish. The flow comes more from habitual action than from random, muse-like inspiration. On days when the flow is completely absent, there is still plenty to do: correct format and bibliography, read over completed drafts of other chapters.

Milestones

The sentence might have 25 words, the page, 300. An article is 6,000-8,000 words. The book is 80-100 thousand. If you wrote a sentence a day, you could finish a book every 11 years. That's pretty respectable, considering scholarly careers of 35 years where someone might have written 2-3 books. Writing a page a day gets you enough material for a book every year, which nobody ought to be writing.

***

When I look too closely at the word count, I produce wordier writing. I'm hoping the days I write 300 words, that those are 300 better words, than the days I write 700. On the other hand I live to force out a few extra hundred words at the end of my writing session.

End of Vacation

If everything will have gone as planned, today should be the last day of my vacation. I'm hoping the vacation went well, though I don't know yet, because I'm writing this a month early to provide with uninterrupted content.

A New Technique

Here's a technique I've been using a bit: take the least well developed chapter of your book and work on it until it is the third least well developed chapter. The way I do this is to take a sheet of paper and write out everything I know about what is going to be in the chapter, then sit down at the computer and write.

Now take the new least developed chapter, the one that has been left in the dust, and do the same thing again with that one, and with a third chapter.

This also works with completing chapters. Take the chapter that is closest to being done and bring it to completion.

Since beginning and ending are separate skills, it is refreshing to switch between chapters sometimes. The other main skill is just "going on," working in the middle of a chapter that is neither incipient nor near completion. That is the hardest stage, the one least abundant in satisfaction. What I recommend here is to wage a stealth attack, taking the chapter quickly from its initial stages to its final ones.

A Time Design for Fall Semester

Sunday: Drive to Kansas. Planning session for week’s work.

Monday: a.m.: prepare classes. p.m.: teach 12:30 until 5:15.

Tuesday: a.m.: research / writing. p.m.: prepare Wed. classes as needed.

Wed. a.m.: grading / class prep. p.m.: teach.

Thursday: drive to St. Louis. / Reading for class.

Friday: research / writing.

Saturday: day off.

Notes:

There are two 10+ hour days: Monday and Wed.

Sunday is devoted entirely to planning exactly how the work for Monday-Friday is going to get done. The general "time design" will be a template, not substituting for weekly plans.

Evenings are left free, but can be filled as needed with research / writing tasks that need to be done.

Aside from teaching (10 hour) days, there is a lot of flexibility.

My main tasks are teaching two classes and writing two articles, one due in December and the other in February.

My time management goal is not to have work spill over inappropriately into times reserved for other work or NOT WORK. I don't mind working hard when I'm working but I don't want to have diffuse nervous work all the time. I think I can get the job done in 30-40 good hours a week rather than 50-60 hours of much more variable quality. The highest quality hour might just be the Sunday planning hour.

Work as Work Avoidance

What is certain kind of work were a way of avoiding other kinds of work (I know this to be the case, in fact). In other words, work itself can be a strategy for procrastination. Imagine you have two tasks, one is dreaded and somewhat difficult, and the other is fun and easy. You might work at the latter task in order just in order to avoid the former. (The good news is you're getting work done, but you might be making things too hard on yourself, working more to get less done.)

But what if what defines something as difficult is simply the label you put on it? In other words, if I have two things to write, and they are equally fun/difficult, the most fun thing to write will be the project which seems less urgent and necessary, the one that feels like less "work" and more play. So in order to trick myself into writing the one I ought to be writing, I might switch the labels around.

Clean Copy

I've decided to make an adjustment in how I work. I've had the lazy habit of writing a lot of rough notes in microsoft word documents. My new approach is going to be to write only complete sentences and keep each document more or less "clean." I dislike going back to something I've been working on and finding a lot of messy notes that I will just have to throw out anyway. It makes it harder to go back to a document, because of the fear of the mess I might find.

I don't know if this change will be permanent or not. The point here is not that one way is better than another, or that you have to work as I do, but that it is good to reevaluate work habits that aren't "working" for you, making large and small adjustments as needed.

Vacation

I am going to take a vacation from writing during the last two weeks of July: 18-31. This is something I very rarely do, because being a productive scholar is what I most enjoy. For me, taking a vacation from everything else in order to write is my ideal. Normal life is what I find stressful. But I just will need at some point to stop for a few weeks just to see if that will help me in the long run.

You won't notice a difference here, because I write these posts several weeks in advance. This post, for example, was written on June 16 but is scheduled for publication on June 29. As long as I'm 14 days ahead when I start I won't have to write even blog posts during the vacation.

The To-Do List With a Single Item (cont.)

It turns out that that the thing you are supposed to be doing is the hardest to do. Here's my work log for the summer so far:


Grade Student papers / submit grades May 12
Reviewed article for [Academic Journal] May 21
Reviewed article for [Academic journal] June 10
Professor X's (at XXU) tenure letter June 12
Review of "Poesia y química" June 13
Finish conference talk June 14

etc...

You'll notice that I did all these things, but the "to do list with a single item" had something else on it, something that I did not do / have not done yet. I kept putting other, smaller tasks before the single item on my list. So maybe my idea of the list with a single item was not so brilliant after all. It works fine, as long as you don't want to actually do main thing you set out to do.