3 Essential Books on the Positive Psychology of Productive Writing

3 academic writers on 3 techniques for transforming your writing anxiety into a ‘productive instinct’

There are hundreds of books out there on how to become a more productive writer. Some of the best advice I’ve found for nonfiction writing, in particular, comes from the trenches of academia.

Academic writers caught in the pressure cooker of growing teaching demands on one side, and a publish-or-perish (or publish-and-still-perish) culture on the other, have developed some helpful and practical ideas to more effectively deal with the inevitable anxiety about our writing projects; that special kind of writer’s anxiety that prevents us from frequent, low-stress contact with our writing projects.

Below are three books that have helped me develop the positive emotional habits needed to find that sweet spot between joy and productivity in my writing practice.

#1 Write No Matter What

Joli Jensen is a Emerita Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. I’ll probably read her book Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics about 10 times during my Ph.D.

One of the powerful ideas in her book, Write No Matter What, is to identify and bust the writing myths that plague academic writers. As Jensen puts it, “Writing myths manifest as muffled feelings we can’t quite overcome.

We ignore them, hide from them, and try to bully them into leaving us alone. But as long as the myths that feed our feelings remain etched in stone, we stay stuck.”

But another useful idea she proposes her notion of “taming techniques.” Taming techniques are simple, daily, habit-driven techniques that ‘tame’ the anxieties transforming your writing project into a high-stakes, infrequently-connected-with, chaotic mess.

The main point of using these taming techniques is to provide a reliable foundation to give you frequent, low-stress, and enjoyable contact with your writing project.

There are three taming techniques she describes in particular.

1. Create a project box.
2. Use a ventilation file.
3. Write at least fifteen minutes every day.

“So that’s it — three tools that let you contain, cleanse, and connect to academic writing. Project box plus ventilation file plus fifteen minutes a day. Are these really all you need to write productively for the rest of your life? Yes and no. Just as most diet advice is some version of “eat less, move more,” most writing advice is some version of “fear less, write more”

Joli Jensen, in Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics (emphasis added).

#2: Air And Light and Time And Space

Helen Sword, Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland, has produced something new in the genre of academic writing advice. The book is unlike anything I’ve read before on the craft of writing, not just for academic writers, but of any kind of writing. Her previous books focused on structure and style, with titles like Stylish Academic Writing and The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose.

However, she noticed that when she gave talks about writing style and structure to students and professors, they quickly shifted the conversation shifted towards wider psychological issues, like work-life balance, power dynamics in academia around publishing, and emotions like anxiety and fear. Realizing this, she writes,

“Gradually, my scholarly gaze began to lift from the words on the page to the people who put them there, and I realized that my next book would have to focus not on writing but on writers.”

Shifting focus from writing to writers, her book took on a new shape. Sword conducted over a hundred interviews with a diverse range of academic and nonfiction writers. From these conversations, the psychology of healthy (and not-so-healthy) work-life habits for writers began to come into view.

A key theme emerging in these interviews was anxiety around time, or rather, the lack of it. Sword writes,

“You can’t lose time behind the back of a sofa or discover a forgotten stash tucked away in a kitchen drawer. You can’t mint it like coins or spend it like cash. Nevertheless, academics talk constantly about making time, finding time, carving out time to write. We fantasize about having more of it, and we bemoan our chronic lack of it. But from what — or whom — can we slice it away without doing damage to something or someone?”

Instead of trying to ‘slice away’ writing time for ourselves, Sword says, we need to approach time as something that’s already there, waiting for us. To do this, she gives us a new vantage point to understand one of the most common pieces of writing advice: write daily.

By scheduling in as little as 15 minutes for writing every day, “your writing time never needs to be “found,” because it’s already there waiting for you. ”

Diving deeper, Sword offers several reasons why writing daily transforms anxiety about our writing projects into a productive instinct:

1. Writing daily is an antidote to procrastination: rather than fretting about your lack of time, you simply meet with Time for your scheduled appointment.
2. Writing daily gives you frequent contact with your writing, keeping your research and ideas at the top of your mind.
3. Writing daily fuels new (and more) ideas. Fear of the blank page often means not knowing what to say; but knowing what to say is often a surprising side-effect of filling in that blank page.

While some writers, like the poet Charles Bukowski, suggest this means you shouldn’t write until the words ‘roar out of you.’ For Bukowski, we shouldn’t bother with writing until the muse shows up, and inspiration strikes: “if it never does roar out of you, do something else.”

But for Sword, daily writing is more like preparing a sailboat for the roar of the wind. Writing daily enables you to catch the roaring wind when it comes: “Sometimes we have no idea which way we are headed until the sails have been hoisted and the wind kicks in.”

#3: The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities

Eric Hayot is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State University, His book is probably one of my favorite books on the craft of academic writing. And the insights and strategies he shares in this book extend well beyond advice for Ph.D. students struggling to finish their articles and dissertations.

His chapter on the ‘Uneven U’ alone makes this book a valuable addition to your writing workshop library.

Hayot writes,

Let’s start with fear. I am terrified — seriously terrified — of academic writ-ing. Nothing that I do confronts me as strongly with a fear of total, consuming incompetence and inadequacy. The problem is that I am trying to be great, and I am (quite reasonably, unfortunately) afraid that I am not great. As a result I am occasionally tempted to take the advice the doctor gives the man who says, “It hurts when I do this”: “Stop doing that.”

New graduate students just entering a Ph.D. program, Hayot writes, often hear that half of them won’t finish. One reason for this often has to do with writing the dissertation, a massive piece of writing work that generates all kinds of writing anxieties and fears. This is because it’s usually the first major kind of academic writing work that resembles the kind of writing they will need to do for the rest of their academic careers, if they choose to stay in academia.

The psychological challenges that result can be enough to persuade (probably wise) grad students that there are better ways to make a living as a writer in the world. Hayot writes,

“The ultimate truth about graduate school is that successful academics are not always the smartest ones in their cohorts. They’re the ones who manage [their writing] anxiety well, who learn to live with their fears and continue, despite everything, to write.”

So how to manage our writing fears? Hayot equips his readers with several strategies for harnessing fear for productivity. Here are three that struck a chord with me:

1. Write daily: “This is the oldest trick in the book: accomplish psychologically difficult tasks by making them habitual.”
2. Make small goals and meet them. For ideas on this absolutely essential rule for maintaining your writing sanity, I recommend reading Raul Pacheco-Vega’s article, “125–250 words, 15 minutes: Setting small writing goals to build an academic writing practice.” In fact, all the writing advice Pacheco-Vega offers on his blog is pure gold.
3. Make fear your ally. Hayot suggests one way you can do this is to not destroy your fear, but manage it. Use your fear to recognize opportunities for improvement in your writing. If you’re stuck with something, he recommends asking yourself, “What am I most afraid of here? What scares me the most about this paragraph, this transition, this paragraph, or this essay?”

For Hayot, the main point is to recognize your fear as a ‘productive instinct,’ rather than an obstacle you need to demolish or overcome. An interesting puzzle to solve for, instead of a brick wall. Easier said than done.

But he suggests that in freewriting about the fear itself –– creating a kind of metalanguage of your own to write about the ‘writing puzzle’ you need to solve––it can point you towards a solution to finishing your piece.

The Takeaway

1. Joil Jensen suggests we harness these three ‘taming techniques’ to provide you with frequent, low-stress, and enjoyable contact with your writing project: 1) Create a project box, 2) use a ventilation file, and 3) write at least fifteen minutes every day.
2. The psychology of writing daily: “Sometimes we have no idea which way we are headed until the sails have been hoisted and the wind kicks in,” writes Helen Sword.
3. Transform fear into a ‘productive instinct’: successful writers are not the smartest or cleverest people out there. They are “the ones who manage [their writing] anxiety well, who learn to live with their fears and continue, despite everything, to write,” Hayot says.