The Astonishing Skills Academics Acquire to Improve Our Not Writing

Getting good at not writing

I spend a good chunk of my time figuring out the most efficient way to get my academic writing done. This involves finding a system of writing strategies I can depend on to develop one key idea from my messy research notes and data into coherent and persuasive academic prose. Once the first draft ‘gets done’ I still have mountains of struggle ahead — second draft revisions, colleagues’ comments, peer-review — all stages I hope lead to successfully publishing my idea.

But that first draft is by far the hardest stage for me. I’m always on the search for a strategy I can use to get me through that first stage.

I’m also wary of the bad strategies I’ve accumulated over the years making writing harder for me. Counter-productive strategies like engaging in ‘virtuous procrastination’: those subtler and more advanced forms of procrastination that academics develop to avoid writing. Things like reading another ‘necessary’ article for our literature review, organizing our workflow to streamline the writing process that we assure ourselves will come later, or maybe doing those dirty dishes. “Unpleasantness is relative” for the expert in virtuous procrastination, because “ if the chapter terrifies you, cleaning your house feels like a walk in the park.”¹

Chon A. Noriega, a professor of film and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, describes academic writers’ uncanny ability to collect unhelpful strategies over time like this:

“One usually gets better at whatever one does on a regular basis. If one does not write on a regular basis, one will get better at not writing. In fact, one will develop an astonishing array of skills designed to improve and extend one’s not writing.” ²

I think this comment resonates with many academic writers. We must search for those writing strategies that work for us in getting our writing done. But it is also important to sort out the good practices helping us from the bad practices making us suffer unnecessarily.

What skills can I develop to prevent myself from not writing?

So rather than ask myself what skills and strategies I can develop to improve my writing, an important question I increasingly ask instead is:

What skills can I develop to prevent myself from not writing?

By framing the question negatively, developing a productive writing practice becomes less of an active search for finding the ‘right’ writing strategies, and more of a task of clearing away the debris blocking our pathways to getting writing done. In other words, learning how to get out of our way when productive writing is our goal.

“Take the one seat”

A useful insight for me in how to approach this comes from an instruction Jack Kornfield received from his Buddhist teacher Achaan Chah on the practice of meditation: “take the one seat”:

“Just go into the room and put one chair in the center. Take the seat in the center of the room, open the doors and the windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.” ³

I find this simple instruction helpful because it reminds me quite literally to just take my seat and write. But in reading Kornfield’s description of this teaching, to “take the one seat” also suggests that just as there are many easier or harder pathways to the top of a mountain, there are many easier or harder pathways to taking your seat and staying in it. The task for the concerned writer is to identify and cultivate the easiest pathways into your writing seat day after day.

Daily short bursts of 30 minutes

For many academics I know, productive writing requires blocking out fairly large chunks of time to devote their full attention to writing for 2, 3, or 4 hours or more. While this is appealing to me, I’ve found that requiring myself to write for large blocks of time has proven to be a great strategy for not getting writing done. I have a deep-seated worry that if I can’t block off enough time to write, then the quality of my writing will suffer.

For this reason, a reliable pathway into my writing seat is to block off a mere 30 minutes for writing each day. Knowing I just need to check off my 30 minutes per day clears these mental hurdles blocking my pathway into my one seat. And research on productive academic writing suggests that daily short bursts of 30 minutes are most productive in the long run anyway!⁴ Surprisingly, however, once I get started, I find it easier to extend my 30-minute burst into larger 1 or 2-hour chunks of time.

Good morning

Another pathway into my seat is to set aside my writing time in the morning. This is in part because the morning is when I feel most energized to write. But it’s also because I’ve discovered that my motivation to write is a finite resource. It steadily decreases throughout the day. So I use my coffee-fueled motivation on writing early on while I can.

Start afresh every day

One more pathway into my seat is to never add the writing goals I missed the day before to today. So if my goal is to write 500 words a day but I skip a day, I don’t add 500 onto the next day to compensate. I just start afresh at 500 words again. So don’t punish yourself for skipping days. That’s a great deterrent to taking your writing seat. Just start afresh each morning.

Invite your future self to take the one seat

Yet another pathway into my writing seat that I’ve found useful is this: before I finish writing for the day, I write an invitation to my future self to take a seat the next day and write. I don’t mean a persuasive letter or note to myself to entice me into writing. I mean tactics like writing a topic sentence containing one idea, offering me an easy lead-in for starting a new paragraph the following day. I also find leaving a question to answer about my data or the literature works well too as a jump start. ‘Anchor sentences,’ or incomplete sentences that I need to tie off, give me an equally effective gravitational pull to my writing seat every morning.

Guilt-trip-free

But by far the best side-effect of taking my one seat every day to cultivate a daily writing practice is that it frees me from feeling guilty about not writing. Not writing is a constant background anxiety for most academics I know. When I am not writing, I am always haunted by the guilt of feeling like I should be writing. But I’ve found that creating a system of pathways that siphon me into my writing seat each day, even if it’s just for a 30-minute burst, frees me from a good deal of not-writing-guilt for the rest of the day.

Evade the Censor

Taken together, these simple strategies help create a swift enough current to pull me towards a consistent writing practice, and “take the one seat” day after day. I’m sure many scholarly writers don’t have this issue. After all how hard can just sitting down to write be? But for those of us who do struggle with this, we need a system to resist all the counter-currents pulling us away from our writing. So I realize now that how useful it is to have a robust system of pathways I can fall back on to make it much easier for me to sit down and write.

An added bonus is that cultivating pathways of least-resistance to my writing seat every morning also helps me to evade that psychological boogeyman every writer faces, what Julia Cameron identifies as ‘the Censor’:

“We are victims of our own internalized perfectionist, a nasty internal and eternal critic, the Censor, who resides in our (left) brain and keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as the truth. . . . Make this a rule: always remember that your Censor’s negative opinions are not the truth. This takes practice. By spilling out of bed and straight onto the page every morning, you learn to evade the Censor.” ⁵

Footnotes/References

[1] Eric Hayot (2014). The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities. Columbia University Press. p. 27.

[2] Cited in: Wendy Laura Belcher (2019). Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, Second Edition: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success. University of Chicago Press. p. 18.

[3] Jack Kornfield (1993). Take The One Seat: Cultivating Meditation Commitment. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Retrieved February 22, 2020, from https://tricycle.org/magazine/take-one-seat/

[4] Robert Boice. (1990). Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press.

[5] Julia Cameron (1992). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Souvenir Books. p. 11.