(no subject)
It's 12:30, and I'm eating my lunch of leftover stir-fry with spicy miso sauce (to be followed by giant chocolate-chip cookie from Hillside), after completing my day's writing-quota in time for my writing-quota deadline. And it wasn't too bad - the writing, I mean. The stuff I wrote will have to be overhauled and reconceived once I review the historiography in more detail and decide exactly what I'm arguing.
Now that I'm done with teaching for the semester (except for the emails from students demanding to know how they did on the final), and in fact, starting yesterday, I've instituted a daily writing quota for myself. I have a paper for my medieval Islamic world R&R due at the end of may, and I want to finish writing the dissertation-related historiography paper I started last year in my medieval seminar, and beyond that, there are articles and a dissertation looming on the horizon. I haven't written much in a couple of years (the dubious joys of being finished classwork), and I haven't written anything more than 20 or so pages long since my undergrad honors thesis four years ago. Even when I was writing more (weekly short papers, 20-page seminar papers, even my thesis), I wasn't fantastically disciplined about it, and I never came up with a consistent writing strategy.
So far, my approach to writing has always been very intuitive - my thesis eventually comes to me, but I'm not sure how. In my first few years of undergrad, that would happen first and then I would write the paper. But papers got more complicated, and my method turned into something more like write half a dozen pages, decide they suck, scrap them, start again, gradually arrive at thesis. Since all of this was always happening at the last possible minute, it created a lot of panic. And, it required firm external deadlines.
At the moment, I think it's safe to say that I'm out of practice at writing, and pretty scared of it. I've always been a little afraid of it, hence the horrible procrastination about it, but it's gotten worse as I've been writing less. As a result, the last several times I've had to write, it's been hideously painful. I know it always will be, to some extent, because hello, writing is hard, but I'd like to work the fear, agony, and aversion - not to mention the procrastination - down to a healthier level in preparation for writing my dissertation. Because I actually like writing, when it's going well, and I'm not tearing my hair out trying to find something to say and then to write twenty pages about it in the last two days before a deadline!
Guided by the infinite wisdom of everything I've ever read about writing, with a special shout-out to Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, I've instituted a daily writing quota for myself for the summer. In the rare situations when I've had to write extensively in the last couple of years, I've noticed that once I get down to work, the first page isn't usually too bad. It's once I've finished the first page, and faced the fact that there are fifteen more to go before I can stop, that the despair sets in. So, my master plan is to avoid the despair. If more than one page causes it, I'll start by writing one page a day. I'm sure I'll be able to increase that in the future, but if I can write a page a day all summer, that's a fair amount of writing. Plus, it's a fair amount of sticking to my guns about work, also something I need to work on.
I'll have to exceed that quota to accomplish a respectable page total by the end of May for my Islamic world paper, but on the other hand, if I've been working away at it every day, I'll hopefully work out what I'm going to say without too much anguish, and the writing won't be so bad. I don't know that I'll ever be able to make my thinking and writing process fully conscious like some people (I think I'm thinking of that one called The Academic Self) suggest, but maybe this way I can make it a little more predictable by spending more time really focusing on and working through the material every day.
So, this is my plan. A page every day by noon through the rest of May and all of June except the week I'm going to West Virginia to see L&L. As I get into June, if I'm doing well, I may start giving myself weekends off. But until I prove I can do it, a page every day, seven days a week. Then, in July, I'll see. I may have to switch over to daily musings. In any case, hopefully I'll have written a lot.
If necessary, I will get an escalating series of people involved for accountability, up to and including advisor R. Currently, I'm making do with my own sense of determination. But poke me if I seem to be slacking off?
Now that I'm done with teaching for the semester (except for the emails from students demanding to know how they did on the final), and in fact, starting yesterday, I've instituted a daily writing quota for myself. I have a paper for my medieval Islamic world R&R due at the end of may, and I want to finish writing the dissertation-related historiography paper I started last year in my medieval seminar, and beyond that, there are articles and a dissertation looming on the horizon. I haven't written much in a couple of years (the dubious joys of being finished classwork), and I haven't written anything more than 20 or so pages long since my undergrad honors thesis four years ago. Even when I was writing more (weekly short papers, 20-page seminar papers, even my thesis), I wasn't fantastically disciplined about it, and I never came up with a consistent writing strategy.
So far, my approach to writing has always been very intuitive - my thesis eventually comes to me, but I'm not sure how. In my first few years of undergrad, that would happen first and then I would write the paper. But papers got more complicated, and my method turned into something more like write half a dozen pages, decide they suck, scrap them, start again, gradually arrive at thesis. Since all of this was always happening at the last possible minute, it created a lot of panic. And, it required firm external deadlines.
At the moment, I think it's safe to say that I'm out of practice at writing, and pretty scared of it. I've always been a little afraid of it, hence the horrible procrastination about it, but it's gotten worse as I've been writing less. As a result, the last several times I've had to write, it's been hideously painful. I know it always will be, to some extent, because hello, writing is hard, but I'd like to work the fear, agony, and aversion - not to mention the procrastination - down to a healthier level in preparation for writing my dissertation. Because I actually like writing, when it's going well, and I'm not tearing my hair out trying to find something to say and then to write twenty pages about it in the last two days before a deadline!
Guided by the infinite wisdom of everything I've ever read about writing, with a special shout-out to Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, I've instituted a daily writing quota for myself for the summer. In the rare situations when I've had to write extensively in the last couple of years, I've noticed that once I get down to work, the first page isn't usually too bad. It's once I've finished the first page, and faced the fact that there are fifteen more to go before I can stop, that the despair sets in. So, my master plan is to avoid the despair. If more than one page causes it, I'll start by writing one page a day. I'm sure I'll be able to increase that in the future, but if I can write a page a day all summer, that's a fair amount of writing. Plus, it's a fair amount of sticking to my guns about work, also something I need to work on.
I'll have to exceed that quota to accomplish a respectable page total by the end of May for my Islamic world paper, but on the other hand, if I've been working away at it every day, I'll hopefully work out what I'm going to say without too much anguish, and the writing won't be so bad. I don't know that I'll ever be able to make my thinking and writing process fully conscious like some people (I think I'm thinking of that one called The Academic Self) suggest, but maybe this way I can make it a little more predictable by spending more time really focusing on and working through the material every day.
So, this is my plan. A page every day by noon through the rest of May and all of June except the week I'm going to West Virginia to see L&L. As I get into June, if I'm doing well, I may start giving myself weekends off. But until I prove I can do it, a page every day, seven days a week. Then, in July, I'll see. I may have to switch over to daily musings. In any case, hopefully I'll have written a lot.
If necessary, I will get an escalating series of people involved for accountability, up to and including advisor R. Currently, I'm making do with my own sense of determination. But poke me if I seem to be slacking off?