On the heels of the last ivory tower rumination and following an Email from a friend who expressed curiosity about hammering through a dissertation even when feeling stalled out, I started writing to her about some techniques.
And writing.
And writing.
I guess I needed to articulate some of this for myself, because I expressed in comments on the previous post, I still am a little astonished that I’ve written so much dissertation already – especially there were extended periods in the spring after my breakup when I found myself unable to write at all. So, in the event that my fellow academics need some encouragement, here are some tips that got me through emotional and intellectual tough spots.
Short version:
- Deconstruct (yeah, I said it) your work.
- Observe and analyze your work habits.
- Work with an ally.
- Set a timer.
- Accept that intellectual work doesn’t look like “real” work.
- Appreciate the work you do, not the work you think you should be doing.
- If you don’t love it, don’t do it.
Long version:
Deconstruct your work.
I feel like most of my work fits loosely into these categories: researching, close-reading literature, reading/notating scholarship, “writing”, revising. Each of these activities requires a different amount of attention and intensity. If you have a sense of what different things ”working” means, you have an instant to-do list – this helps avoid avoidance – and if you get stalled out, you can switch tasks in good faith. For example, ”writing” encompasses a variety of mental exercises to move from note-taking to telling a story that makes sense of the evidence. If I’m not sure how to get started on “writing,” I will frequently take up another task – usually reading/notating something new, because that is very busy work but nearly always sets off a productive chain of thought. Sometimes this busy work becomes a form of procrastination (my committee has sometimes advised me to stop reading and start working) but for humanities work in particular there is very little wasted thought. Everything you read goes into the soup that is your brain, and sometimes reading one more article does indeed set off a firework.
Observe and analyze your work habits.
When I’ve felt stuck, one of my committee members has repeatedly recommended writing for one hour a day. That is probably excellent advice – it would ensure a consistent and continued engagement with your work, and some people really flourish under a strict regime.
I don’t. I get crabby. I found that some days I really couldn’t fit it an hour in without giving up something I valued – yoga, eating, sleeping – and that setting aside the time didn’t guarantee that I would accomplish anything, or even feel accomplished. So I work in chunks, usually. In April, when I was working the most steadily and spending the most headspace on refining my arguments, I worked mainly on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, sometimes in the morning, sometimes on a weekend day. (MWF were pretty much strictly for school business: teaching, my internship, the graduate journal.)
For some people, that would be a nightmare: being stuck in a room for an entire afternoon with your work. But for me, it was mostly exciting – provided that I was decently fed and rested. I’d just start later if I needed to finish some household chores like laundry or cooking; if I was beat at the end of a three-hour stint, I’d quit for the day. Your mileage will absolutely vary and it’s important to be honest with yourself about how you work, not how you think you should work.
Work with an ally.
This one comes from D, who got it from an article that I’ve lost the name and title of. Work with someone who also has work to do – it doesn’t matter what kind. Sometimes when I am feeling low I refer to this as “baby-sitting” because I’m afraid I simply won’t do my work if I’m not being watched. But generally it’s not about the surveillance; it’s about feeling like you are in a productive atmosphere, or (if you’re lucky) a collaborative community. Scholarship can be isolating; company is nice.
As an example: last week I was plugging away at some notation when an acquaintance from my university walked in. We don’t know each other well, but she asked to sit with me because the café was crowded. We typed very busily for awhile; eventually we got to chatting about our respective job hunts and enjoyed some commiseration, but for the most part we just worked quietly. It can be nice, though, to take time to talk about what you’re doing and what you hope to accomplish in the work session – sometimes articulating your work helps it click, or your companion will ask useful questions, or perhaps their work will spark your interest.
Set a timer.
Also from D. The article suggested 15 minute intervals, which is how long the average attention span is presumed to be. My most frequent allies and I found ourselves most comfortable with 30 minute intervals. There should always be some flexibility: sometimes you’re in a zone and should keep right on going for a second 30 minute stretch. Sometimes your attention is diffuse and you need to set the timer for 20, steamroll through and then allow yourself to blow off steam.
If you’re working with an ally, you will probably arrive to the session with different qualities of attention. Be honest about it: you will probably find that you influence each other for the better or for the worse, and it’s easier to be better if you’ve admitted that you need help being focused (so your ally doesn’t humor your chatter for long).
Additionally, timing will give you a better sense of how much work you can actually do in an afternoon. You will probably find that you greatly overestimate how much you should accomplish in the period of several hours – which explains why you sometimes feel that you are underperforming.
This tip and the above tip about breaking your work down into smaller activities can be supported by a website like ididwork.com, where you can log your time.
Accept that intellectual work doesn’t look like “real” work.
You’re an intellectual. You think; that’s what you do. But there’s a lot of pressure both internal and external to the academic community that working is putting something out there, into the world! You’ll do that eventually. Before then, you must allow yourself time to think.
If you need to put words on a page, you can try free-writing for one of those 20 minute timed stretches – just type through what it is you’re trying to say, what you’re thinking or confused about or need to look up.
But mainly, this concept helps me feel better about taking days off. It’s not like it’s out of sight, out of mind.
Appreciate the work you do, not the work you think you should be doing.
When I was trucking through those April revisions, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything extraordinary. Part of me felt that I should: when you’re writing and re-writing your prospectus, you spend so much energy explaining your NEW THINKING THAT NO ONE HAS THOUGHT, EVER! But in practice, you’re not conjuring castles out of air. You are using perfectly ordinary materials, like nails and planks, and you’re building partly on top of a framework other folks have already made.
But you do bring your craft to it, and in the end you’ve made a pretty snazzy place to live, and it’s hard not to feel good about that. I often found myself smiling while I wrote, mostly because after all this time I still really, really love most of the poetry and novels I was using.
If you don’t love it, don’t do it.
A story. Last summer, I has just turned in my prospectus and started writing my “first chapter.” I was thinking each chapter would be about 30 pages and that I would do about one a semester – because that’s how it’s usually done, I think – and writing on in the summer would get me a head start. So I started writing about psychoanalysis and motherhood and feeding, partly at a committee member’s advice: if you’re writing about food, why not start at the beginning, with nursing? So I researched like crazy and took copious notes and, in fact, wrote a ~25-page draft of a chapter that summarized the psychoanalytic principles of parental feeding and applied them to two books which complicated the theory. But it just wasn’t coming together. I couldn’t sew it all up – and I kept going on tangents, and writing little mini papers about other books and other ideas.
Finally, I excised a mini-paper out of my fat draft and sent it and another mini-paper to my chair and said, What the hell do I do now? And he said, obviously you should be writing a bunch of mini-papers.
I threw that entire chapter out and started writing for real. Thank goodness, too, because I really hate writing about psychoanalysis, even if with the aim of “complicating” or “problematizing” it.
So if you find your work angering and frustrating, take stock. Are you angry at yourself, because you are a self-doubting academic? Or do you hate your material? Because in the latter case, that’s not your dissertation. As I say of my aborted material, “I wrote A first chapter, but it wasn’t MY first chapter.”
Now. On with Hemingway and the hunger artists.
