Structural Issues in Academia

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From the outside, academia seems like a rarefied space that supports the life of the mind. The reality on the inside is more complex. This disconnect isn’t new or unique to academia, but academia has its own structures (or structurelessness), rhythms (or polyrhythms), and challenges at various points in a career.

We’ve lived inside academia for many years, and so here we’ll share some general thoughts on how to survive and maybe thrive. (Full disclosure: as academic editors, we orbit around academia, you might say we have “alternative academic (alt-ac)” employment. In addition, one of us (Alex) adjunct faculty, which further colours our perspective.)

The first part is to take stock of the system as a whole. There are good and bad aspects to academia, like any human system. It is entirely possible to thrive, but even those who find thriving don’t find it without struggle. That much seems universal.

Academic Dynamics

The ways academics interact with each other can be profoundly weird. When we take a bunch of people with very specific interests, an intense work ethic, solid ability to delay gratification, and a certain amount of attraction for solitary work, an intense atmosphere develops. The dynamics of this atmosphere come in extremes.

At the positive end, academics can be incredibly generous, supportive, and friendly. There can be profound meetings of minds in academia. There can be life-changing mentorships, friendships, and periods of intense bonding. The facts, skills, theories, and insights academics can get from each other can change the world. Many academics also cherish planting the seeds of knowledge, critical thinking, and interests in their students, and take those responsibilities seriously.

At the negative end, academics can be surprisingly petty, vindictive, absent-minded, and competitive. Some academics revel in the way their knowledge gives them power over people and makes their positions almost unassailable. Over years and decades, these tendencies can develop into profoundly damaging and dysfunctional patterns of relating to fellow academics and students. Academics are always busy, but for some this can transform into aloofness and inhumanity. Many academics are not particularly good teachers, and some of them use methods that are actively harmful to good learning and to the mental health of their students. Experts often forget the struggle they went through to earn their expertise, and this can lead to wildly inappropriate pedagogy.

The academic system is large and, by turns, encouraging and infuriating. Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash.

Meeting new academics can be an exercise in discerning which type they are, and how to navigate that. Like in any encounter, academics often size each other up relatively slowly, in a process that can take months or even years. The biggest factor in developing a network is persistence. Intense bursts of activity are helpful, but it’s really the repetition that welds academics together.

Academic Structural Injustice

Some of the negative dynamics above come from the structure of academia itself. Despite being a modern institution, the roots of (western European) academia go back to medieval universities, which strongly emphasized hierarchy and apprenticeship as a way of training new academics. This structure has persisted to the present day. New PhDs are trained in such a structure.

There are costs and benefits of this model. On the positive side, developing expertise often requires intense, prolonged, high-stakes mentoring and guidance in the standards of a discipline. On the negative side, the apprenticeship model gives the apprentice next to no power in determining their fate. The apprenticeship model has few recourses when the trainer does not—or cannot—handle their responsibilities. Whether aspiring academics a good or bad apprenticeship depends on the predilections of their master—in the case of grad school, the supervisor and committee. There are almost no structural checks on the power that supervisors and committees have in their role as trainers in this way. Rights exist on paper, but are often unenforceable.

So we end up with a system of fiefdoms within which the tenured professor has near-absolute authority. This has been pointed out in many places and tracks our experience and the experience of many of our clients. Of course, there is a self-selection effect here. Nevertheless, there are great humanitarian gains to be made with a little more structural transformation of the training model.

How to get structural transformation is a difficult, context-sensitive question. We think that there’s no substitute for graduate students and early-career academics getting organized and demanding more rights by whatever means they can. In our experience, trade unionism is the only plausible counter for the structural problems built into academia.

We shouldn’t be totally negative. Positive dynamics and outcomes often happen, but this is usually despite institutional pressures. In our experience, collegial and generous communities of academics exist as distributed networks and subcultures within the cultures of larger disciplines and departments. It takes work to tap into these networks, but that work can pay off immensely.

Neoliberalization

Another factor that makes structural injustice in academia worse is the large-scale social trend towards neoliberalization of universities. This is the process where universities come under increasing pressure to substitute the humanistic model of education with the vocational model of education. At the same time, neoliberalization aims to runs universities as businesses.

The humanistic model is structured around giving students a broad understandings of the world and with equipping them with critical thinking skills that they can take forward with them into whatever specific jobs they do. Humanistic education tries to develop the skills that would make students good citizens in a liberal democracy.

The vocational model treats education as essentially job training. It is much more focused on measurable outcomes, return on investment, industry connections, networking, and job placement. Any student who’s been asked “what are you going to do with that degree?” and has recoiled from the question understands the attitude behind the vocational model of education. The vocational ideal prioritizes credentials over understanding.

Ideally, education should train job skills and couple those with humanistic critical thinking. There is no deep conflict here. But it sometimes seems that university administrators only understand the vocational model. This is the product of a long history of treating universities like businesses. The only problem is: universities aren’t businesses. At least not to academics.

Academics of all stripes instinctively know this. If market logic dictates everything, then student entitlement increases massively. Tuition pays for most academics’ (and administrators’) salaries. These are clear trends. Grades in elite American universities are almost meaningless now because they are so inflated because students spending a small fortune to be there, and they will complain hard about mediocre grades. This is a dysfunctional dynamic from the perspective of actually teaching people things.

So, neoliberalization feeds the negative, competitive, anti-social dynamics that already exist in academia. The continued neoliberalization of universities will emboldened the negative academic dynamics. Prospective academics should be aware of this and how it plays out at their institutions.

How to Thrive?

There is more to say here. (We will get around to it eventually.) But for now, it’s important to emphasize that surviving and thriving within this system is possible. There are costs, to be sure, but if one is committed, it’s possible to navigate effectively.

You will need some skills: long-term planning, personal development through inevitable stress and adversity, strong networks of support and collegiality, strong personal boundaries, the capacity for short-term sprints through overwhelm, and an unsentimental, critical approach to the dynamics that play out around you. You can develop these skills by finding mentors from all walks of life, but also fellow academics who understand the struggle

You will also, from time to time, have to fight collective fights to change systemic dynamics that seem completely baked-in. You’ll have to forge consensus with fellow academics and then hold it together through struggle. This is profoundly hard work. But the good news is that the system you’re fighting isn’t all-powerful or immovable. All institutional dynamics seem impossible to crack—until they crack. Their appearance of immovability is how they try to win the struggles. History shows us that the institutions don’t always win.

Self-Care and Community Care in Academia

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We’re written quite a bit about self-care over the last year. It underlies many of our discussions of writing, motivation, craft, and editing. But good advice that doesn’t define its own limits is very close to bad advice. So this week let’s talk about self-care in relation to community care!

Individualism’s Shadow Sides

We live in an individualistic society, where the discourse is biased towards viewing most problems as fodder for self-improvement. The shadow side of individualism is the deep neglect of social, community, and structural issues that bear on most problems.

While we have very sophisticated ways of talking about personal successes and challenges, our discussions of social, structural, collective, and policy-based successes and challenges are crude and shallow in comparison. Some people even think that all discussion of structural issues doesn’t make sense. This is very close to blaming people for being defeated by social structures they had no hand in making, and that they can’t unmake themselves. We think this attitude stems from how easy it is to talk about personal issues and how hard it is to talk about structural issues.

Self-Care and Community Care

Reasoning together is better than reasoning alone. Sometimes. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

Self-care and community care are intertwined. Minimizing this is the biggest problem with individualism. Ideally, self-care gets us to a place where the need for community and the structural issues that prevent community becomes apparent. Likewise, community care can give people enough stability to address some important self-care issues. So, if the community care is broken or underdeveloped, it limits self-care.

We see some of the fundamental limits of self-care in our academic coaching work. We help clients with methods of self-care: suggestions, tips, and accountability. Also, we are obviously part of our client’s extended support network. We also have to manage expectations in our coaching practice, which means recognizing both personal-level and structural-level limitations on our help.

Academia and Community Care

Academia is full of structural issues—like any workplace, really. But in academia, there’s a marked tendency for those hemmed in by structural constraints to blame themselves for the difficulty of their path. Such misplaced blame is counterproductive, to put it mildly.

The hyper-specialization of academic work tends to make academics feel isolated, and that their work only matters to very few people. This feeds the academic ideal of academic work the solitary and isolating.

We think this is a grave error. Academics are human, and as such they need community. It need not be community in a traditional sense, One can find support through friends, though writing groups, academic societies, chosen families, blood families, or shared hobbies. A near-universal piece of advice for all academics is to have a hobby or interest that is unrelated to academia. This is very helpful in getting academics out of their heads and meeting people within the broader community.

Academic Coaching

Coaching is part of community care, but sometimes a very small part. Tips, tricks, guidance, and accountability are useful, but accountability is really the most important piece. We help improve individual-level accountability practices, but often one’s closest people are the ones who provide it most effectively and sustainable.

“Yes, but How?”: Mindfulness and Writing

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We often offer tips, tricks, tools, and discussions of basic decency and kindness to help writers. This helps some people, but not others. Depending on who’s reading, any given tool might come across as obvious, preachy, condescending, toxically optimistic, excessively negative, or, somehow, all of those things at once! Good advice is often only good advice when we’re ready to hear it.

So we’re trying something else. We’re starting a series called “Yes, but How?”, which will focus on deep-diving into subtleties and complexities of good advice. In essence, it’s us nerding out about concepts, frameworks, and practicalities of how to do the things. We hope this will help writers tweak tools to their needs.

This week, let’s talk about mindfulness.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is both a psychological state and an individual trait. State mindfulness waxes and wanes throughout the day. Trait mindfulness is unevenly distributed; some people are more inclined to being mindful, but it is a skill one can cultivate. Mindfulness helps writers be patient, persistent, and at the same time open and creative. It facilitates flow, deep work, and kindness. Any struggle is easier if done mindfully.

How do we train it? The basics are simple: (1) find an object to focus on, and (2) notice when focus has shifted and bring yourself back. Do this for a specific amount of time to train yourself. That’s all, really. Of course, there are a few ground rules for making the most of it.

First, you should use soft vigilance rather than hard fixation: focus the way you focus on a piece of music or a painting, not the way you focus on a single voice at a loud party. Second, the object should be dynamic and easy to follow. Breathing, sounds, mantras, or walking movements are popular objects, but there are many out there. Third, the way you bring yourself back should be gentle and kind, not judgmental. How you re-engage attention after getting distracted is the most important part. Re-engaging is how we train mindfulness. Start with short sessions, and gradually increase the duration. It slowly gets easier. Then more challenges will come up. Rinse and repeat.

The dream of writing like a Zen master. Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash.

Nuances of Mindfulness

We can’t recommend mindfulness practice enough. Both of us here are long-time meditators. But there are some caveats, especially around the way it’s explained. Mindfulness practices are commonly presented a techniques for “clearing your mind”. This is an oversimplification. The “clear your mind” attitude comes from an over-generalization of advice for beginner mindfulness practitioners, for whom thoughts are usually the most subtle and insidious distractions. Trying to clear our minds tends to backfire. Mature mindfulness includes mindfulness of thoughts as they arise, grow, and fade. At a certain level practice, it’s better to just let thoughts do their thing rather than pushing them away. They’ll tend to calm down, but not disappear. And that’s just fine.

Mindfulness is really about being present with whatever arises. It’s about getting grounded. And that looks different at different times.

Zenned-out writing can, and probably should, look different than this.

Mindfulness and Writing

A bit more subtly, mindfulness is sometimes explained as developing “nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment”. This is a better gloss on mindfulness than “clearing your mind”, but it’s still not enough. We think the best rendering of mindfulness is “attunement to the subtleties of attention”. This is harder to grasp, but we think it captures what’s worthwhile about mindfulness. Mindful states are those where, instead of being carried by habits of attention, we engage them actively in something like a dialogue. We open new ways of intervening and working. Perhaps we need slightly more sensory clarity in one moment, and a wider focus in another. This sort of tweaking is available with sufficient mindfulness.

So, since writing is mostly a “thinky” activity, mindfulness in writing should neither clear the mind, nor focus exclusively on the present moment. Writing is mostly focusing attention on what’s not present. This is obvious in fiction writing, but also grounds good non-fiction writing. Merging the lovely, grounded energy of mindfulness with the thinky, striving energy of writing is an interesting challenge that each writer has to explore themselves.

The world of mindfulness is vast beyond measure. One must try and taste mindfulness for oneself. You’ll go through ups and down, openings and droughts, but you will learn to gently and kindly make your mind more pliable and suitable for great exertions of thought!

The Plain Language Ideal

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This week, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released their plain-language standard for written communication. This marks the first internationally accepted statement of what clear communication means. The movement towards plain language is important for how writers and editors work, so that’s what we’re covering this week! We’ll summarize the standard and consider a little how it applies in academia.

Plain Language

The general idea behind the ISO Plain Language Standard is that writing should put the reader’s needs first. It should be as easy to find useful, comprehensible information as possible given the needs, interests, and skills of the target audience. While the needs of the writer aren’t irrelevant, they are secondary to the reader’s needs.

Plain language is not the same as simple language. Whereas simple language aims to overcome comprehension or learning difficulties, plain language aims to present just what’s needed for the general reader in a specific context.

The standard gives four principles for plain language writing: relevance, findability, understanding, and usability. It also gives guidelines for interpreting and applying these principles in more specific contexts. While these principles are sound, applying them is deeply contextual and demands good judgment.

The plain language aesthetic. Keep it simple Keep it clear. Photo by Sarah Dorweiler on Unsplash.

Relevance

Relevance means choosing information, formatting, and document types that help readers get what they need out of the document. In order to be relevant to the reader, it’s important to have a clear idea of who the target audience is. Writing for a government website to be used by the general public is different from writing a dissertation.

Findability

Findability means that readers should be able to easily find what they need. This principle concerns broad structure of a document: headings, through-lines, arguments, flow, pacing, and length.

Understanding

Understanding means that once readers find that they need, they should be able to easily understand the information. This principle concerns the most micro-level features of a document: word use, sentence length, paragraph structure, and overall cohesion.

Usability

Finally, usability means that readers can easily use the information. Usability depends on the target audience—i.e., the reader and their needs. Sometimes readers need specific pieces of information. sometimes they need frameworks. Sometimes they need details. And sometimes they need all of those things.

Plain Language in Academia

What does the plain language standard mean for academic editing, our corner of the editing world? Academic editing has been implicitly committed to plain language standards—that is certainly our practice. Nothing in the standard is absolutely new. However, academic writing has some unique tendencies that writing in general does not, and thinking about how to apply the principles is a non-trivial task.

Academics tend to struggle in three areas: structure, jargon, and complexity. We edit to move manuscripts into greater compliance with plain language standards. Academic writing is often structurally convoluted because the writing is often done under severe time constraints. This means that findability of information is compromised. Similarly, academics often default to jargon that’s understood among their peers, but that can get in the way of understanding for a (slightly) wider audience. Finally, academic ideas are often inherently complex. Most of our work is making suggestions on how to move away from jargon, towards clear structure, and away from complexity for the sake of complexity.

Judgment is Essential

Of course, standards can only go so far. One shouldn’t shoehorn a complex argument into a simple structure. Sometimes jargon is the most efficient way to convey information, depending on the audience. And research is often complex because it’s breaking new ground and so can’t be reviewed, reflected on, or digested in the way that established findings can. There’s no substitute for judgment and experience, either the writer’s or the editor’s!

There is much more to say about plain language standards in academia, and there are interesting intersections with material we have already covered. Stay tuned as we explore this terrain further.

Working with “Ugh”

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We want writers to live happy and productive lives, for several reasons. Among these, it’s just good to be happy and engaged with writing. But also, it means more writing for us to edit! This is why we keep sharing tips on how to stay productive.

There are loads of good productivity techniques out there. Today we’ll share one of the more counterintuitive ones, because sometimes productivity advice is too product-oriented and oversimplifies the process. Trying really counterintuitive things drops us into the reality of the process very effectively.

The “Ugh” Phenomenon

Everyone faces moments (or hours, or days, or weeks) of “ugh”: that shapeless, powerful, unaccountable resistance to doing the thing. We’ve talked about it in several ways—overwhelm, akrasia, boredom, the doldrums—but we think that “ugh” is the most evocative way to put it.

The conventional wisdom for dealing with “ugh” is to break it down, feel it, name it, think it through so that it gets a shape. Once it takes on a shape, we can get a foothold and apply the techniques. This is good advice, and usually works. But sometimes the usual approach only makes it worse. Sometimes trying to bypass the shapeless, uncomfortable “ugh” feeling makes it more persistent. It’s as if it wants us to appreciate, at the embodied level, the difficult place we’re in. Our minds and bodies are complicated!

That just about captures it. Photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash.

In this situation, we need to find a way to zag when our mind-body system expects us to zig. We need to break familiar patterns and find something counterintuitive. Here’s our modest contribution.

Make it Worse

It nothing else works, try to make the “ugh” worse. We can do this in two ways.

First, we can brainstorm ways to actively make it worse. Maybe we need to drink some caffeine, or erase everything we’ve written, or get angry at ourselves for feeling unmotivated, or fly into a panic about the deadlines that are coming, or catastrophize this situation. There’s lots of room for creative “solutions” here.

Second, we can try to feel the “ugh” more intensely and then react nonverbally in ways we know makes it worse. Try to make the “ugh” feel more shapeless, more uncomfortable, more chaotic, more foggy, more negative. Bring out all your tricks!

These two ways work together: from that place of intense “ugh”, you may find that new and “better” ideas for how to make it worse appear. Or more ideas make you feel worse. Roll with it.

Speeding through the Stuckness

Why would anyone do this? Three reasons.

First, when “ugh-“ing, we resist recalling the natural solutions that have worked for us in the past, but it’s easy to think of ways to make it worse. The neat thing is that once you’ve brainstormed ways of making it worse, it’s easy to modify them into strategies for moving in the opposite direction. For example, if drinking coffee makes it worse, then maybe drinking some water is the better way. Or if getting angry at ourselves is worse, maybe taking a deep breath, or feeling sadness, is the better way.

Second, when the “ugh” is more intense, it’s paradoxically easier to give it more shape. Most “ugh” feelings disguise themselves in the vagueness and fog of the overall feeling. If the feeling gets more energetic, then we’re more likely to pick up on patterns we can work with.

Third, doing this exercise is pretty ridiculous, which brings in a much-needed element of humour to what typically feels like a super-serious, high-stakes situation. Remember, humour is a healthy coping mechanism!

Consciously trying to make “ugh” worse doesn’t work very well, which ironically makes it pretty safe! Remember, this feeling is mostly driven by unconscious processes, and consciousness doesn’t really add all that much to it. Go figure.

The Wisdom of Stuckness

The stuckness of “ugh” is usually an opening into the ways of getting unstuck. The only problem is, we need to actually feel what we’re feeling before we can remember our solutions. Making it worse actually makes the mind-body process the message of the “ugh”. Sometimes we just can’t skip that step.

So the next time you’re very stuck, try making it worse. It may not work all the time, but its effectiveness might surprise you.

Our Clients’ Voices are Inviolable

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There’s a common attitude that editors aim to standardize a writer’s words so they sound like everyone else’s. We don’t do this. Most editors don’t. Our main goal as editors is to amplify the writer’s voice.

This thought (or mission statement) is worth developing. Of course, we poke, prod, and tinker with your writing. But there are places it would be inappropriate to tinker with. The most fundamental, inviolable part of your writing is your voice.

A Writer’s Voice

At the most literal level, every human voice is unique, and voice is one of the best ways of identifying people. It’s similar with writing. A writer’s voice is a unique, consistent fingerprint across pieces, genres, and projects.

You might think this is just a metaphor, but a writer’s voice is one of the first things we notice as we edit. Even a choppy of unclear piece of writing has a certain consistency. Voice is like the chord progression of song: it can be the same in very different pieces, as nicely demonstrated in this video.

A writer’s voice is often hard to describe in words, but with some practice and exposure it’s unmistakeable. We’re confident that we can tell the voices of our various clients with a 3-4 sentence sample.

Signs of Voice

Your writing voice is what determines your writerly identity to a reader. Readers come to know your voice through superficial markers: word choice, emphasis, sentence length, the rhythm of the writing, and so on. We consider these aspects of writing fair game for thoughtful and tactful editorial prodding, since writers are less consistent about this level than about their fundamental voice. Our pokes and prods here concern matters of execution, and we typically give writers options about how to revise, since getting too prescriptive might accidentally make wrong assumptions.

There’s a deep connection between how you speak and how you write—your voice. Photo by CoWomen on Unsplash.

Creative writing puts voice front and centre, but voice matters in academic writing as well. Many academic writers assume that the goal of scholarly writing is to write like everyone else. While individuality is less of a norm in academic writing, voice matters a great deal. If a writer doesn’t bring out their voice, it makes a piece of academic prose sound like reporting on others’ work, instead of a contribution to a discipline.

Barriers to Strong Voices

Many things stop an authorial voice from shining through. Most obviously, if a piece is riddled with spelling and grammar errors, the voice becomes more nebulous. Individual sentences and paragraphs sometimes just don’t work—they may have issues with coherence or cohesion. Sometimes sentences and paragraphs are just too unique to a writer, showcasing the flow of thought in a way that’s hard to follow. Dealing with this is a matter of polishing.

Sometimes the problem is inherent to a piece of writing. Something hasn’t come together. The goal needs to be clearer. Or more research needs to happen. Dealing with this is a matter of strategizing.

There are deeper barriers. The most common one with writers is lack of trust in their authorial voice. We see this especially with grad students. Grad students are usually budding academics who are still unsure of their capacities. They’ve read enormous amounts of other people’s writing, and try their best to emulate those voices, sometimes at a disservice to their voices. Here our intervention looks more like coaching and dialogue.

More broadly, the deepest problem for authorial voices is self-doubt, which can only be addressed patiently and persistently, ideally in a supportive community.

Developing Voices

Our job is to both diagnose the problem and to suggest remedies that are appropriate to the problem. Helping a voice shine through depends on what the problem is. In the longest term, we work with writers to provide an interested reader with whom they can sharpen their skills. But we are always only developing what’s already there.

We respect the mystery and the drive behind an author’s voice, whatever it may be. It would be inappropriate for us to tell a writer how and why they write, or what they’re trying to convey. Our work, boiled down, is that we help the writer’s voice pop off the page, whatever it may be.

Practical Nudges for Attention while Writing

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This week, we’re applying the framework we’ve been developing around attention to writing tips. We think it’s at least a little helpful to use unfamiliar terminology to describe very familiar occurrences. Unpacking familiar things can open a space for reflection, intervention, and improvement.

A quick reminder: there are at least three ways to shift or nudge attention: feature-gestalt, transparency-opacity, and figure-ground nudges, going in both directions. These are ways in which we nudge our attention into different shapes. We can use the proverbial forest and trees to summarize it all. Shifting into gestalt/transparency/ground brings the forest to the fore, whereas shifting into features/opacity/figure brings the trees to the fore.

Transparency, Opacity, and the Tyranny of the Blank Page

Almost everyone knows the subtle paralysis of staring at a blank page or screen. Here, we should nudge attention from opacity (the page) to transparency (the intention to put some meaning on that page). We’re usually aware of both of the page and the intention, but it’s easy to get misattuned and put too much energy into noticing the page and not enough energy into following through on the intention. When we “see through” the page, there are fewer opportunities to trip ourselves up.

How do we nudge ourselves from opacity to transparency? We suggest that before you sit down to write, have an idea of the first thing you’re going to do. Just a small, definite thing: a phrase, a sentence, or even just the first word. This brings a certain transparent quality to the start of writing.

It might help to remember that writing isn’t typing. You want your brain-wave to be in writing (transparency), not in the mechanics of typing (opacity). Of course, typing is necessary for writing, but a lot of writers lose their flow when they make typos, and then double back to fix them. Both of us can’t stand a typo-ridden page, but if this doesn’t bother you, consider just flaunting it, like a jazz musician who leans into the “wrong” note. You’ll get what you meant from context 99% of the time when you re-read. This way, you get to stay in the transparency side of things, not lost in the opaque details.

This image induces the transparency/gestalt/ground attention. Photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash

Figure, Ground, and Inspiration

Losing momentum is a fact of life with writing. For example, you’re half-way through a paragraph and you just can’t seem to get through a sentence.

One nudge that might help in this situation is the figure-to-ground nudge. Let your attention kind of “space out” and notice what’s around you. Instead of being so fixated on the sentence, the writing device, or the text, notice your workspace, the walls, the items. Stare out the window and see what you can pick up in the world outside. This helps reset our attention a bit. It calms that spiralling feeling. It also, ideally, feeds that unconscious part of us where the words come from with a lot of new information.

This nudge is really just a micro version of the classic advice for all creative work: if stuck, go for a walk. When walks are not accessible, think of this attention shift as a mini-walk.

This image induces the opacity/figure/feature type of attention. Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Features, Gestalts, and Persistence

Other times when we get stuck, stepping back is not an option. In those cases, moving from noticing the features of a situation (details) to the gestalt (whole) might help. Instead of the sentence, notice the paragraph. Or instead of the paragraph, notice the flow of the argument, or the whole piece of writing and what it’s trying to say. It’s a subtle nudge, but it may be energizing. This one is easy to do in theory, but harder in practice than the figure-ground one. It’s subtler, but helpful.

In general, we think that the writing headspace has a certain forest-first, trees-second quality. Mastery of attention in writing depends on skillful fiddling. We can go too far in the trees direction sometimes. As we keep saying: attention is a mercurial thing. You shouldn’t force it unless absolutely necessary. Sometimes the exact reverse of these nudges is what’s needed, especially if we’re feeling scatterbrained. People are very different in terms of what works. There is no recipe for writing success besides knowing the ins and outs of your attention, feelings, energy levels, and the many quirks that we all have. Being aware of multiple ways to move attention helps. We hope you’ve found some of this useful.

An Editor Goes to a Writing Retreat

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One of us (Alex) is currently on a writing retreat for academics. Here’s the setup: we have a room full of early-, mid- and late-career academics, we’re all on a synchronized schedule of writing blocks, we’ve committed to being there daily for about 5 hours each day, there are ample snacks and coffee, there are occasional prompts, and there are breaks for informal discussion and socializing. We’re glad to be in the trenches with potential clients, so this week we’re sharing some field notes, like anthropologists doing participant observation.

Writing is Grim and Wonderful

Everyone in this group is highly skilled in the mental and physical discipline of writing. It’s inspiring to see how much work all of us can accomplish in this compressed retreat. Usually, the room is crackling with intensity and most people are still and focused. It’s a special sight.

Against this calm background, the subtle physical signs of struggle are striking. There are fits and starts, both individually and collectively. At any given time, people are staring off into space, stretching their bodies, fidgeting, or staring down something in the writing with knitted brow. It helps to notice this, since it both validates and dissipates the inner struggle. It’s universal. It’s just a part of the job!

Writers often over-fixate on the negative aspects of writing. But the overall vibe of the sessions is joyful and temporarily energizing. Even if what we produce can never quote match the vaulting ambition of the original idea, it’s a wonderful, almost magical thing to be able to communicate in these deep, extended ways. The perfect is the enemy of the good-enough. And there’s general consensus that reaching good-enough is great cause for celebration.

Solidarity in Struggle

Like this, but slightly less cozy and with more people.

There’s something very powerful about being stuck, looking up from the notebook or laptop, and seeing a highly-acclaimed, well-known academic doing the very same thing! It pierces through the hierarchy and incorrect projections that still pervade the system.

Our conversations tend to be focused around the struggle of writing. We’ve found we are all expert practitioners of the struggle to survive in a fast-paced, demanding environment that values nothing but productivity. How do we produce quality work in a system that cares only about quantity? The central tension of academic writing is finding a way to write a lot and to write really well.

Inner Doubt and Editor Brain

The main recurring theme of the banter and commiseration between writing sessions has been that writer brain is beset on all sides by editor brain. Almost every academic is constantly fighting a battle to do deep work without slipping into the relatively shallower work of fiddling with words, making structural changes, or chasing new ideas. (All of which are important, but aren’t really writing.)

Even incredibly sophisticated and productive writers—some of the senior academics here—seem to constantly find new ways to slip out of deep work. For most of us, wry humour about this tendency is the best coping mechanism, since humour holds the tension between real pain and the need to release the pain. If we go too far in either direction, either diving into the pain and beating ourselves up, or suppressing with positivity, we’re not dealing with the problem effectively.

Tools and Fuel

The physical tools of writing in the 21st century are: a laptop (universal), a notebook (almost universal), caffeine, and snacks. We’ve had some conversations about productivity technology. There’s no need to discuss laptops. There are some tablet-like tools designed for no distraction, but the reviews from power users are mixed, trending towards negative. Although some tools can help for specific problems, we probably can’t engineer our way out of the torrent of distraction. There’s no substitute for discernment.

We’ve also had some conversations about optimal brain food, but the consensus seems to be that when we’re optimizing writing output, there’s no room to optimize anything else. So snack away, hopefully on something that’s not too nutritionally empty! One surprising observation: mid- and late-career academics seem to drink less coffee than early-career academics—perhaps because academics tend to burn out their caffeine receptors during those early years of frantic productivity.

The Writing Space

The room we are writing in helps with the work. There’s contemporary art on the walls, some of which is pretty funny. This is very helpful. We’re also on the top floor of a building that foregrounds a bigger sky. These little cues are tools for mini-contemplation and quick re-focusing.

We hope you find this field report useful. It adds some on-the-ground detail to what we’ve been writing about over the the past little while. While most writers still work alone or in small groups, these elements are helpful in designing successful writing retreats. We’re working on rolling out something retreat-like at a smaller scale ourselves, so stay tuned!

The Zen of Writing (Part 5): When Motivation Disappears

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This week we’re reflecting, as we often do, on the fickleness of motivation. While it’s often possible to adjust to natural fluctuations of energy, sometimes motivation disappears as a package—we can’t do the task, can’t adjust, and sometimes can’t even reflect on what’s going on. In other words, just like sailors, sometimes we writers find ourselves becalmed despite our best plans—the doldrums wallop us!

How we think, feel, and act in those moments can make all the difference in getting back to writing, or at least feeling OK about ourselves and our fickle capacities. So let’s drill down!

Thought and the Doldrums

There are two ways in which our thought-patterns make the doldrums worse.

First, our cultural scripts around motivation are mostly broken. We typically think that we have more intentional control over their energy levels than we do. The ability to buckle down and power through usually only applies to very well-defined tasks. And well-defined tasks are the sorts of tasks that we can optimize so that we feel productive and in control. Writing is usually not a well-defined task, regardless of genre.

When writers uncritically accept cultural scripts that suggest that we “power through” the doldrums, we actively make things worse when we’re in them. Now we’re feeling bad about a natural drop in energy, and we end up using up more energy judging ourselves, which can lead to a downward spiral of badness, to put it technically.

That becalmed feeling: a bit peaceful, a bit irritating. Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

Second, the more meaningful a task is, the more likely we are to think that we should feel inspired and ride the inspiration wave to the end. This is mostly wrong. Inspiration is a temporary wind that fills our sails; most of the work of writing (or any complex task) is skilled, but repetitive crafting.

We have to work hard to remind ourselves that when we’re becalmed it’s not because (1) we’re undisciplined, or (2) not passionate about what we do. It takes patience and persistence to remember these two things.

Feelings and the Doldrums

Even if we have gotten past the unhelpful scripts and thoughts that make the doldrums worse, it still feels bad to be in them. We may be under totally legitimate time pressure. We may have a long to-do list. Or we may be distracted, stressed, harried, or underslept. This things needs to get done, and it’s not getting done. That’s a recipe for bad feeling.

Typically, we avoid the bad feeling. We do this in lots of ways: we push the feelings away, or we channel them into something else, or we rationalize them. These are all ways of playing into the utterly impossible idea that work shouldn’t feel bad sometimes.

The skillful way to address bad feelings is to bring in a bit of stillness. Usually, the task isn’t that hard, but we’ve made mountains out of molehills. A bit of stillness helps things reset and rejig at that level below conscious thought. Just a few breaths help sometimes. Sometimes a walk will help. Sometimes wiggling our bodies helps. Just expressing the stuckness might be enough. (We’re very fond of exclaiming “But I don’t want to!” at pretty regular intervals as we work.)

With stillness and expression we give some space for feelings to settle without pushing them away. If in this state you find that the feeling is totally legitimate, it might be time to give yourself a break. But feelings also lie. There’s no substitute for discernment, which is a learnable skill.

Actions and the Doldrums

Even assuming we’re approaching the doldrums with Zen-like insight into thoughts and feelings, the doldrums still present a vexing question: what do I do now?

We want to suggest that sometimes that very question is a trap. Humans have a general tendency towards acting rather than sitting and waiting for the next course of action to emerge. So, sitting with the doldrums is sometimes the best option.

There’s usually a reason why our motivation tanked in this situation, but usually we’re too active to recognize it. Sitting with the doldrums and not beating ourselves up can actually be a lovely moment of rest. And we think that’s the reason why the doldrums arise most of the time: our system needs rest. So we should give it, without indulging or judging. Just rest.

That’s really the take-home message today: rest! Resting is not opposed to meaningful and engaged work. In fact, it’s necessary for it, as long as we eventually get back to the task.

On Being a Writer and Draft -2

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Clients sometimes tell us that they are “not writers”. What they usually mean is that they’re not looking for suggestion on how to take their writing to the next level—they just need this text to get polished and to get done.

This common (and valid) attitude has gotten us thinking about what it means to be a writer. So this week we’ll nerd out about this question.

The Drafting Continuum

We think that whether someone identifies as a writer speaks to the earliest phase of the drafting continuum. A quick reminder: draft -1 is pre-writing, where your goal as a writer is just to get the juices flowing. At this stage you don’t even have to produce written text. Draft 0 is the stage where you’re producing text for yourself, not some imagined audience. Draft 1 is writing intended for someone else—a real or imagined audience. Every draft beyond the first gets scrutinized by increasingly stringent external standards.

Identifying as a writer (or not) represents different attitudes to draft -2—a stage that’s even more formless and nebulous than draft -1. (We recognize we’re stretching the definition of “draft” here, but bear with us. We think we’re going somewhere.)

Spontaneity and Draft -2

So, what’s draft -2? How can we have a stage even more upstream of writing than draft -1?

Draft -1 is all about taking goals out of the picture. In draft -1 we approach writing with an attitude of trust towards our unconscious mind and what emerges from there. But we all know that our unconscious mind is unreliable. For every writing idea that pops into consciousness seemingly from nowhere, there are probably multiple times when the unconscious just spins its wheels in familiar, boring patterns. Unconscious processes are complicated and contextual.

Whether the playfulness of draft -1 “works” depends on deep-seated habits of feelings, knowledge, and attention. Clearly, some people are full of ideas, insights, intuitions, and opinions, whereas others are more sedate on that front—at least outwardly. (The same person can be very different at different times and in different contexts.) We think that while all people contain books within themselves, the execution of those inner books ranges from easy to near-impossible.

The Uses of Draft -2

We think that “working” on draft -2 means accessing that unconscious place where ideas come from. This is psychologically complicated. Even draft -1 is outside of immediate conscious control. Draft -2 is even more so. “Working” on draft -2 is more like living life and waiting for inspiration to strike. Being on a walk, or doing something that allows ideas to percolate naturally is probably the closest model we have to that sort of work.

Draft -2 work: getting astonished. Photo by Alessio Soggetti on Unsplash

Draft -2 is, in some sense, the rest of life. It’s those spontaneous little moments that don’t lead anywhere but perhaps plant some seeds that may sprout much later in unexpected places. It’s conversations and sights and sounds that slowly, imperceptibly shape who we are. In an important sense, we “do” draft -2 when we seek our inspiration and joy in our lives. Draft -2 is the ground from which the “work” of draft -1 grows.

Writers and Non-Writers

When people talk about being or not being writers, we think they’re talking about their experience of draft -2. Is the slow percolation of ideas joyful or kind of annoying? It’s a question of values and priorities.

Most writers will agree writing is a joyful activity on some level. We think this is at least partly because writing is where some of the most meaningful little experiences we’ve gathered in life find their home—at least for writers. Non-writers find other outlets for this slowly accumulating joy. And people should absolutely play to their strengths, and we must all acknowledge that creation takes on many valid non-verbal forms.

The Existential Pleasures of Creativity

Here we run up against a basic mystery of life: why do we enjoy the extremely subtle pleasures of creativity? We have no special insight.

We do, however, have some insight into the writing process. We think that draft -2 is the logical conclusion of tracing the source of writing. We don’t think we can go any deeper into the formless, unpolished, spontaneous, and mysterious. What we do know is that every step that follows draft -2 amounts to getting a bit more structured and/or polished. With draft -1 you actively give yourself some space and time to explore these vague, formless intimations you’ve gathered. With draft 0, you’re constraining yourself further to putting words on a page. (Most people would say that writing begins here.) And with draft 1, you’re putting in some imagined or real external constraints on what you’ve produced. And so on.

As editors, we don’t really work with material that precedes draft 1. But that doesn’t stop us from being curious. The more we can imagine the lives of our clients, the more we can help.