Announcing Our First Writing Group for Grad Students

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We’re excited to announce that we’re launching our first writing group! It’ll be free throughout July as we gather feedback, and it’ll move to a subscription service in August charged at an affordable rate. If you’d like to sign up for July or to receive alerts for future groups, you can do so here.

Both of us have benefitted tremendously from writing groups as we finished our PhDs, so this group is targeted towards grad students who are in the writing stage.

The group will be organized around silent sociability, a concept that effectively summarizes our ethos. The idea is that just by being together and struggling with writing, we’re creating a supportive environment that counteracts some of the isolation and pressure of the graduate student writing experience.

That said, there’s no ideal way to structure a writing group. But, aside from the unsurprising fact that, according to the fledgling academic literature on writing groups, folks in writing groups most appreciate the uninterrupted writing time, there are also three other key elements, all of which we’ll incorporate into our writing groups: (1) peer interaction, (2) formal instruction, (3) a focus on emotions and mental health. We’ll adjust the balance between these over time, depending on the group’s needs.

Of course, writing groups are all based on the assumption that we all need uninterrupted writing time. And, by starting to run writing groups, we’re here to make getting this uninterrupted writing time as easy for you to get as possible. Here’s what you’ll get:

  • We’ll provide you with a weekly online space full of friendly strangers that will help you to get your writing done.
  • The schedule determines the writing blocks, so it’s out of your hands! We take on the responsibility of starting and ending the blocks. No need to motivate yourself!
  • To complement these blocks of uninterrupted writing time, we’ll have breaks where we’ll get to chat informally as peers about our struggles and successes.
  • We’ll have a discussion at the end of each block where we’ll also offer you a bit of formal instruction on topics that you’ve requested and on elements of academic writing in which we specialize, such as goal-setting, structural and copy editing, and on strategies for organizing your research.
Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Our approach to these groups is informed not only by our own experience in a variety of grad student writing groups during our PhDs, but also by the fledgling academic literature on writing groups, their mechanisms, their benefits, and on how to refine them. We’d be happy to share what we have learned both practically and theoretically—and you can see three key sources below if you want to dive in by yourself.

Finally, research shows that many of the barriers to writing for grad students come from emotional struggles. A writing group is not therapy, but we welcome discussion of the heavy toll that graduate writing can sometimes take. We’ll structure our discussions around this ever-present challenge if there’s need for it.

We hope this gives you a basic sense of what to expect from our writing groups. Again, if you’re interested, feel free to sign up for alerts here.

Further Reading:

Fegan, S. (2016). When shutting up brings us together: Several affordances of a scholarly writing group. Journal of Academic Language and Learning, 10(2), A20-A31.

Vacek, K., Donohue, W. J., Gates, A., Lee, A. S. J., & Simpson, S. (2021). Seeking balance within personal writing ecologies: a collaborative autoethnography of a doctoral student writing group. Studies in Continuing Education, 43(1), 104-118.

Wardale, D., Hendrickson, T., Jefferson, T., Klass, D., Lord, L., & Marinelli, M. (2015). Creating an oasis: some insights into the practice and theory of a successful academic writing group. Higher Education Research & Development, 34(6), 1297-1310.

Writers on the Struggle to Write Well

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Today we will step back and look at a selection of relevant quotes by working writers. We should treasure their candid takes about the process of writing.

Is Writer’s Block Even Real?

Many writers push back on the idea that there’s anything special about writer’s block. Many say it’s not real! We wouldn’t go that far—having written about it here, here, and here—but thinking this way seems to help at least some of them. Take, for instance, Patrick Rothfuss:

…who’s heard of writer’s block? I really don’t think it exists. Actually, no, sorry, I’m going to take that back: it does not exist. We’ll state it flatly. Sometimes, writing is super hard. Just like any other job. Or, if it’s not your job, sometimes it’s hard to do a thing even if it is your hobby. But no plumber ever gets to call in to work, and they’re like “Jake, I have plumber’s block,” you know? What would your boss say?! I have teacher’s block. I have accounting block. They would say “You are fired! You have problems and you are fired. Get your ass in here and plumb some stuff, Jerry!”

Rumaan Alam echoes and develops this idea:

Writer’s block is a fiction. That’s not to say I always feel like writing, or that I have some big idea percolating. I don’t know if you can force out good sentences or great ideas, but that doesn’t mean you cannot write. You can always write garbage; goodness knows, I write plenty of that. Sure, there are days I don’t feel like looking at my computer or picking up a pencil. Such days, I read; reading is inextricably linked with writing, so you can grade yourself on a curve and say that counts. And there are days I can’t even read—I have a day job, I have a family, I have a life, like anyone. But you never stop thinking, and thinking is a part of writing too. I’ll probably develop a case now that I’m saying this on the record but writer’s block is a delicious myth and nothing more.

The question of whether it’s real, for both of these writers, actually seems secondary to the question of attitude. Both of these quotes encourage us to view writer’s block as less solid than it appears to be. And we could all use more reminders of that!

The Morrison-Kafka Spectrum

Photo by Vipin Rajbher on Unsplash

Even if writer’s block isn’t especially solid, the havoc it wreaks on people’s lives falls on a spectrum. Let’s call this, a bit cheekily, the Morrison-Kafka spectrum. On one end we have writers like Toni Morrison whose thriving writing output came in the midst of a packed, often chaotic, busy, distraction-filled life:

Time is the problem, not the activities. Apparently it’s a facility that I have to tune out the chaos and routine events if I’m thinking about the writing. I never have had sustained time to write, long periods or a week away to do anything—I never had that. So I would always write under conditions that probably are unbearable when people think of how one writes.

On the other end we have writers like Franz Kafka whose struggle seemed to genuinely drain his life of meaning, as suggested in this excerpt from his recently published diary:

JANUARY 20, 1915: The end of writing. When will it take me up again?

JANUARY 29, 1915: Again tried to write, virtually useless.

JANUARY 30, 1915: The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

FEBRUARY 7, 1915: Complete standstill. Unending torments.

MARCH 11, 1915: How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing. It doesn’t come off. A page now and then is successful, but I can’t keep it up, the next day I am powerless.

As writers, in whatever genre and level of professionalism, we can expect to drift between the extremes of Morrison’s energetic tenaciousness and Kafka’s tormented passion. (We hope your struggle is not so heightened!)

How to Engage the Block

We’ve already talked about some strategies for dealing with writer’s block here. Danez Smith captures all that discussion concisely and beautifully:

I don’t believe in writer’s block. When I am experiencing what feels like it, I know I need to do one of a few things. The first would be to stop writing and to focus on absorbing art. When I’m not happy with my writing, I know I need to spend more time listening, looking, reading, touching, & tasting other people’s creativity to feed my own. The other thing I have to do is ask questions. (Why am I stuck? Is it the piece? Am I feeling balanced enough in other areas in my life to flourish in my writing? Am I hungry? Am I tired? Are the idea and the genre of what I’m working on agreeing with each other? Am I experiencing a road block or a directive to try something else?) Another option is to write through it, to write every ugly, horrible sentence that comes to mind and just work until I find something of value. I am a firm believer that every bit of writing is a necessary part of the process, and I’ve come to trust that on the other side of the “block” is something new and exciting waiting for me.

May the words of those who have been in the depths of the struggle serve to help you in your own inevitable struggles with this hard, hard task! If you’d like to peruse a varied selection of in-depth quotes about writer’s block, see here and here. Happy reading! May it help you get back to writing.

Writer’s Block (Part 3): Overwhelm

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We’ve explored writer’s block in previous posts (Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here). Put simply, writer’s block is a constellation of feelings and experiences that is driven by cultural scripts and expectations about writing. The more we buy into some of these scripts, the more likely we are to get stuck when things don’t go according to plan. And the stuckness can really wallop us!

Today we’ll focus on a small piece of this stuckness: overwhelm. This is the “ugh” factor—and it can be quite subtle. You can recognize it as a state of heightened indecisiveness, irritability, and distractibility. Overwhelm keeps us stuck, keeps us distracted by things that are normally easy to tune out, and may push us to seek distractions. These pieces feed off of each other: we might get stuck with writing, and five minutes later we’re doing something else without being sure of how we got there.

Writing really does feel this tangled sometimes. Photo by Lucas Kapla on Unsplash

Fight, Flight, and Freeze

How do we come out of overwhelm? Here we’ll use some language that comes from psychotherapy; make sure to take it with a grain of salt. Overwhelm is best thought of as a defense mechanism. When we perceive danger, we instinctively go into the “fight or flight” response. This much is well-known. Less well-known is another mode of this response: “freeze”. This happens when there’s perceived danger but where there is no obvious action to be performed in the situation. So the nervous system freezes—it basically shuts down all non-essential function.

Now, writing is (hopefully) neither a matter of life and death nor of obvious danger. But when we hit on hard patches while writing, we become more aware of the stakes of our writing project. And sometimes we just freeze: we shut down, and we lose the capacity to decide how to move forward.

This really sucks. But the good news is that these states typically don’t last very long. And we can learn ways to move through them.

Psychotherapy literature has one simple recommendation for moving through freeze states: just decide something. You don’t have to solve the problem. You just have to decide to do the next thing. Step back from the plan. Find the next, tiny decision. You’ll find that at some level you can still work. And getting in touch with that un-frozen part of yourself will make all the difference.

The Two-Minute Rule

Another insight from psychotherapy says that intense emotional states are actually quite fleeting. Even rage and terror start dissipating after about ninety seconds, provided we are not actively working ourselves up (which is all too natural sometimes). Overwhelm in writer’s block is nowhere near as intense as rage or terror, so our recommendation is: when blocked, try to find something to do for the next two minutes. You might find yourself much less stuck on the other end. Write a sentence. Talk to yourself about what you’re writing. Write a comment to yourself. Scribble on a piece of paper. Doodle. We have some suggestions in our fact sheet about getting unstuck. But what works for you will probably be pretty personal, and you’ll already have a good sense of what to try the next time you’re feeling overwhelmed and having trouble writing.

So, to summarize: overwhelm is subtle and hard to catch, but it doesn’t last, so long as you don’t play into it. Give yourself two minutes and try to stay in the game in whatever tiny way makes sense for you. You will probably find the stuckness breaking up.

Self-regulation (Part 2): Meeting Inspiration Half-way

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In the first part of this series, we started considering how to treat writing as craft and not as a mysterious and inspired gift. Because the sad truth is that inspiration is fickle. And while being in a flow state feels great, moments of inspiration are not reliable, nor are they sustainable no matter how much we might wish that they were. What arrives from the unconscious depths of our being often leaves just as dramatically and unexpectedly.

Getting inspiration and craft to play together well is hard! So, when we’re coaching clients, we work with each client to create conditions where they as writers can meet inspiration half-way.

But what does this mean in practice?

It means that we need to get clear on two things. First, we need a working understanding of inspiration. Second, we need to understand what we mean when we use metaphorical language to talk about moving towards inspiration.

Inspiration is an unconscious tendency to make connections that we tend to experience as ideas or feelings erupting into consciousness—as stuff that feels like it comes to us. It comes from the facts that we are patten-finding creatures at all levels. The state of “being inspired” is usually energetic, clear, and flow-like. By contrast, craft is a matter of habits and routines and it requires having a variety of tools in our writing toolboxes. Just like inspiration, craft is also largely unconscious, since it’s a sedimented pattern of habits of attention, language, motivation, and so on. Good craft ideally allows inspiration ways in and keeps its fires stoked for longer than would otherwise be the case.

Inspiration: the red patches against the background of steadily built habits. Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

So, what is it to meet inspiration? It is to get in the headspace to encourage it, stoke it, nurture it. This is a tricky task since too much effort deadens inspiration and not enough effort lets it slip away. In our metaphor, meeting inspiration all the way is to over-effort the process. And to meet inspiration less than half-way is to under-effort the process. Too much effort feels forced; too little effort leads to disorganization; inspiration doesn’t like either of those extremes.

Practically speaking, meeting inspiration half-way means making space in which you work patiently and persistently for inspiration to arise, but in that space you are able to work even if inspiration doesn’t arise. Many writers, regardless of genre, place great value on regular blocks of uninterrupted writing time. This insistence is opposite to the social image of writers as unpredictable or bohemian, but it is the root from which so much grows. During this time, writers try to find that union of craft and inspiration.

What happens inside that space is quite varied. Some writers like to start with some sort of ritual to get into the appropriate headspace. Some writers work hard to break down big tasks into very, very small ones. Some writers split the time into writing and editing or research blocks, since the two usually call on different skill-sets. Some writers find ways of procrastinating that still keeps them in the space. We are sure that at least some writers do very silly things during their hard-earned writing time!

There is much more to say here, so stay tuned as we develop this series, but for now, we can say that meeting inspiration half-way is hard because inspiration is nebulous. The best way to ferret out inspiration is to give yourself protected, uninterrupted time to experiment with finding the right balance of effort and ease, of craft and inspiration. What you do during that time demands experimentation and creativity, since people’s brains work differently. What do you think you would do if you had (let’s say) two hours every day to try to write?

The Zen of Writing (Part 3): Gracefully Overwhelmed Work

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Writing, in almost all its forms, is creative work. One of the most common pitfalls of creative work is overwhelm. It arises for many different reasons. Maybe we are overly attached to an idea and we hold on to making it perfect even as we grow to understand that there is a ton of complexity under the surface. Maybe we are simply spending most of our time doubting ourselves. Maybe we got some difficult feedback. Or maybe we are just exhausted for external reasons.

Sometimes the insides of our minds are like this desk.

Regardless of what caused the overwhelm, the tried-and-true way of dealing with it is to just do something. Overwhelm is a state of paralysis, one which can build on itself rapidly. Once it crosses a certain threshold, overwhelm can dull our spontaneity, flexibility, and the ability to step back from the situation. If we think of performing an action, no matter how small, as a form of intentional mental movement, that movement counters the tendency to freeze up. Typically, states of overwhelm feel insurmountable, but they aren’t really insurmountable. It only takes a little bit of intentional action to get the mind moving again.

Our fact sheet on getting unstuck has some in-the-moment strategies for nudging yourself into action. Today we will focus on a related attitude: the Draft 0 mindset. Draft 0, as the name suggests, comes before Draft 1. Draft 0 is for you and you only. It can be written in an unpolished a way as fits your brain. The goal of working with a Draft 0 is to get words on the page–any words! In deciding to not share this draft with anyone, you are effectively stopping the constant background chatter of the self-critical editor brain. This is excellent. You may feel that energy has been unlocked.

Draft 0 allows you to dump all the formal, polished rules of writing and prose construction. Go ahead: write those run-on sentences, those redundant sentences, those sentence fragments! Go ahead and just dump your thoughts onto the page in search of something actionable. Go ahead. The Draft 0 mindset is similar to doodling, which has itself been shown to be quite beneficial in getting us to stay on tasks that may be difficult. So doodle with your words!

In cases of really bad overwhelm, sometimes even Draft 0 is inaccessible. In that case, we suggest taking yet another step back, to Draft -1! Write in point-form, or with shapes, or with swoops and loops. Change your context from a keyboard to a piece of blank paper. Take the doodling from a metaphor to literal doodling! Pace and wiggle if your situation allows it. This may help. And then, when you are ready, resume with Draft 0.

You may be pleasantly surprised with the results. And even if you aren’t, you will find that you probably broke through the paralysis of overwhelm, which is a great gift to your mind and body. You will have given yourself a taste of what it feels like to work well under bad conditions. This is essential for anyone’s writing journey.

Self-Editing Strategies: Structural Editing, Content Editing, and Copyediting

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Ah, editing. Nobody really likes editing their own writing. While writing can be occasionally gratifying, and the products of editing are certainly rewarding, the process of editing is at best neutral and at worst actively painful. So let’s talk about the pain!

There is a big difference between self-editing and editing done by someone else. The former is more accessible, but the latter is much more effective. This is because self-editing is really difficult! We all like writing more than editing, and it takes a lot of training and practice for us to become able turn off our attachment to our own writing in order to cut, develop, or rearrange the material. So, the recommendation is to get someone else to edit your work.

That said, self-editing is better than nothing. So let’s talk about self-editing strategies. This discussion is based on our fact sheet on the writing process, which you should peruse for more details.

An editor in their natural habitat. Photo by Kiyun Lee on Unsplash.

Editing is daunting, so let’s break it down into three layers: structural editing, content editing, and copyediting. (There are many ways to break down editing, but this will do as a rough approximation.)

Structural editing is the most high-level part of editing. It focuses on the overall structure of the piece of writing. The questions at the forefront of your mind during a structural editing are: (1) what is the main point of this piece?, (2) is the main point salient?, (3) does the support of the main point flow naturally?, (4) are there too many digressions and tangents?

If you find yourself at a loss during a structural edit, there are two main strategies for getting unstuck. First, try a reverse outline. This works very well for some, but not for others. (Alex swears by them; Megan not so much.) Reverse outlines tend to cue our attention to the structural level, and so make structural thinking and rearranging easier. Second, you can try working backwards. Most people’s first drafts are messy because we quite naturally work out and refine our ideas as we are writing. This is great, but it means that we tend to bury the most important parts of the writing towards the end, or somewhere in the depths of our paragraphs. So sometimes going in reverse order–from conclusion to introduction–helps unstick some things.

Content editing is maybe more familiar. It is editing at the line and sentence level. Assuming that you’re clear on what you’re writing, the goal of content editing is to remove ambiguity, clear out needless verbiage, and generally punch up the flow and grabbiness of your prose.

There are many, many strategies for content editing your own writing. You can step back and talk through a paragraph to yourself (or to someone else). You can underline two or three key words in the paragraph and see if you need to reorganize anything. The bottom line of almost all of them is to introduce a little bit of chaos to how you’re moving your attention at the sentence-to-sentence level.

Copyediting is what most people associate with editing. This is the final layer of editing, the polish. This kind of editing looks for grammatical problems, typos, spelling errors, consistency of terms, and so on. Self-copyediting is the hardest because you are too familiar with the meaning of what you’ve written, and so sometimes we miss these less salient bits of the surface form of the writing. The best strategy to make your copyedit more effective is to work backwards, paragraph by paragraph. As with the content editing, the idea is to introduce some manageable distance from your own writing as you edit.

We hope these tips will help you be better self-editors. Getting the balance between editor brain and writer brain is hard, which is being an editor is a viable occupational choice.

The Zen of Writing (Part 2): SMART Goals

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Last time we looked at writing through the aspirational lens of achieving flow. And we saw that in order to have a chance at flow in writing, we need to set SMART goals. And to set SMART goals consistently, we need some self-regulation skills. So, we find that a simple task (“just do it”) breaks down into something daunting (“have better self-regulation skills”), which is not all that helpful.

So let’s forget, for the moment, about the big picture. Today, let’s drill down into SMART goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, and timely. Obviously, what counts as a SMART goal depends on context. Writing a blog post, writing an email, and writing a dissertation are very different beasts. Maybe the better way to think about SMART goals is in relative terms. Relative to the goal you have in mind, can we make our new goal more specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Specificity

Specificity captures the idea that a writing goal should never be vague. A specific goal lets you feel whether you are progressing towards it. For any writing project, no matter the size, “finish the project” is never specific enough. To get specific, you need to be clear on some aspect of how you are to finish the project. You have to scale down your ambition. Sometimes, your goal is to finish the paragraph. Sometimes it is to finish the sentence.

Measurability

By measurability we don’t necessarily mean something you can quantify–although in some cases and for some personality types that may make the difference. The basic idea behind measurability is: can I frame the goal so that at any moment, no matter what is going on, I can have a sense of feedback? Measurement here is implicit, which is all you need in most writing situations. You measure progress by the paragraph, by the word, by the sentence, or by the draft. It is up to you. Our information sheet on getting unstuck in writing has some reframing strategies that might help you zero in on goals that feel measurable to you.

Achievability and Realism

I think that these two terms are essentially interchangeable, and were probably separated in order to make the acronym work. (SMAT and SMRT just doesn’t have the same ring to it!) Once again, the basic idea is you want to be able to finish the goal so as to afford feedback. It is better to finish a bunch of small goals than to struggle with a few big ones. Accomplishing a goal feels good, no matter the scale, and that good feeling, no matter how small, is motivating and affords some amount of sustainability in our writing.

Timeliness

This feature makes the goal relevant to the context in which you are writing. how much time do you have? Lots of uninterrupted time or sporadic bursts of time? How energetic are you? What counts as timely will differ according to a bunch of dimensions, but the main ones are probably other tasks you need to accomplish and your energy levels. A deeply focused revision of your draft is not timely if you are being constantly interrupted. Similarly, a sprint to finish a project may not be timely if you are feeling sick.

At their most basic, SMART goals are an interrelated package. Specificity depends on context, and is related to realism/achievability. The more realistic and specific a goal is, the more measurable it is, and the more easy it is to sense if it is timely. All the pieces feed back into each other, so as we work with SMART goals, we get much more feedback on our process than we do when the goal is hazy or ill-defined. So, for all those reasons, it is a very good idea to break down big goals into small ones. As always, practice will make it easier. And if you are not the sort of person who likes lists of features, the bottom line is easy to remember: when stuck, simplify your goals.

The Zen of Writing (Part 1): Flow

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Writing should be fun, but it seems impossible to make it fun. Last week we touched on some negative aspects of writing: the inevitable stuck places, the frustrations, the overwhelm. This week we’ll explore the flip side: the goal of overcoming all that and attaining the enjoyable, Zen-like state of flow!

The frustrations of writing and the flow of writing are intimately connected. Without a clear picture of what the goal is, all the struggle will seem meaningless. And without naming and exploring the struggle, talking about the goal will come across as preachy and unrealistic. As we see it, achieving the goal of flow in writing (and in life) is a slow, long process of stripping away old habits, developing new habits, and attending carefully to the stories we tell about both. There are few shortcuts. But as we become more mature writers, we grow more capable of diagnosing our stuck places and getting unstuck.

The Flow State

So let’s talk about flow in a bit more depth. The concept was named and popularized by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (what a name!) to describe a very general state of attention and energy: one in which we feel “in the zone”–deeply engaged with the task. In the flow state, self-consciousness reduces or disappears, the sense of time passing can be warped, the sense of self may be reduced or fall away, and people report a deep sense of harmony and enjoyment of the task. Flow is attained in all sorts of tasks by people in all walks of life.

What is conducive to attaining flow? Three things. First, the task must have clear goals. Second, we need immediate feedback about how well we’re doing. Third, there needs to be an appropriate balance between skills and challenges. Inappropriate balance between skills and challenges leads to boredom (if the task feels too easy) or anxiety (if the task feels too hard), as we can see on this (somewhat busy) chart:

Flow and Writing

How does this map of flow and its factors apply to writing?

First, as we write we can get better and better at having clear goals for ourselves. This usually means implementing SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. SMART goals make it more likely for the writing task to be conducive to flow. Of course, implementing SMART goals presupposes some self-regulation skills, and if we are realistic, we all lack some part of a full self-regulation skill set. So we need to be honest with ourselves at the outset as a condition of getting better at SMART goals.

Second, immediate feedback is usually not attainable in writing tasks. If our goal is to write a good piece, and the goodness of the piece is determined in part by other people’s feedback, then there’s no possibility of immediate feedback. But even here we can reframe to find some immediate feedback. If our goal is to write 500 words, that’s the sort of thing that affords immediate, internal feedback. Sometimes the goals need to be tiny, like “write the next sentence”. There’s a whole skill set here in turning off our critical, editorial tendencies and just getting some words on a page.

Third, the balance between skills and challenge is something we can intervene on. For very hard or overwhelming tasks we can implement SMART goals to break them down to sub-goals, and the felt challenge of the task should decrease. Which will make us more likely to achieve flow. In the medium-to-long-term we of course deliberately practice our skills so that we can rise to ever-tougher challenges.

Like all quick rundowns, this is more of a map than a specific skill set. But having the map might be helpful as you navigate your many diverse writing struggles!

References:

Csikszentmihaly, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row.

Writer’s Block (Part 2)

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Writing is hard and will always be hard. Writer’s block will always be lurking in the wings. When it comes, it comes as a big pile of interrelated feelings. Our fact sheet on getting unstuck in writing has some practical suggestions for dealing with the feelings when it’s necessary.

But what is going on in this big pile of interrelated feelings, really? We think there are a few pieces at play if we really drill down. A caveat before we begin: take all this with a grain of salt. Part of the process for developing our understanding is writing about writer’s block and discussing it. Come along with us as we explore as we pry open a little piece of the scripts that we internalize!

One piece of the script is an expectation of flowing, frictionless productivity. Some parts of us expect writing to be a deep flow of brilliant thoughts: ideas and words tripping over each other beautifully to generate precious insights and thoughts with every phrase, sentence, transition, paragraph. We like states of flow, where our skills and the challenges we face are finely balanced. Expecting writing to feel like this more than 5% of the time is unrealistic, to put it lightly. And so as we sit down to write something new, or to continue a piece, we are confronted by the plain fact that it doesn’t feel good. We may be anxious, or rushed, or indecisive. The task may be too much for our skills, and so we feel anxious. Or the task might be over-learned and mundane, in which case we feel bored. Or the feeling may oscillate rapidly. Or, frustratingly, we might feel both bored and anxious! And so we may take much, much longer to get our heads in the game, and so produce the writing slowly. And this feeds back to the feeling of being stuck.

Of course, acknowledging all that does little to change the internalized script. So we need to internalize an alternative script, again and again, at the bodily level.

Here’s the script. Most writing is craft: the patient and repetitive application of habits that we’ve learned. Most writing is mundane: the arrangement of marks on paper or screen to convey some shadow of the thoughts in our heads. Thinking is easy but vague; writing is more precise, and for that reason, harder. So much thought is actually the expectation of precision: a half-baked idea is exciting because in thought we can skip past the effortful task of executing the idea. Writing is closer to reality. It forces an honest confrontation with the vagueness and half-bakedness of our precious ideas, an honest confrontation with our tendencies to avoid work, or to expect that ideas can spring forth fully formed like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.

And most writing feels mildly tiring. Only occasionally can we look back on what we’ve done and get energized or excited. The good news is that if you let the writing sit for a day or two, you will forget the pain of crafting it. So let us give thanks for forgetfulness!

To deeply internalize the two previous paragraphs takes patience and gentle persistence. Try to find one minute in a day to reflect on these truths, and you may find writer’s block appears a little less powerful. We will explore how to do this in follow-up posts.

Announcing the Academic Coaching side of our business!

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Clarity Doctors is officially launching our academic coaching services! As academic coaches, our main focus is on graduate students in the late stages of their programs–that dreaded phase where all that remains is the dissertation. We’ve spent the last few months working with clients who have helped us beta test our coaching practices, and they’ve certainly helped us at least as much as we helped them! Here’s what they’ve said about working with us:

Megan and Alex bring an approach to editing and academic coaching founded in doing justice to both their clients’ struggles and their ideas. Their combined expertise enables them to work with writers whose interests and specializations are diverse and transdisciplinary. As someone who has struggled to overcome years of criticism and to find their way back to the passion and joy of writing and thinking again, it has been both a relief and a gift to have my thoughts and struggle held so patiently and expertly by them. From the nuts and bolts of writing, to the struggle to overcome conceptual impasses, Alex and Megan can help you to identify how to move forward with kindness, skill, and tremendous insight. Highly recommended.

Kaitlin, Ph.D. student

Megan and Alex are both very qualified academics. They have been supporting me as a writing coach to think beyond a box and be creative. They give very practical advice and work with you holding your hands. Megan is a very good english language editor as well. I am very happy with their work.

Sujata, Ph.D. student

Our Approach

Our academic coaching approach is based on support, community, and confidence: we’re here to support our clients, who are all extraordinarily capable human beings doing very complex and difficult projects; we’re part of a broader community of support for the client, since writing and research are inherently communal; and we’re here to help our clients build their confidence and sense of their own efficacy. Since graduate programs have myriad ways of eroding people’s confidence through imposter syndrome, etc., we offer our clients support that really feels like support to them, each individually, to help remind them that they really are extraordinarily capable human beings!

We assume that folks in graduate programs know how they work best and what they need. We are committed to treating our clients as the experts on their mind-bodies, their specialized knowledge, and their skills. We see our work as helping to bring out our clients’ strengths and to help them develop the confidence that graduate programs undermine for many structural reasons. We are, of course, experts on editing, too, and we come prepared with our own skill-set for navigating academic projects, but our relationship with our clients is based on dialogue. We are here to help set up a structure within which our clients can overcome the barriers to their progress.

Fact Sheets and General Framework

To this end, our academic coaching page has two free fact sheets that anyone can use for self-help. The first sheet gives an overview of strategies for getting unstuck while writing, which draws on Alex’s cognitive science background. The second sheet gives a four-tiered approach to writing clearly and effectively, and it draws on Megan’s experience with teaching Effective Writing. Perhaps some of the information on our fact sheets is all that you need to get unstuck. If so, great! Our fundamental mission is to help others suffer less than we suffered!

The two fact sheets also give a general framework for how we work with our clients. In our initial meeting, we’ll go through these sheets to identify trouble spots and areas for support or improvement. Breaking down the amorphous difficulty of graduate school writing and research into more specific problems is always a good idea, and these fact sheets give us a research-based structure around which to build our plan for supporting you. Beyond this general framework, though, our relationship with each client is unique and guided by the specifics of their life.

If you feel stuck, feel free to reach out to info@claritydoctors.com, or if you know someone who might benefit from our academic coaching services, please pass along our contact info to the hard-working graduate student in your life! Getting a Ph.D. is an inherently difficult process, and we are here to help make it somewhat less difficult.