> Skip to content
FEATURED:
  • The Evolution of Race in Admissions
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
ADVERTISEMENT
Advice
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Show more sharing options
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Copy Link URLCopied!
  • Print

The Hardest Part of Writing Is Restarting

By  Rebecca Schuman
February 15, 2019
Scholarly Productivity
iStock

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a new series, “Are You Writing?” Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

It should be straightforward enough for you to stay consistently productive as a scholar as long as you have the right plan:

  • Start your projects far in advance.
  • Work in short bursts on most days, and at a reasonable time.
  • Don’t get bogged down trying to read (or reread) everything ever written on your topic.

If only life worked that way. Instead, reality usually intervenes, and all of our neat-and-tidy plans get shot straight to the Bad Place. Then, suddenly, it’s the first day of a new term, and we realize we haven’t cracked our research project in … oh, sweet merciful deities, a long, long time.

We’re sorry. Something went wrong.

We are unable to fully display the content of this page.

The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net.

Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, or subscribe.

If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a new series, “Are You Writing?” Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

It should be straightforward enough for you to stay consistently productive as a scholar as long as you have the right plan:

  • Start your projects far in advance.
  • Work in short bursts on most days, and at a reasonable time.
  • Don’t get bogged down trying to read (or reread) everything ever written on your topic.

If only life worked that way. Instead, reality usually intervenes, and all of our neat-and-tidy plans get shot straight to the Bad Place. Then, suddenly, it’s the first day of a new term, and we realize we haven’t cracked our research project in … oh, sweet merciful deities, a long, long time.

When I work with academic clients as a writing and productivity consultant, I often tell them the hardest part is getting started, but that’s not entirely true. The real hardest part of a research project is restarting it after a long absence. Amid loose ends and notes that no longer make sense, one also must navigate the minefield of self-loathing and disappointment (not to mention a cranky editor or two).

Well, in the words of a scholar much greater than I: “You must chill.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Before you can go back to the project, you have to heal thyself (perfunctorily, at least). Returning to an abandoned piece of research without sufficiently dealing with what made you retreat in the first place is like getting back together with an ex without discussing what led to the breakup. Ask yourself two questions:

  • Are your demons primarily work-related? Things like: overpreparing for class, getting bogged down in committee work, taking on too much work, dealing with disruptive students or academic-dishonesty issues, or receiving hostile critical feedback.
  • Or are your issues mostly personal? Things like: a health crisis, the death of someone close to you, a divorce, or the delightful but productivity-obliterating arrival of a child (or two).

With an honest assessment in hand, you can determine what you can resolve and what you can’t. In the case of deeply personal crises such as deaths and illnesses, the only real tincture is time. What you can and should do, however, is give yourself a break. You, your life, your health — are more important than anything else. If the tenure clock is running, you may be able to stop it for a semester or a year. And if you’ve already got tenure or aren’t ever going to get it, then take advantage of that fact and remove the pressure for now.

In the case of less-dire situations, especially overwork, you have quite a bit more room to maneuver. Create some serious boundaries for how much time and effort you will devote to class prep and grading. Because guess what? Spending too much time on that isn’t the mark of a great pedagogue. It’s the mark of a procrastinator with poor time-management skills.

The cardinal rule of college instruction is that course prep will expand to fill the time you give it — so don’t give it a disproportionate amount of time. If you teach a two-hour graduate seminar on Mondays at 3, then don’t start prepping for it in earnest until Mondays at 9 (presumably, you’ve already read the material at some point in time, because you assigned it).

ADVERTISEMENT

If you have a squillion papers to grade, use my time-tested rubric method: Every student gets a rubric and a grade, and anyone who wishes for detailed comments about a paper, and a line-by-line reading, is welcome to get one during office hours or by appointment. No student who actually wishes for your detailed feedback goes without it. You’re a professor, not a martyr.

Now that you’ve made some peace with the destroyers of your time — and thus created a welcoming psychological space for returning to your writing project — it’s time to create the physical space for it in your work day.

In my November column, I introduced the primary strategy that has worked for me and my clients: Carve out 25 minutes of laser focus on your research and writing, one to three times during your work day. But for some stalled projects, especially those that have grown monstrous in your absence from them, even devoting that much time can seem too daunting.

This is where the Daily 15 comes in. The 15-minutes-a-day technique is tried-and-true: As a graduate student, I remember reading about it in Joan Bolker’s iconic Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. That 1998 tome is now rather dated, but the 15-minute advice is sound.

ADVERTISEMENT

To illustrate the importance of the Daily 15, I like to use a visceral metaphor. When I was a kid, I had to get one of my molars pulled before the adult tooth was due to grow in, and my dentist put in something called a “spacer” to keep my other teeth from migrating together in the interim. When my adult molar finally came in, there was space for it to do so without turning me into a snaggletooth monster and costing my parents a fortune in orthodontia.

Believe it or not, the same space-saving principle holds true for your research: Even if you don’t have the inspiration or the big smart thoughts right this second (due to the aforementioned demons of all sorts), you need to cultivate and fiercely maintain the physical and psychic workspace for the moment when you are ready (which may be sooner than you think).

So if you’re blocked from an old project that’s haunting your thoughts, take a mere 15 minutes — every day, without fail — to do something, anything, even tangentially related to it. Jot down a list. Read three paragraphs of an article. Free-write a thesis statement, even if it’s not very good yet. Edit a page or two.

What you do in those 15 minutes a day doesn’t have to be sequential or masterful or even make a lot of sense. It’s about reintroducing your research project into a schedule that has heretofore crowded out that work.

ADVERTISEMENT

There’s a pervasive mythology about academic scholarship — that it has to be the product of some sort of inspiration bordering on magic, and that if you have the brilliance, that’s all that really matters.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Brilliance (or something close to it) is, I’d say, about 3 percent of creating a publishable article or monograph. The other 97 percent is patience and the stamina to be able to work, over and over, on something for which the end might not be in sight for a while. (Some people call that sort of work “drudgery,” but my New Year’s resolution is to be more positive.)

In short, the answer here is to stop waiting for inspiration and start training yourself to work consistently, no matter how you feel.

Once you’ve committed space in your workday to an abandoned project, start filling your Daily 15 with slightly more regimented tasks. Then, eventually, isolate one to three days a week when you have a bit more time, and expand the 15 minutes to 45 — and then, if you’re lucky enough to have that kind of time, to 90 minutes. By now you might even be cooking on the project, and wish you had more time to work on it.

There is rarely a large academic project that goes off without real life interrupting it. Interruptions are simply unavoidable. But with a little bit of honesty, a set of reasonable expectations, and a few relatively simple techniques, those interruptions don’t have to become work-killing demons.

ADVERTISEMENT

Rebecca Schuman received her Ph.D. in German from the University of California at Irvine in 2010. She is an essayist, translator, consultant, and author, most recently, of Schadenfreude, A Love Story. “Are You Writing?” is a series on scholarly productivity. Her website is Academic Adjacent, and her Twitter handle is @pankisseskafka.

A version of this article appeared in the March 22, 2019, issue.
Read other items in this Are You Writing? package.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Scholarship & Research
Rebecca Schuman
Rebecca Schuman is a professor pro tempore of literature at the University of Oregon’s Clark Honors College, as well as an instructor of creative writing in the Stanford Continuing Studies program. She received her Ph.D. in German from the University of California at Irvine in 2010 and has been an academic-writing coach and productivity specialist since 2013. Ask her a question on academic writing or productivity via Twitter, Facebook, or email. She is on Twitter @pankisseskafka.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

Related Content

  • A New Series on Scholarly Productivity: ‘Are You Writing?’
  • The Worst Writing Advice in the World
  • Don’t Spend Your Holiday Break Writing
  • Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
    Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
  • The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
    The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
    Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
    Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2023 The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin