In the fall of 2024, I led a workshop for postdocs on how to engage undergraduates in the face of so much competition for their attention. Afterward, when we met for lunch, the postdocs quickly turned the conversation to their own struggles with distraction. Some had read my books and wondered, less about their content, than what it took to get them written: How did I do it? Did I have some secret for writing productivity?
Surprised by the shift in conversation, I replied: “Part of it is that I just like to write. Even if nobody were publishing my work, I would still write.” Then I added, trying to be more helpful: “However, I struggled a lot with my writing in the past three years, and what really helped me get on track were candles, classical music, and closed tabs.”
As a productivity technique, that sounds both oddly specific and fairly enigmatic. But the underlying strategy is simple: Find writing rituals that work for you. The particulars will vary from writer to writer, but the right mix of routines and artifacts can support or renew your writing focus when it has been dispersed to the many winds of academic and personal life.
I went looking for a new mix myself after a recent stretch of writer’s block that had its origin in a medical trauma that I’ve already chronicled. In the fall of 2021, I spent two months on life support in the wake of a viral infection in my heart, a heart transplant, and a stroke during the surgery.
What I haven’t shared, up to now: I was moving toward a book deal with a new publisher in the weeks before I became sick, and the contract offer finally arrived in my inbox when I was flat on my back in the ICU, under heavy sedation and being kept alive by multiple machines. Fortunately, one of my brothers, a fellow academic, was monitoring my emails and knew that someone should probably respond to baffled inquiries from my agent and publisher asking why I hadn’t signed my book contract yet.
The heart transplant went swimmingly — except for the in-surgery stroke in the Broca area of my brain, which rendered me completely unable to speak or write after I woke up from anesthesia. Fortunately, my aphasia was not permanent. I gradually recovered most of my powers and was able to resume writing my Chronicle column — slowly, painstakingly — three months after the transplant and stroke.
All of which explains why I was struggling to get started on the book I had promised the publisher. By that point, I had published seven books and I already had a chapter outline in hand for the eighth, but post-surgery, I wrote at what felt like a snail’s pace. Every sentence I put on the page contained errors: missing words, doubled words, typos. Every draft I wrote had to be reviewed and corrected line by line, and then reviewed and corrected again.
As I strained to keep going on the draft, I worried that my medical trauma had permanently diminished my academic powers. Was I still the kind of person who could write books? Finishing this one, I feared, would take me 10 years.
Spoiler alert: I did finish. The irony is that it’s a book about writing, which is new territory for me since most of my books have been about college teaching. Write Like You Teach is due out in May. The book’s key argument is that, as academics, we can use our classroom experiences to learn how to write more effectively for wider audiences.
Instead of assuming that public writing involves developing some mysterious set of literary skills, we can embrace the notion that readers of nonfiction books are learners, much like the ones in our classes. Just as we understand how to adjust our teaching to the students in the room — in introductory courses versus graduate seminars — we can learn to pitch our writing to various audiences, from fellow professors in our field to readers of our hometown news outlets.
It was in my research for the book, reading and rereading a host of writing guides, that I was reminded of the power of work rituals.
One of the texts I revisited was Helen Sword’s Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, for which she interviewed academics to explore the patterns and processes that enabled them to get their writing done. I wrote about her book in July 2021, with the effects of Covid still in the acute phase. The isolation of the pandemic had stolen my usual writing spot from me, but I had been inspired by her chapter on the power of place to reclaim a productive setting in my home.
As I reread Sword’s book, I remembered that I had absorbed a second core idea from the chapter: not just that the places where you write can inspire you but that so, too, can the rituals you use to transition into writing mode. A repeatable pattern of actions that shift you from the chaotic world of email, social media, collegial or family interruptions, personal worries, and other pressing work into a mindset in which you can concentrate and write.
The power of place and of rituals, Sword wrote, are often interconnected: “If you take your laptop to the university library every morning and write for an hour while sitting at a desk with a view of a courtyard garden, you are likely to get ‘into the flow’ more quickly each time you go to that same spot to write.” The library and the courtyard view matter, but so does the ritual of walking to that spot and setting up your laptop and materials. Performed often enough, those routines will prepare your distractible brain to ease into the hard work of focusing on your task.
Her argument resonated with me because I have made a parallel point about teaching: In a series on “Small Changes in Teaching,” I wrote about how to use the first five minutes of class to shift students’ attention to course content. Any student who has taken a class with me in the past 25 years knows the instructions for my favorite opening ritual: “Take out a half-sheet of paper and write a one-paragraph response to the following thought question about the reading. Write for 10 minutes, and then we’ll discuss.” While the students settle in and write, I stroll around the room getting my thoughts together.
The traumatic rupture of my normal writing processes had made me forget the effectiveness of ritual as a trigger for focus. Once reminded, I was able to return to writing habits that had served me well in the past, and fulfill my book contract.
So what are my rituals? They begin 10 minutes before a scheduled writing session, which could last anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. I make a cup of tea and bring it into my office. I light a candle, preferably one with a pleasing scent, but that matters less than striking the match and seeing the flames spring to life. I turn on my audio speaker and connect to the local classical music station, and the soothing voice of my favorite host. Finally, I bid farewell to all of the open tabs on my screen except my word-processing program. By the time those rituals have elapsed, I find myself ready to write.
Of course, none of those things have any special power. The point of Sword’s book is that there are no writing places, rituals, habits, or practices that are common to all successful writers. You’ve probably heard the oft-repeated advice to make writing a daily habit. From Sword’s interviews and surveys with more than 1,000 academic writers, however, she found that only 17 percent wrote every day.
There’s no telling what will work for you, so take every piece of writing advice you read with a grain of salt, mine included. But I share my experience with rituals in service of offering a simple productivity tip that might eliminate whatever barrier is preventing you from writing in this moment.
If you don’t have a writing ritual — both a place and a transition process — develop one that pleases you. If you do have one, but it’s not working and you’re not writing, try something new. I have every expectation that, a year from now, if someone asks about my writing ritual, I won’t remember that I used to light candles and make tea, because instead I eat a chocolate bar before I start writing, or take a shower or do the dishes or walk the dog.
In fact, now that I mention it, I have been meaning to incorporate more chocolate into my diet. There’s always room for one more ritual, isn’t there?
