As I've alluded to in a previous post, I am absolutely terrible when it comes to the process of academic writing. It's a painful, constipated endeavor that often leads me to incessant frustration and self-loathing: I ought to know how to do this by now, I think. Why is it always this agonizing? (Why, by contrast, is it so fun and relatively easy to write these little blogs?)
One of my colleagues, Marah Gubar, recently went to a writing retreat and she shared with me a complete reframe of the writing process that I'd love to share with you, mostly since it has made an enormous difference to me. (For the curious, the retreat she attended is called Inkwell, and I am relaying that advice secondhand since even that was inordinately useful to me.)
The big takeaway that Marah gave to me was the idea of little wins every day: if you're only happy when you achieve your big goals (e.g., I finished an article!), then you'll only be happy a couple times a year, if that. Instead, it's more realistic -- and helpful -- to set tiny goals each day, like "write one paragraph of the methods section," and see if you can reach those. The idea, then, is that you start out each day by writing a set of 3-5 of these tiny goals, conduct a "weather report" (i.e., how are you feeling today?), and then adjust your goals from there. (If you're feeling poorly, for example, maybe 5 goals is simply too much for the day.) Then, the idea is that you sit down and write for maybe 2-3 hours -- real, focused writing, or a "flow task" -- and you spend the rest of the day on "ebb tasks," for when you're lower energy. (You can keep a running list of "ebb tasks" that you need to do when you're not a top performance but need to get done anyways, like fixing citations.) Right before you stop writing, you write down what you're about to do so that you can pick up where you started the next day (what others call the "Hemingway bridge"). Then rinse and repeat.
Somehow this model of writing -- mirrored in part by my therapist's framing of doing "no fail tasks," like opening your dissertation file for just 5 minutes a day -- has absolutely changed my writing practice, and I hope it's helpful for you too.
One other thing that has been an interesting experiment for me is using this word counter app called Pacemaker, which helps you break down those tasks. For example, if a book chapter is about 10,000 words, and you only want to work on it on Mondays and Wednesdays, and you want to finish the chapter by the end of the year, Pacemaker will calculate how much you need to be writing per day in order to reach that goal. (You can also tell it if you want to frontload the writing so you do most of it in the beginning and slowly drop down on word count as you get closer to the deadline). Somehow looking at the calendar and realizing that I only need to churn out 200 words per day (for example) is much more motivating. I'll have to see how long I stick with it, but having the little confetti burst when you log your next word count really helps a lot. Hopefully, by the next time I post, I'll have more experience with it and be able to relay whether or not the tool is actually helpful for writing the litany of articles and books I have on the back burner.