Hi friends,
Spring is bananas! Everyone is sick, schools are closed willy-nilly, and February’s carefully devised schedules are in disarray. We had nine events at my kids’ school this month, and they’re only in school 12 days next month, there’s an eclipse in the middle, and it feels like it’s basically summer even though it’s only 45 degrees out. I know it’s not just me, because here’s a little taste of the emails I’ve gotten this week:
Reschedule?
Reschedule!
Ugh I need to reschedule.
Sorry!!!! Reschedule.
Most of us are just trying to keep our heads above water, which makes me feel a little mean for even writing this post. But! If your writing is stressing you out, which means you’re avoiding it, which means you’re stressed out because you’re avoiding it, you’re in good company. And yes, you might need to take a break or find an accountability group or revisit your goals or tweak how you’re thinking about productivity.
Or…you might need a side project.
What’s A Side Project?
A side project is something you’re working on that is pretty disconnected from your primary focus or work. Hobbies are great—plant flowers, watch Agatha Christie adaptations in chronological order, run marathons—but here I really mean a writing project that is a labor of love.
Here’s mine: I meet with a writing group every Wednesday afternoon. And for the past few months, I’ve used that group to work on the same project. I’m writing a play! Is it a good play? Not yet! Do I know how to write plays? Not really. Will it ever see the light of day? I doubt it. I might not even finish it. But I’m writing a play!
It’s super fun! I do some research (it’s based on real people from Victorian England), I find something wild in the historical record, I text it to my playwriting buddy (Actual text: “Great news! Her second baby daddy challenged her first baby daddy to a dual! The 1850s were wild!”) and then I write a scene or do a character sketch and then go back to my real life.
My Life is Bonkers. Why Would I Do This to Myself?
As in all things I write, if this sounds terrible, feel very free to ignore me. However. I have four reasons this might be good for you:
It is fun. If you were the kind of kid who scribbled short stories in notebooks or wrote plays and put them on for your family, your brain might be missing the kind of creative, generative process that gets lost when we write academically for more instrumental reasons.
Words beget words. If you are having trouble getting traction on your “real” writing, my guess is that you’re using other things to escape instead. Tik Tok or social media or grading or whatever. Instead, if you’re stuck, a side project can be a great way to get momentum. Spending 15 minutes on easy, fun writing before switching to a more demanding project can feel like a reward and build you some momentum. I’ve made it a goal to write this newsletter more often this semester. One reason is because generating words here doesn’t burn me out—on the contrary, it makes it more likely that I keep up with writing on my other projects.
A focus on process, not product, can be liberating. Look, when I write nonfiction, I mostly expect that people will read it and want to engage in it. Even in early drafts, I’m still writing to an imagined audience and anticipating their responses. With my play, I have none of that. It’s purely process driven, and since I like the process of reading/thinking/imagining/writing, it’s a lot of fun.
The norms of your field don’t always need to define the writing you do. Not every field is a book field. Not every field values public-facing scholarship. Obviously we need to meet the requirements (and sometimes push the envelope) of what we need to do to get jobs, get tenured, and/or get promoted. But that’s a floor, not a ceiling. If slam poetry or podcasting or children’s book authorship is calling your name, embrace those as possibilities!
What Should I Write?
My project for you is to find something you’ve always wanted to write about and make time to do it on a semi-regular basis. Maybe you’re a chemist, but took a poetry class in undergrad and loved it. Buy yourself a nice journal and make a date with yourself to write some poetry on Thursday mornings. Maybe you were a chef before you became a literature professor, and you’ve always wanted to put together a cookbook of recipes from famous literary works (I would 100% buy that cookbook). Maybe you’re an architect, and have always imagined the best places to hide bodies in old buildings—write that murder mystery! (An academic mama wrote this thriller!)
It also doesn’t need to be that derivative…Lab Girl is a great example of an academic memoir (I really enjoyed this book and was really fascinated the entire time that this book got published and became a national best seller. Anything is possible!) There’s also a huge market (if that’s your thing) for academics who can write legibly to the broader public, and that could be a fun outlet as well.
How Should I get Started?
What a great question!
Find a way to capture your ideas: I have a note on my phone that is puzzlingly titled “Garage Sale.” It’s where I put everything that I think is interesting that I might want to write about one day that isn’t related to a scholarly pursuit. Other people carry notebooks for this purpose.
Have a low-stress, low-productivity writing time to work on it: Wednesday afternoon is a great time for me to work on my play, because I’m tired. I don’t schedule meetings on Wednesdays, so I’ve almost always spent the preceding hours immersed in an editing project, and my brain needs a break. It’s a nice time to take a step back, do some reading, and let the project grow.
Immerse yourself in the genre: There are a wide range of podcasts and books about everything related to writing. If you’re writing poetry, find some poets to follow on Bluesky! If you’re trying to write a murder mystery, listen to podcasts about craft! If you want to write a memoir, take a workshop from a memoirist! It can be really, really nice to be in a classroom that you’re not in charge of.
In short: if you’re tired because it’s the end of the semester/beginning of a new quarter and you’re not getting any traction on your existing projects and writing feels hard, start something new! It might give you the energy and clarity you need to get your other projects across the finish line as well.
Go write amazing things! And then tell me about them!
Kelly
Housekeeping
This newsletter will always be free, but if you like it you can always forward it to a friend or nudge a colleague to take one of the super fun classes coming up! If you have friends who are starting new faculty positions and trying to turn their dissertation into a book, or who are going on sabbatical and trying to make book progress, could you forward this to them? You’re the best!
Editing and coaching! Great news—I have some extra availability in April! If you have any papers that you’re hoping to get into the world before summer, I’d love to work with you on them. As always, if you think you’ll need editing or coaching support this summer or fall, now is a great time to get on our calendar. Along with the traditional developmental editing and consulting services, we’re expanding to offer new services, including drop-in editing, support for scholars for whom English is an additional language, and help with alt-ac job searches.
Sign up for my book writing workshop! As many of you know, I’m teaching So You Want to Write a Book, which is a yearlong book writing workshop. I couldn’t be more excited about this workshop, and I hope that you will consider applying! All of the details you need, including scheduling and payment logistics, are here, and you can apply here. I’m also very happy to set up a quick chat to answer questions about the workshop and see if it’s a good fit for your project. Important: we shifted the dates slightly, to May 6-8, 2024. If you are excited about the workshop but have a conflict of dates, they will be recorded as well.
ApWriMo free writing challenge! If you’re looking ahead for some end-of-semester accountability and camaraderie, sign up for our free AprWriMo challenge, where we’ll write together every day from April 15-April 30. We’ll also have a full-day minimalist writing retreat on April 19, where we’ll open Zoom up at 8 am eastern, and keep it open until 8 pm or the last person logs off. Sign up here. It’ll be great, I promise.
Future plans…Folks have been wondering if there will be writing workshops this summer. Other than the book writing class, I’m taking a break from workshops from May through September. But I’ll be editing and working one-on-one with folks this summer, and then back in the fall with a new (and even more awesome) version of the Writers’ Circle, so stay tuned for more details that!