When it Feels Like There Aren't Enough Hours in the Day
Getting Unstuck Part I: The Vibes (Plus—last call for writers circles!)
Hi friends,
First, fun stuff!
I arrived home today to find a shiny copy of Emily Farris and Mirya Holman’s Power of the Badge waiting for me. Pretty, right? I loved getting to read an early version of the book, and to watch them write it along the way. You should all buy it—and stay tuned for an upcoming newsletter, where they’ll share the secret behind their coauthoring genius.
AND: Nora Nagels’ new book Gender Equality in Conditional Cash Transfers is available now for pre-order. She finished the book in one of our writers’ circles, making it what I believe is the first writers’ circle book baby, and your library would be lucky to have their very own copy.
AND, because we also love articles, Marisa Westbrook is doing some fantastic work on the experiences of folks in public housing, and this article is well worth your time to read. (Hey! Are you writing cool stuff? Tell me about it and I’ll tell my little corner of the world!)
In other fun news, I had the great pleasure this week of swooping into the Gender and Politics pre-course at APSA to talk about planning your writing (Do you want someone to come talk to your department or university about writing? Send me an email! I love giving talks!). I would have stayed longer—Philly is one of my favorite cities, and APSA attracts many of my favorite people—but my kids started school on Thursday (praise be!) so I needed to get back to Brooklyn for lunchbox sorting and outfit picking and existential dread quelling.
When I started to design my APSA presentation, it occurred to me that most people know how to plan their writing—what is harder is to figure out why they’re getting stuck in their plans, and what to do to get unstuck. So I thought I’d write this week and next about how to get unstuck. And like most things in the writing world, there are vibes, and then there are technical things. So this week: vibes. Next week: strategies. Why? Because you already know the strategies! You subscribe to this newsletter, so you already spend time reading writing advice! If the vibes are good, you’re going to write!
Getting unstuck
A few months ago, I wrote about how one of my major goals this year has been to stop making decisions from a place of scarity. Look, this is hard (for me). Living as a self-employed person in New York City with three little kids and one foot in academia, one foot in writing means a lot of wading in the tides of precarity. And from my conversations with all of you, I know I’m not the only one. But we can do better.
When I work with writers who are stuck, they have almost always found themselves in a place where it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough…of anything. I don’t have enough time to do the kind of writing I want to do. I don’t have the kinds of connections I need to get published. My ideas aren’t good enough. It’s not a big enough contribution to get published in the journal/press I want to get published in. I have too much teaching/service/other stuff on my plate to do this project justice. Caregiving is too demanding for me to make any kind of progress.
And yeah, look, I get it. Me too. There’s an article making the rounds right now about academic life, and this sentence resonates with what I think a lot of us feel:
It is impossible to be a top-line manager and administrator and mentor and researcher and writer and outreach officer and IT expert and online instructor and pedagogical innovator and recruiter and teacher and marker and external examiner and press pundit and grant bidder and editor and look after your own wellbeing. No-one can do that. Yet that’s what is often asked.
So this article isn’t to minimize or diminish real resource and time constraints and the gendered nature of service and caregiving. But it is to say that within the constraints, we can still figure out a way to mentally create conditions where we can still write (and those will hopefully give us the oomph we need to say no to the shit that isn’t serving us and agitate for a better world).
The vibes, they are a changin’
So let’s take some of those examples and change the vibes.
I don’t have enough time to do the kind of writing I want to do. I have too much teaching/service/other stuff on my plate to do this project justice. Yeah, I hear you—it often feels like the thing that determines whether you get tenure/promoted/ a job is the only thing that doesn’t make affirmative demands on your time. In an ideal world, we’d be able to schedule 4- or 5-hour writing sessions when we have time to immerse ourselves in writing.
Change the vibes: Find room to stretch out, either in terms of writing time or in terms of topic or in terms of time. Start writing poetry in the evenings instead of forcing yourself to check footnotes. If you have an hour on Fridays to write, go to your favorite coffee shop and buy the fancy drink, or light a nice smelling candle in your office. Book yourself a hotel in the neighborhood on Saturday night and throw yourself a mini-writing retreat.
I don’t have the kinds of connections I need to get published. Every time someone brings up networking, a full-body shiver runs through me and I immediately imagine myself as a hermit on a mountain with no friends or internet access. But of course, that’s not true! Networking feels cringy because it feels inauthentic, but when you do the authentic version of it, you don’t even realize that you’re networking. This sounds so business-speak I want to cry, but the vibes-based solution to this is to focus on building relationships, not on networking.
Change the vibes: Tell someone they’re awesome. Send an email saying you taught their article and your students loved it, or an artist an email saying that you bought their painting because you wanted to hang it in your office.
It’s not a big enough contribution to get published in the journal/press I want to get published in. In academia, we fight over scraps, and convince ourselves that if we don’t publish in the top journal/with a top press, nothing you write matters. This is dumb.
Change the vibes: Go find the CVs of people you think do cool work (not who are the most prestigious). Look at their CVs, and scope the diversity of places they publish. Or, look at a the websites of three publishers not in the top 5, and see what exciting books they are publishing. I promise you that some of the most cutting edge work is being done outside of CUP/OUP/APSR, and people are getting tenure with it.
Caregiving is too demanding for me to make any kind of progress. My kids were home all summer, and so I really feel this one. In the ten minutes I have to myself when I’m not hearing “mom! Mom! MOM!!!!! Why is there a color named purple?” I definitely don’t feel like I have what it takes to get some real writing done. Sometimes, you just need to drop the rope, and stop trying to balance the two.
Change the vibes: Spend more time caregiving. No, really. Cancel all of your plans for the weekend and take your kids to the beach. Or go visit your parents on a whim, leave your computer at home, and have a pizza and Netflix night. Surprise your friend who’s going through a rough divorce by booking a bnb outside of the city so you can go antiquing. Doing this will make the cost feel more worth it, and also let you carve out more time for writing without feeling as much guilt.
Alright friends, next week—we’ve changed the vibes, so let’s talk strategies for getting unstuck.
Until then, write good things!
xoxoxo
Kelly
What’s going on around here
Hi friends, old and new!
I’m Kelly, a political-scientist-professor-turned-academic-editor. I live in Brooklyn, have three kids and a new book. I post here once a week or so about all manner of things related to writing and making space for writing.
I own Epilogue Editing, and here are some of the things we do:
LAST CALL FOR Writers’ circles: Are you already feeling overwhelmed trying to balance writing and the demands of the semester? I can help with that! There are two spots left in my writers’ circle for mid-career scholars, and one spot available in the circle for early career scholars!
Session one, for mid-career academics, will meet 930-11 on Tuesdays, and session two, a mixed group focused toward early-career scholars, will meet 1130-1 on Tuesdays.
Now is the LAST CHANCE to sign up for the weekly writers’ circles. These are a fantastic way to build community, support, and accountability around your writing practices all semester long. Join us, and invite a friend!
Editing and publicity work: We have fall availability! But the calendar is filling up fast. If you have a piece of writing you’d like to get out into the world, now is a great time to reach out.
Coaching: I’ve accepted my final coaching clients for the fall! If we haven’t talked yet and you need some writing support, I’d love to have you join a writers’ circle—or reach out and we can talk about working together in the winter/spring.
New! We do have a few coaching slots available for international scholars, so feel free to reach out about those.
AcWriMo: There are pumpkins at the supermarkets here, which means it’s almost time to sign up for AcWriMo, where we write every day in November (and then take a break). Since there was all of that drama over the weekend about NaNoWriMo deciding to sell their soul to AI, I’ll have more on AcWriMo next week! Get excited!