Hi friends,
It’s been a week, huh? Sending lots of love to all of you doing the hard work in the classroom this week. The kids are lucky to have you.
My writers’ circles started this week, which are always SO FUN—and it means I sit at my desk instead of making myself infinitely available to snuggle with Sherbert on the couch and type with one hand while petting him with the other. By Monday afternoon, he had had enough. After staring me down failed to produce his desired result, he spread his giant orange body across my external keyboard, effectively ending my workday.
So these thoughts are inspired by my giant orange cat who would like you treat writing more like a job and ultimately work less.
Being a professor is a job, not a calling
If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about higher ed, I would dispel the notion that there is something sacred about going into academia (or about teaching in general.) Universities are our employers, and we exchange labor—in the form of research, teaching, and service—for compensation. I have a whole rant about this I’ll save for another day, but I want to talk about two things that happen when we don’t think about writing as part of our day job.
FIRST: When you think of writing as a calling, or as something you enjoy, it feels selfish, so you prioritize other things. I spend so much time in writers’ circles and coaching sessions convincing people to a) identify writing time b) block it c) protect it and d) actually write during it. The problem is that people often view writing time as selfish, so the easiest time to exchange (YES I can schedule a dentist appointment YES I’m available for office hours YES I can cover your class) instead of blowing a bubble and protecting that time. Writing gets pushed into corners - 15 minutes before class, after the kids go to bed, times where it doesn’t bother anyone (and also times where you are exhausted, and it’s hard to write). And so your writing atrophies.
But y’all, baseball coaches really love baseball. Mechanics, I’ve found, really love cars. And maybe they coach their kids’ Little League team, or they have a passion project restoring a vintage car on the side, but they do the work they are paid to do during the time they are paid to do it. In fact, it would be weird for a mechanic to say “it’s super fun to rebuild transmissions so I’m going to do it on my own time this weekend and instead just deal with paperwork now.”
If you are writing the next dark academia book or a murder mystery at sea, that’s amazing! Do it when you can steal time! But if you’re writing something related to the research you get paid to produce, reclaim that time as your own and make other things fall around it.
SECOND: The flip side of this—one reason I suspect many people let writing get pushed to the periphery is because it’s hard and it makes us vulnerable and it takes less of our cognitive load to do the other parts of our job (and other parts of our job have much quicker payoffs). We avoid writing until the stars align: until we have the perfect amount of time and all the clutter is cleared from our lives and our kids are back in school. And that perfect unicorn time…never happens. So we try to write in the shadows, and are dissatisfied when we don’t get the results we want.
Mechanics don’t wake up and say “oh, this feels like an off day so I’m going to avoid installing new brakepads” and baseball coaches don’t say “things are too busy and I’m not going to coach my best game so I’ll just sit this one out.” You go to work, sometimes you’re amazing at your job, sometimes you’re not so great at your job, but you show up anyway.
And part of making writing a little more mundane means you just kinda show up and write a few bad sentences, and eventually you have a whole pile of words that are okay but not great. And then you can edit them.
What we do isn’t magic, and it isn’t a higher calling, but it can be awesome. And it’s important. The work you do, what you write, is important. And so you should be compensated for that labor. And then go home and do things that aren’t work, because you are a human who writes and you deserve a break. And if you think of writing as your day job, and you give yourself breaks on the evenings and weekends, you’ll end up writing more—I promise.
Write all the things!
Kelly
What’s going on around here
Keep your eye out for announcements about an exciting event (suspense!), AcWriMo, and spring writers’ circles, in that order!
Coaching/Editing/Publicity
Our editing calendar is mostly full for the fall, and people are beginning to reserve space for the spring—please reach out if you have a book, article, grant, or job materials that could use a developmental or stylistic edit.
I have a few openings for a long-term coaching clients right now, as well as availability for short-term coaching sessions. If you could use one-on-one consultations about your research, writing, or interviewing, let’s chat.
Finally, if you have a book coming out, we can help you with marketing and publicity, as well as dealing with the dreaded author questionnaires.