Writing Around Your Project

Four ways to strategically write outside of your manuscript

Hi friends,

Well, it’s been cold and rainy and not very springlike here this week. But someone in my neighborhood put a pretty red birdhouse in this tree, and I really appreciated that. Spring will come.

I’m going to be taking next week off from this newsletter as I take a madcap trip around the country with my family, but today I wanted to talk about how you can get unstuck in the writing process by using new/different documents as tools.

If writing were easy, then your manuscript would be a straightforward articulation of your argument. “I noticed this! Current literature doesn’t seem to deal with it. I gathered some data, and here’s what we know now! Cool, right?”

It would just be a simple way to convey thoughts and ideas to a broader public of curious, helpfully skeptical, readers.

And then I wouldn’t have a job. Because as it turns out, it’s really freaking hard to weed through/wade through/tune out (all interesting metaphors here) all of the other stuff in order to say what you actually want to say.

One way to do this is to create supporting documents—places where you put words that need to exist in the world for one reason or another, but don’t actually belong in the manuscript you’re writing now. Here are a few ways that can look.

Strategy One: Kill Your Darlings (But Create a Graveyard File).

You know how this goes—you have 12,000 beautiful words for an 8,000-word article. There is a section you’ve written that is perfect in every way, but probably doesn’t need to be here. Cutting them feels painful. What do you do?

Create a file for every project that is the cutting-room floor. Give it a funny name. Every time you cut a paragraph, just save it to your file. At the end, you can go through and see if anything you put in there actually has to be put in the manuscript (it probably doesn’t). Or maybe it needs to be its own thing! In which case, jump ahead to strategy two.

Strategy Two: FEELINGS (Dear Diary…)

You’re sitting there, writing away, and then all of a sudden you’re flooded with anxiety. Or anger. You’re typing more and more quickly, or you’re paralyzed with fear—because it hasn’t become about the project you’re working on, but about THEM.

THEY have entered the chat. Your dissertation advisor. Or reviewer 2. Or the “more of a comment than a question” guy from the last conference you went to. Or the person who is wrong on the internet.

As you try to vindicate your work, you start writing in passive voice, or putting up a wall of text. The calm, authoritative voice has disappeared. What do you do?

Go for a walk. Then come home, get out your journal, and write down all of the reasons that those people are full of shit. Write down what you’re mad about, what you’re afraid of, why they misunderstand you, why you’re right about this and all things… and then figure out how to enter back into the manuscript with poise and swagger.

If you’re feeling ongoing anxiety about the manuscript, it can help to write out the feelings every morning. Putting the doubts on paper so you can look at them can be really helpful in helping you come to terms with how true these might be.

Strategy Three: BUT ALSO (You Have World Enough, And Time).

This is a little bit different from strategy one.

Often times a reader or editor will tell you something has too much detail, and suggest you can curate a paragraph or two out of the pages and pages of data you’re describing. That sucks! But, it’s the perfect thing to spin off into another article—so save the wonky detail, and then reimagine its use later.

Or you’ll be writing, and you realize that the manuscript is the equivalent of how my four-year-old tells me stories “and then! and then! and then! and then!” because you KNOW SO MUCH STUFF. AND HAVE SO MUCH TO SHARE WITH THE WORLD.

When this happens, open a new document, and start writing all of the stuff that’s orthogonal to the original manuscript there. Given world enough, and time (thank you Marvell), you’ll write a lot of articles, and many books. If higher ed as we know it doesn’t collapse, you might be doing this for the next 30 years!

So let this manuscript, now, take the form it needs to, define narrow scope conditions, and know that you’re saving other stuff for the next article, the next book. If you curate each project as its own world, over time you’ll create the networks that connect these worlds.

This is also why people sometimes start newsletters—working on their main project brings up a whole bunch of other things you want people to know. Maybe about what it’s like in the field. Or why understanding medieval art helps us grapple with today’s politics. Or about some poet’s elicit love affairs (please send me that newsletter).

My point is that having a now-or-never mentality about the project you’re working on makes it a more anxious place to spend time, for you and the reader. But if you promise yourself there can be another book, or there can be an article written for the broader public, or there can be a super wonky methods supplement, it can let you relax into this piece, right now—and make it better.

Strategy Four: The Words Won’t Come (MARGINS)

You’ve also, I suspect, been here. You’re writing, it’s great, and then all of a sudden your brain and fingers come to a jumbled, confused stop. Your brain starts leafing through and discarding all of these words and sentence and nothing gets written and you get stuck. My suggestion: either open a comment and type to your editor/BFF/cat what you’re trying to say, or go for a walk and talk it out into a voice recorder. It’s literally as simple as “Kelly, what I’m getting tripped up here and what I’m trying to say is…” and then explaining it.

I’ve given people this suggestion a lot over the years and never had a good sense of why it works until I read Natalie Wexler’s new book Beyond the Science of Reading. She argues that there are four ways we use language: listening and talking, which are innate to all humans, and reading and writing which are tools we invented and taught ourselves, so they aren’t automatic. Writing can feel hard, then, in a way that talking doesn’t—it uses a different process in your brain. So when writing isn’t working, think about how you would explain it.

Enjoy the week friends! Write good things.

Kelly

What’s Going on Around Here

Hey! Need a community? I have so many options for you!

So You Want to Write A Book?: Two spots left! A unique hybrid workshop dedicated to supporting writers throughout their book writing journey. Come join us in May! More info here, Register here

So You Want to Finish (or Make a Lot of Progress) Your Book? An Advanced Book Writing Workshop. I’m so excited about this— a year-long, monthly workshop for folks with more advanced book manuscripts. One part troubleshooting/ accountability, one part advanced topics in book writing. We’ll start in May. Details here, register here.

A (very rare) summer Writers’ Circle. I almost always just host two writers’ circles a year—in the spring and the fall, but my sense is that people are in need of some community this year, so I’m going to host a very rare summer workshop in May and June. AND, by popular demand, there will be space for writing built into our meetings: so we’ll talk about writing, and then actually do it. Details here, register here.

We’re also open for new coaching clients, editing assignments, and book publicity relationships—get in touch!

You can see all of what we’re doing in 2025 here.