How do I keep writing during the semester?
Back-to-school season is notoriously hectic. The days get shorter, our schedules overfill, and time itself seems to speed up. Maybe you start the year full of optimism and the nostalgic pleasures of fresh notebooks and newly sharpened pencils, or maybe you’re too tired for all that.
Either way, after a couple of weeks back on campus it’s pretty easy to look at the semester ahead and feel overwhelmed by the prospect of getting any writing done. Teaching is like a goldfish: it grows to take on whatever space, time, or energy you give it. Service and admin are back with a vengeance, and parenting and other family obligations can kick into a different gear. It’s…a lot. Against this backdrop, the most sustainable goal for many of us is simply to stay in touch with our writing over the semester.
Planning for the Possible
I recommend taking a few minutes (or even an hour or so if you can) near the start of the new semester to consider what kind of relationship you want to have with your writing.
Look at your weekly schedule: what’s realistic? Committing to twenty minutes a day or 90 minutes a week on your project could make a tangible difference. How can you incorporate writing into your weekly patterns? Are you more likely to be focused and energized on teaching or non-teaching days? Do you work better at home, in your office, or somewhere else? How can you plan for that? Would adding a regular writing block to your calendar be helpful? If you know you’ll be too frazzled to produce new material, can you revise an existing piece or do some reading for the next project?
Keep in mind that for most people, gentle, ongoing progress is more effective than setting unreachable goals that may leave you feeling disappointed or even trigger a shame and avoidance spiral.
Helping Your Writing be More Demanding
One of reasons it’s so tricky getting your own writing done during term time is that it’s often much less loudly demanding than your other commitments. If you fail to prep for class, or attend to your committee meetings, or pick up your kids from school, other people will notice and there will be immediate negative ramifications. If you don’t make progress on your dissertation for another term, or continue putting off revisions on that article, it might take a long time for anyone else to notice, if they ever do. This is also why so many of us become much more productive when we have an imminent hard deadline for our writing.
This is the problem of extremely unbalanced external accountability. The solution is simple, though not always easy. We need to do whatever we can to help our writing shout louder, to feel just as un-ignorable as everything else—maybe even more so. And we do that by creating (or faking) external accountability. It’s about ensuring there’s tangible consequences if you don’t do your writing.
Here are some tools to help you build external accountability for your writing practice during the academic year.
Tools and Resources
Body doubling
A familiar concept in the neurodivergent world, body doubling uses the idea of external accountability to increase productivity within each work session. Basically, some of us get more work done with other people around. There are a number of online services built around this concept, including Caveday and Focusmate, but these more robust platforms come with a cost.
That said, one great free option is the Writers’ Hour from the London Writers Salon: daily virtual writing sessions tailored to a number of time zones. Or go the DIY route: you and a friend might schedule regular coffee shop dates or Zoom sessions to body double together. If you’re getting your bum in your seat at a set time and creating some mutual pressure to keep on writing, you’re golden.
The ‘Any Good Thing’ writing challenge
If you’ve got a lot to get done this semester, consider sociologist Rebecca Barrett-Fox’s monthly writing challenge, which combines gentle social pressure and a financial stake. “Each month, participants agree to write at least 400 words per day for 5 days each 7 day week.” Each participant pays $20 to participate; if you miss more than 2 days that month, you lose your money (it goes into a kitty for a monthly prize draw).
Writing coaching (and editing!)
One of the most effective parts of working with a writing coach is that it introduces a friendly new stakeholder into your writing process. For example, not only do I encourage my clients to set goals and deadlines, I also ask them to provide evidence that they’ve met them (often by sending me their new pages). This tends to create a powerful extra impetus to get stuff done. As one coaching client says, Our bi-monthly sessions help me feel accountable and engaged with my project.
Similarly, while it’s not the primary purpose, editing clients have also told me that working on a project together has created the structure and time constraints they need to finish their draft.
If you’re interested in writing coaching or editing services, please get in touch to arrange a free consultation.
