I’ve spent uncountable hours over the years wanting to write, feeling ready in many ways, but not knowing what to write. Which completely tanks it and makes it seem like a fail, with endless fails to come. It’s not that I don’t know my topic or what my project is, nor even that I don’t have any ideas. …
It’s not you, it’s the situation. Mucky swampy energy… and of course not doing your writing. Those are signs that you’re about to get stuck and that finishing your dissertation or academic book or article is going to be seriously derailed. Or not. And that’s the weird thing about it. One of the most common things I have to remind …
is the one-sentence through line. Don’t spend days or weeks meandering, writing around in circles, not sure what the spine of your article, chapter or book is. What does it all hang on? And what can you hang onto as your go about writing? This one sentence does the trick and I’m going to share with you how to write …
For me one of the biggest drags on writing has been the feeling that it’s “not good enough.” Non-suckism, a.k.a. perfectionism, is something every writer must overcome. Yet many don’t realize it because of this wildly misleading label “perfectionism” that’s bandied about. I certainly don’t feel that “perfectionism” sounds like it applies to me. How about you, are you trying …
There is a smart way to do it. This can also work for creating your masterpiece—nothing against that—but today I wanted to share some pointers about just getting an object done. A thing. Those times when you just HAVE to get it done, and there’s little time. Four weeks, is plenty of time, and I’ll tell you why. As long …
I’m going to say something here that might cause a gasp of horror. Something that seems to fly in the face of what people say about writing productivity. Something that seems to fly in the face of the often stated plea to write first and revise later. That to be productive academic writers we need to ignore quality at first …
Heel, me! That is, not heal me, but “heel!” This is our habitual approach to self-discipline. Unfortunately it’s based in a belief that to finish your writing you can and should force yourself to do it. And there is something wrong with you if you can’t do that. In the case of academic writers, you are supposed to always force …
As an academic writer I bet you’ve sometimes wished that you punched a clock every day and could just go home and forget about it all, after a certain hour of the day. I know I have. Instead of scrambling around day to day, trying to fit everything in, what if I could just work part of my life, and …
If you are getting stuck trying to start up your writing project, and find yourself avoiding the troubling feelings that brings up, thus also avoiding doing the writing you need to do, why not try a few procedures, first, before giving in? Thing is, if you give in and avoid the sucky feelings of being stuck getting started then you …
Chances are you are reading this because writing your projects in the past have led to a big messy patches that were very hard to get through. It kind of feels like extremely thin copper wires are tangling in your brain and also coming out of your head, poking out from two to four inches, although when you look in …