Summer reading, summer writing

Librarians and classroom faculty alike look forward to summer as a time to move forward with writing projects of all kinds. Two recent books in the genre of academic writing habits caught my eye recently: Write No Matter What by Joli Jensen and Air & Light & Time & Space by Helen Sword.  Taking its title from a Charles Bukowski poem, Air & Light & Time & Space draws on interviews Sword conducted with 100 productive peers in all disciplines and from institutions around the world. Normally, reading about the productivity habits of exemplary scholars with stellar publication records would make me wish to close the book and take a long nap. Yet their tales of  learning to research, write, and persevere through complex projects read more like charming anecdotes from our best mentors and less like lifestyles of the impossibly disciplined. Sword models building a “house of writing” by plotting  your own four cornerstones: Behavioral, Artisanal, Social, and Emotional.  Your writer-self then tailors writing strategies to capture your strengths and develop weaker areas. Imagine plotting each of these attributes on an x-y axis, then drawing a line between points to make (hopefully) a symmetrical diamond shape.

I plotted my own BASE and I did not get a symmetrical shape! I discovered that while I have confidence in my behavioral and artisanal habits, I am less sure of my social and emotional writing habits. Attention to these areas should improve the quality and quantity of my writing. Try mapping your own BASE to learn more about amplifying your writing habits and skills.
Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics offers familiar advice, practical tools, and unrelenting myth-busting for academic writers. Although I may have heard variations on her advice before, I’ve never encountered so much help presented in such a straightforward, un-clichéd way. This book is dense with usable tools, support strategies, and effective ways to disable the productivity-impeding stories we tell ourselves.
It’s tough to pick just one favorite bit of advice or exploded myth from this book, so I’ll offer a few that I am trying out this summer: debunking the “one more source” myth we tell ourselves keeps us from actually starting to write. We’re sure that the lit review will be better with just “one more source.” With the sheer volume of scholarship and the myriad channels through which we can explore the work in and adjacent to our fields, a perfect literature review is a dangerous fantasy. Quit reviewing and begin writing. Tough medicine for librarians in particular.
A new favorite strategy: leave room in your daily(!) writing routine to find your way back to a productive place. Rather than write to the point of exhaustion, wrap up the day’s writing while you still have a little something left, and leave the door open so you can find your way in the next day. Perhaps this is a sticky note to yourself about something interesting to finish working out, or a written invitation (using comments in Word, maybe?) to pursue a particularly juicy idea.
Not long ago, the New York Times published an article on procrastibaking, or baking to feel productive despite the urgent need to accomplish “real work.” Perhaps reading books like these falls under the category of procrastireading. Yet unlike baking, where we can consume and enjoy the result of our efforts one time only, we can apply the lessons of these books to current and future writing projects.
Good luck with your summer writing projects, everyone. Got some good writing advice to share? Tell us about it in the comments!