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I recently read Helen Sword’s Air & light & time & space: how successful academics write. The title is based on a poem by Charles Bukowski, which describes how writers fantasise about how if only they had the ‘air and light and time and space’ to write. I find myself falling into this trap constantly: if only I could work uninterrupted, I could get all the writing done!
In her book, Sword compares advice found in popular writing books with practices described by academics she interviewed. She found that contrary to the common advice that you just need to set regular writing sessions and get on with it, many successful academics use a variety of processes and practices. Sword, herself a successful academic, found during the writing of the book that her attempt to stick to the kind of writing schedules recommended by the advice books failed miserably. Instead, she decided to do the things she found pleasureable, which for her was long walks and working with notecards.
I’ve been thinking about this recently, after another unsuccessful attempt to freewrite each morning. What is it that makes my writing pleasurable? Or more generally, what makes my research pleasurable? So far, I’ve come up with two things.
First, I read lots and widely. Reading is one of my favourite things to do, and the opportunity to read is something I treasure as part of doing a PhD. This reading involves
I read at various time throughout the day, but my favourite time is in the morning, preferably at breakfast. I read whatever takes my fancy, and invariably I find I have ideas about my current projects. Sometime these ideas are directly related to what I was just reading, but often they seem completely unrelated. The process of doing something I enjoy seems to enable the depths of my mind to chug away at an ongoing research question.
Second, I enjoy handwriting. I find sitting in front of my computer to write really tough. Words don’t flow easily and distractions beckon. But for whatever reason, handwriting is not only easier but more enjoyable. Sometimes I write longhand (the original format of this post); sometimes I draw diagrams. Often I make a mess. But when I come to type, it’s much easier if it’s already partially formed on paper. Then I either type it verbatim, or (more often), edit as I go. I do this writing in my Supernote, which is portable and never runs out of paper and hardly ever runs out of battery. It feels somewhat inefficient, especially as I’m a reasonably fast typist, but maybe that’s why it works. And at the end of the day, what maters is that the words are there, not how they arrived.
_Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-text-on-gray-background-261763/_
