How We Write

Everyone who writes has an approach to writing.1 I have asked scores of students over the years about their writing routines and rituals. Some have said they need to clean their apartment before they can sit down to write. Others say they need several freshly sharpened pencils and a clean legal pad. Many turn on music, but many others seek noiseless isolation. Some only write in the morning – others only at night. Most say they need a block of at least 2 hours before they would even think about starting to write. Most say they struggle with writing, though a few say they bang out papers from start to finish in one long sitting.

My point is that we all have rituals when we write. Most of our rituals emerge from a combination of stress or anxiety about writing combined with superstitious learning. Writing causes stress for many of us, and most people prefer to avoid stress when they can. We create rituals about writing as a way to generate excuses for not writing now. The mood is not right, the room is not right, the timing is not right, etc., so I just won’t write right now. Avoidance is a common response to lots of situations that cause anxiety, and all of us have some situations that cause us anxiety, so don’t feel bad – you are in good company.

Of course, many of us also have experienced the growing anxiety that comes with putting off something that we know has to get done – I certainly have. It can hang over me, interfering with my ability to get other work done or my enjoyment of down time. I know I will feel better once the unpleasant task is completed, and rarely is the task as unpleasant as I imagined. I know this because I have repeated the cycle many times, but I still find myself in this situation all too often.

Superstitious learning occurs when we associate some unrelated event or cir- cumstance with a positive or negative outcome. Athletes are the best at this – if a baseball player ate a turkey sandwich before having a great game, you can bet that they will be eating the same sandwich tomorrow. Athletes might have lucky shirts or lucky socks. They may go through a specific warm-up routine before each game. They may have a favorite saying they repeat before each play. They sit in the same place, listen to the same music, or drink the same thing every day, every game. This is more than just a routine – these are rituals that they believe impact the outcome of the game. Players ”learn” their rituals because good performances

lead them to want to repeat what they’ve done and bad ones teach them which behaviors to avoid. Sometimes a ritual runs out of magic, but if the player has been doing it for awhile, they often just redouble their efforts to properly adhere to the ritual.

Writers do the same thing with writing. We remember times when our writing went well and we try to repeat that experience by recreating the steps that led up to that experience and the environment in which it happened. Sure, a quiet place and sharp pencils can be useful, but too often we give way too much credit to those kinds of factors. We transform preferences for certain conditions into essential conditions for success. We believe that we can’t write effectively except under nearly perfect circumstances. We probably could write just as well in a wide variety of circumstances – we just don’t like to do so, and so have convinced ourselves that we can’t.

These three things – anxiety, superstitious learning, and avoidance – feed off of each other. If we step out of a ritual, that makes us anxious. That makes it harder to concentrate on our writing, which makes the experience less pleasant and potentially less successful. This reinforces our belief that our rituals are critical for success, and feeds into our desire to avoid the unpleasant task of writing until we can create the proper set of circumstances our rituals demand.

I think this has its roots in anxiety. Most students express feelings of stress, anxiety, frustration, and/or fear about writing. Even those who experience very little anxiety still know that writing takes work. Thus, for a great many of us, writ- ing produces some sort of negative feeling. These are powerful feelings, which is why they change our preferences into things we view as essential, which is why we change our routines into rituals.

If you have the luxury of accommodating your rituals, go right ahead and do so. However, as personal and professional lives get more demanding or compli- cated, our ability to accommodate our writing rituals is reduced. If you are a graduate student now, I can tell you that being an Assistant Professor or working as a professional researcher will place more demands on your time, not less. You might as well start getting ready for that now. Fortunately, if we recognize rituals for what they are, we can reduce our dependence on them and/or adapt them to be more flexible.

tasks. Sit someplace different each of the next five times you sit down to write a letter home, a memo for class, or the day’s Facebook posts. Change or turn off your music. Go to a noisy place in the library and write that one-page book review.

Time is a big issue for a lot of writers. If you have a seminar paper to write for class, schedule a 20 minute break in the middle of your day to write anything for that paper – random notes, a partial outline, the references, a paragraph on the methods – and then stop. Do it again later that evening and again the next day. Don’t worry about the quality of what you are writing – you might delete all of it next week. Just write something.

In short, demonstrate to yourself that it is possible to write under a lot of dif- ferent circumstances. I particularly value having learned how to write during short spans of time, or during longer spans of time that include multiple interruptions. You may still have preferences, but recognize them for what they are and don’t give them so much power over you.

In addition, reward yourself for small successes. Bang on that paper for 20 minutes and then take a walk, check a website, or just close your eyes and breathe for a minute or two. Get used to feeling good about your writing as you are doing it rather than only when the full paper is done. Notice the decline in anxiety that comes from making progress and getting started.

All of this is easier if you are not alone. Find a friend, colleague, spouse, or even advisor to share all of this with. Encourage each other, report back to each other, celebrate the small victories together, but also hold each other accountable. Take it one step further and co-author a paper together. Doing so lowers the burden and increases the sense of being in this together. We think of writing as a solitary act, but we are social beings. Plus the whole point of writing is to communicate something to someone else. Of course it is hard to write and talk at the same time, but if you are a social person, you can make writing a more social experience.