Pacing, or Finding Your Own Productivity Sweet Spot

So I’m doing the Another Damned Notorious Writing Group, and this week Notorious, Ph.D. asked participants to think about pacing:

What we’re talking about here is establishing a good pace to keep you on track. Obviously, that’s part of what the weekly check-ins are for: to make sure that you’re making meaningful progress every week so you actually reach your goals. But there’s another type of pacing we need to talk about, and that’s the pace for each individual week. We need to make sure that we’re not putting the week’s goal off until two days before the end, then either trying to cram it all in, or realizing that we can’t possibly cram it all in, and finish the week feeling too discouraged or embarrassed to check in the next week.

This topic was on Notorious’s mind because she realized that her week got away from her a bit, and then, as she writes, “all of a sudden, it was Wednesday, and I realized that I had only barely touched the project all week. And there was panic, and a sense of impending doom.”  And so, she asked everyone the following:

Maybe you experienced something similar in your first “real” week on the project? Or maybe you had another kind of weekly pacing issue, in that you overestimated what you could take on in a given week? Or maybe, just maybe, you did it right, and established some good habits that you want to resolve to carry through for the following 11 weeks. Whatever it is, let’s talk about how we are going to keep on track in a given week.

Now, my initial response to this prompt was quite contrary.  This won’t be a surprise to those of you who suffered through my contrary responses to the Reverb 10 business last December.  Apparently, prompts make me twitchy.  But at least in this case, the contrariness really does have a foundation in my (limited) knowledge of theories about writing from rhetoric and composition.  Let’s get my contrary and shitty responses out of the way first:

Um, why exactly do we need to make sure not to put off the week’s goal until two days before the end of the week?  Why is writing every day conceived as a “good” way to achieve one’s writing goals?  ‘Cause that’s just not realistic for me, both in terms of time management during the academic year and in terms of my own tendencies as a writer.

I feel like I’ve written about this before, but I can’t easily find a post, so maybe I just think I did?  Basically, all of the typical advice about writing and productivity tends to center on “writing first” – i.e., making writing one’s first priority and so waking up at like 4 in the morning (or whatever it ungodly time is necessary) in order to start each day with writing so that other things don’t get in the way – and on writing daily – i.e., making writing a top priority that must occur every motherfucking day, regardless of what else is going on.  I know that these two strategies are really, really helpful for some people.  When I have attempted them myself, they do.  not.  work.

Part of the issue actually goes back to my contrary feelings about prompts.  Making writing “mandatory” doesn’t actually result in me writing: it just results in me getting all obstinate and bitchy, and I’m worse off than before I made these “rules” about how to get my stuff done. This is not unlike how students respond to rules about writing that are disconnected from their own personalities as writers.  For example, let’s consider the old-fashioned “you must turn in a formal outline for your paper with the final draft,” or the even more defunct practice of having students submit their “note cards” with all of their research on them with their research paper, assignments that I remember from high school.  The idea behind these “rules” is that it forces students into a certain set of writing practices.  Nevertheless, this is not, actually, how most people’s composition processes work.  So what talented writers whose composition practices don’t fit with these rules do, what I did, was I’d write the paper my way and then do the outline and the note cards after the paper was already written, eliminating any value that those two activities might have had.  What struggling writers do is to get totally stuck, either attempting to “follow the rules” and do a bad job at the paper, coming out of the process thinking that they are “bad” writers or “hating” writing, and/or, in a worst case scenario, they plagiarize.  The “rules” actually get in the way of the writing process.

Basically, prescriptions about writing contravene the idea of writing-as-process, and they orient writing around a set of arbitrary end products, something that, for most writers, at best produces uninspired writing, and at worst produces writer’s block.  So the trick, ultimately, in terms of trying to eliminate writers’ anxiety, is to think about “tools” rather than “rules.”  If you think about things like models for setting up a schedule for writing, techniques for idea generation, strategies for developing an argument, organizing one’s ideas, and structuring a piece of writing, and practices for getting to the end of a writing project as items that one can use as needed, it eliminates the dichotomies that get in the way of actually producing writing: either I’m virtuous and I write every single day or I’m bad and I procrastinate; either I proceed at a slow and steady pace, logging my progress as I go, or I rush to cram everything in and I don’t make consistent progress or know what progress I’m making; either I’m doing it “right” or I’m a fraud and a failure.  Ultimately, writing – any kind of writing – is personal.  And in order to be successful, you have to be the writer that you are – you have to be the person that you are, as a writer.  There is no one-size-fits-all approach.  Thus ends the condensed version of what I teach my students in the first unit of my freshmen composition course.  And for those for whom that “clicks,” yes, their writing improves exponentially, both in terms of their attitudes about writing and in terms of the end products that they produce.

Now, though, let me qualify all of the above: if writing first, or writing every day, or writing your article or chapter according to the steps laid out by Boice or Belcher or or Bolker or somebody else whose name doesn’t begin with B works for you, then mazel tov.  It’s all about what works.  I’m not saying at all that those things can’t work.  I’m only saying that they don’t work for me, and that’s just fine, actually.

But if you think I’m some loose-y goose-y scholarly artiste who waits around for the visitation of a muse for inspiration, think again.  I’ve given a lot of thought to what works for me as a writer, and I do have some typical structures for productivity that, depending on a various factors, I engage for keeping myself going as a writer.  My “pace” as a writer depends on the “pace” of my job responsibilities over the course of the academic year.  I’ve found some ways to grow in the place that I’m planted, and the most important thing about that is that I don’t set goals for myself during the academic year that I can’t meet.  Put simply, what I do in the fall semester, when I’m chair of a major university-wide committee, I’m teaching four courses (including a grad seminar, an online course, a composition course, and a course in the major), and I have various funding applications due, is not what I do when I have none of those responsibilities on my plate.

So how do I pace myself during the semester?

1. I set achievable goals.  I know that I can write 2-3 pages in an hour or two.  However, that depends on me having down-time for thinking and on me having a fully formulated plan for those pages.  In other words, it’s not realistic for me to think that if I just wrote five days a week that I could come up with 10-15 pages, not during the academic year.  My head’s too full of other stuff.  So my writing goals for the academic year tend to fall in smaller chunks – 3 pages a week, not 3 pages a day, and I don’t write every single day because I know that I can’t just write a paragraph here and a paragraph there and have it come out as a coherent whole.  I’m not a spoiled brat who thinks that it’s impossible to write at all during the academic year, but I’m aware that multitasking gets in the way of drafting for me.  And so, I schedule time to sit down and write those few pages, and throughout the rest of the week I allow myself to think, to read around as the mood strikes me, and to reflect on where I am in the project in an entirely unstructured way.  So when I sit down to write, I write.
2. I forgive myself when life gets in the way.  Because the reality is that life does sometimes get in the way.  I don’t panic.  So, for example, remember how Monday was going to be a writing day?  Yeah, it wasn’t.  Other things needed to come first, and then, well, it just didn’t happen because I was tired and I needed to knit and wind down.  I didn’t think, “oh, crap!  I screwed up my writing day this week – I’ll just have to write six! pages next week!”  My response was to adjust my schedule for the end of the week so that the writing would get done. I changed my plans for Friday (today) and I knocked out my three pages on the day that I was supposed to check in for the writing group.  I feel proud of myself for that – not like I screwed up.
3. I don’t pretend that I can have brilliant! new! ideas! during the academic year.  I do that work in the summer.  And in the summer I make plans for how to bring those brilliant! new! ideas! into reality during the academic year.  Basically, the academic year is for execution – not for origination.  I mean, sometimes I have an idea by accident during the academic year, but I’d be lying if I said that this was a regular occurrence.  Honestly, my intellectual energies are too exhausted by the need to think about the day-to-day shit that comes with teaching and service.  And that’s ok.
4. At the end of each writing session, I always journal about what comes next, problems or questions that I have about the next section, and plans for how to approach the next writing session.  This can be somewhat involved, including organizing notes, brainstorming about secondary and theoretical sources that might be useful, and thinking about the project as a whole and how the next section will fit into that.  Basically, at the end of every writing session I look at how things are developing, and this often involves reorganizing my outline, and rethinking the piece as a whole, or if not rethinking than just thinking in deeper and more concentrated ways about the piece as a whole.  I reflect on how the ideas have developed and I orient those to where I thought I was going in the first place, and I modify my path forward accordingly.  I first did this when I was dissertating, and it is an essential piece of me maintaining forward momentum on any project.  When I don’t do this, that’s when I stop making progress.  Because I stop writing.  Because I don’t remember what I was supposed to do next.
5. Even when I’m not writing my chapter (or article or whatever), I know how important it is that I write regularly in order to alleviate any potential anxiety around sitting down to do “real” writing.  Blogging, working on an abstract for a conference, revising something for an application or for a publication – it all counts.  Hell, even writing an assignment for a class or writing an email counts.  Taken in a broad way, the “write every day” advice is actually something that I do.  But I take it in a broad way, and I give myself “credit” for all of those writing activities.  Because the reality is that those writing activities contribute positively to my “real” writing.
6. Contradicting #5, though, I also understand that the point is to make progress, however limited that progress might be.  I don’t lose sight of the long-term goal, and I don’t actually give myself permission to get lost in the “shitty first drafts” stage, or the “but any writing is good writing” place.  Because that’s just not how one sees a project through to completion.  It’s about a mix of low-stakes, medium-stakes, and high-stakes writing activities, just like it is for my students.  Too much emphasis on one of the above produces negative results, i.e., you never make actual progress on anything.

So I’ve got a Mr. Stripey whose planted himself on my wrists as I type (curled up with his butt on my wrists/laptop and his torso/head on my chest) and he’s purring away, so I think that this post is done.  Like I said, life does get in the way of writing.  Or at the very least a 13 pound cat certainly does.