The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (37 page)

Of course you will need good time management (Chapter 4) to ensure you’re balancing your responsibilities properly.

(4)
Especially in times of crisis, give credence to your own thoughts and feelings.
If you are feeling under-supported, misused, exploited or discriminated against, you probably are. Seek help, starting perhaps with someone outside the organization (e.g., a coach or therapist who works with academics).

And remember: You didn’t get this far by being weak or thin-skinned, so don’t let anyone tell you you’re being weak now. Anyone who says that, or that it’s your job to grow a thicker skin (Section 7.1), is ignorant, if not an active oppressor.

(5)
Especially, though not exclusively, for women: watch out for sexism and sexist critiques
.
Sexism remains rampant in academia, and I rarely meet an underproductive female academic who hasn’t experienced serious—and, in some cases, devastating—sexism, sexual harassment, or sexual exploitation. Again, your priorities should be to (a) give credence to your own perceptions of, and feelings about, the situation, and (b) seek help.

If someone labels your concerns “complaints,” “whines,” or “nags,” be aware that those words have strong sexist connotations, and are often used to deprecate women’s valid concerns, and silence their voices.

(6)
Follow the advice in this book.
Make a plan, with deadlines and deliverables, for getting your degree. Do your time management. Work to eliminate perfectionism. Ask for help early and often. Equip yourself with abundant resources. And, most especially, work in community. Community doesn’t just provide support and grounding but tried-and-true solutions to many of the problems you’re likely to encounter.

(7)
Remember that graduate-level writing requires a different process than undergraduate writing.
Some graduate students I know could write a decent undergraduate paper in a single sitting without breaking a sweat, but when they tried the same trick in graduate school they ran aground (Section 2.5). When starting graduate school, adjust your writing process to handle the longer and more challenging assignments. Don’t forget to ask your advisor and others for help!

(8)
Unionize.
It’s a fundamental tool of empowerment. Check out the website of the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (www.cgeu.org) for more information.

9)
Professionalize
, by which I mean invest time and money in tools and techniques that will boost your effectiveness, including a good computer and backup system and specialized software tools (Section 3.6). Make abundant use of your university’s writing center, and if you need counseling or coaching, go right out and get it. Your institution probably offers it for free, but if it doesn’t or if it’s not working for you, do your best to pay for it elsewhere. Group sessions are cheaper, or you might be able to find a therapist who offers a sliding scale. Your school probably also has some graduate student support groups, or you could organize one using meetup.com—an empowering act that doesn’t have to take up too much time.

10)
Jettison as many other responsibilities as possible.
Reducing commitments not only frees up time but reduces stress, so get your family and friends to take on as many of your responsibilities and chores as possible, or hire someone. Also, take a leave from as many projects, committees, and campaigns as possible. Be ruthless and “overdo it”: even if you think you’ll be able to handle a certain commitment while writing, you’ll almost certainly be glad later if you give it up now.

If you have a spouse who can support the family while you write, give up the teaching gig. If a family member or someone else offers a gift of money or an easy-term loan, take it if you don’t think doing so will lead to uncomfortable family dynamics.

If there are responsibilities you can’t delegate, understand that it will take you longer to finish your thesis than someone without those responsibilities. This point would seem obvious, but I constantly talk to grad students who are kicking themselves for not working at the same pace as less-encumbered colleagues.

11)
Be cognizant of your work’s activist and emotionally challenging aspects.
Many research projects either intentionally or unintentionally challenge the status quo, and therefore can be considered activist as well as academic projects—and, often, graduate students get hung up because they don’t realize what that implies.

When you add activism to scholarship, you add layers of intellectual, emotional, and strategic complexity. Intellectually and emotionally, your work could challenge not just you but your committee members or others. Strategically, it could limit your career options.

It’s wonderful if you want to combine academics and activism, but do so knowingly and with abundant support from other scholar/activists. In particular, you will have to figure out how to balance your activism with your career goals, especially if you’re hoping for a job at a leading institution—which is not necessarily a sell-out, by the way, since we need radical viewpoints inside the system as well as outside it. It’s also not a sell-out to (a) incorporate your radical views gradually into your works, so that your thesis might not actually be that radical, (b) collaborate with non-radicals, or (c) present a conventional/non-threatening appearance that makes it easier for others to accept your message.

For more on what an activist mission entails, see my book
The Lifelong Activist
(Lantern Books, 2006) at www.lifelongactivist.com.

Relatedly, many underproductive students I speak with, especially in fields such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, or history, have fears and/or conflicts around their research topic. Sometimes they’ve got anxiety or even trauma from a stressful or dangerous field research experience. Make sure you’re aware of any such fears or conflicts, and seek professional help in coping with them.

And, finally,

12)
If you think academic writing is somehow special, and so the advice in the rest of this book doesn’t apply to you, get over it.
Academics commingle with other writers in my classes, and the advice helps them as much or even more than the others. (More, because of the huge amount of perfectionism in academia.) Thinking your work is too complex, intellectual, esoteric, or otherwise special to follow the basic rules of writing productivity is nothing but perfectionist grandiosity.

Academics often marry or partner with academics, so perhaps it’s not surprising that I work with many underproductive academics who are married to prolific partners. Almost always, the underproductive person in a heterosexual couple is the woman, a fact we can attribute mainly to sexism. (Women still tend to have a lot more household and caretaking responsibilities, and to suffer from more discrimination.)

Having a prolific partner puts enormous pressure on a perfectionist writer, since the partner is a constant reminder of how much the perfectionist is “failing.” To make matters worse, prolific partners’ attempts at “helping” are often counterproductive. The usual tactic is nagging, but even gentle nagging (e.g., “Did you get any writing done today?”) is only likely to create anxiety and feed the underproductive partner’s perfectionism.

In some couples, the prolific partner is a harsh critic, not necessarily because he’s mean but because he himself is resilient and can’t understand why others aren’t. But here, as elsewhere, harsh criticism is counterproductive.

If you’re the underproductive partner, it’s your job to state your needs and maintain your boundaries. If it sets you back to have your partner critique your work, stop asking him to do it. If his reminders are stressing you out, tell him to stop. If you need more time to write, ask him to do more chores, or discuss hiring someone.

If you’re the partner of an underproductive writer, the best thing you can do is model compassionate objectivity (Section 2.10). Also, listen to her needs and strive to meet them generously. If she asks you to do the dishes so she has more time to finish her thesis, offer to do the laundry too. (Better yet, pay others to do it.) It’s natural to want to ask her how her day’s writing went, but if doing so stresses her out, refrain.

If your relationship is already charged because of her procrastination, it’s probably best not to offer advice—but if you do, make sure it’s not misguided, e.g., “C’mon, honey, you know in this business you need a thick skin.”

If she hasn’t read this book, suggest it to her.

First of all, thank you.

Thank you for being a caring advisor, and for being willing to improve your skills in this vital area. Proper supervision does take time, but can boost not just your students’ productivity but your own. The trick is to devote generous time to students at the beginning of their graduate careers, and also when they need help: this not only helps them to be more self-sufficient but empowers them to take on tasks you might not otherwise be able to delegate, such as helping with grant proposals, organizing meetings, and being a mentor to others. (See below for delegation tips.)

In contrast, if your students feel undertrained or under-supported, or if they feel there’s no one they can turn to for help, they are likely to become disempowered and run aground—thereby requiring much more of your time over the long run.

The first thing to do is analyze your own methods for supporting your students and identify any barriers or obstacles (Section 1.1) that could constraint your effectiveness. Supervision is hard, and no one does it perfectly. Beyond that, there are probably elements in your own situation that are disempowering, including time constraints and people ineffectively supervising and supporting you. Acknowledge your deficits and constraints, make a plan for overcoming them where possible, and do the best you can.

When you start working with a student, ask about her experiences, needs, and expectations, and clarify your own. The gap between undergraduate and graduate school responsibilities is often both huge and unacknowledged (perfectionism, again!). Compared with undergraduates, many graduate students have:

• Many more, and much harder, scholastic responsibilities;

• Many more, and much harder, professional responsibilities beyond the scholarship; and

• Many more life responsibilities.

And yet, many advisors expect students to leap this gap with little or no help—and judge them harshly if they can’t. If you do acknowledge the existence and breadth of the gap, however, it only makes sense that, even though graduate students are older than undergraduates and have been selected for commitment and competency, they still have a legitimate need for abundant support, particularly at the beginning of their graduate careers.

Also,
be aware that many students have the mistaken idea that the same processes and techniques that allowed them to excel as an undergrad will allow them to excel now.
Helping your student understand exactly what graduate-level research and writing entails, and which techniques have worked for prior students, could make all the difference.

Help your student create a time budget, and when he begins his thesis, a plan for research and writing. Familiarize him with your school’s writing center and other resources (maybe provide him with a list, which you can have your students maintain). Think of him as having a team to help him, with you being the team leader. (You can refer him to the writing center for help with composition, for instance, while you focus on his ideas and analysis.) Set up a regular meeting time where you can relaxedly discuss non-urgent matters, while encouraging him come to you promptly with the urgent ones.

The key to helping students be prolific and reasonably independent is to set clear guidelines for them in the areas outlined in this book: compassionate objectivity (antiperfectionism), resourcing, time management, writing habits, internalized oppression, etc. Don’t just give them a copy of this book, however: ask
specific
questions to uncover any triggers or obstacles (Section 1.1) that may impede progress. (Recall the Joan Bolker comment I quoted in Section 2.15, in which she invokes a hypothetical diligent advisor asking a student, “Do you really want to take on all of Henry James’s novels in your thesis?”) Remember that
simply asking a student how her work is going without delving into specifics is nagging, not support
. The student may appreciate that you cared, but you’re not providing the context for meaningful problem-solving.

Be aware that some barriers may be linked to your field or your student’s thesis topic. Some students researching intense topics like war or oppression wind up being more affected by them than they anticipated, and some working on controversial topics wind up being more fearful of the career or social ramifications of their choice than they anticipated. In both cases, by the way, the student is likely to be either unaware of these fears or in full-on perfectionist “shaming mode” about them.

One of the most damaging aspects of academia is its hypercompetitiveness.
Never compare your students with each other or anyone else
, and also discourage them from making comparisons. Remember that even seemingly “good” comparisons can backfire by causing situational perfectionism (Section 2.9).

Especially discourage irrational perfectionist comparisons (Section 2.7), such as those with scholars who have been in the field longer, or who are researching fundamentally different topics, or who are luckier (say, in their personal circumstances or the timing of their work).

All of this comes down to
explicitly
teaching the student how to be an effective scholar and coworker. To not be explicit is to expect your student to absorb the needed information and strategies automatically, just by being around you and other academics—a risky and fundamentally irresponsible strategy.