Wow. It has been a tough few months. Many of us will have been hanging in there, particularly parents, waiting for the mythical day when children go back to school. That thought has probably sustained you, right up until they did actually go back to school, and then came back days later with a cough. And around and around you go.
Worse - on top of the into school, out of school Hokey Cokey - you were faced with the mother of all onslaughts: preparing on-line teaching. I’m sure some of you work for institutions that had this all organised well in advance of term starting (I mean, surely somebody did), but for the rest this term is starting to feel like a programme of torture. Between dealing with the technology, wondering whether you will literally survive in person teaching and supporting the isolated and bewildered student body and fearing for your own mental health, there is rarely a moment to sit back and breathe.
But just for now: breathe. Slowly. Take a moment.
What happens when you stop?
I want to talk about what happens when the hopes and dreams and coping mechanisms of the last few months start to falter, because that is sure to happen. Right now you might be in the white heat of it all, and are merely crawling through each day. I’m sure you had great hopes for your shiny new on-line all singing and all dancing teaching module, yet instead, you sit in your room staring at 400 blank black boxes wondering if anyone is out there. You created this thing of beauty in a frenzy pushing all other obligations aside, including writing.
There might be a sense around you that you have successfully pivoted - and somehow it is, in a sense, all over. You are done here. You have got used to it. You have become a teaching robot. The new normal. But it is anything but normal and don’t be moralised, brutalised or gaslit into thinking anything else.
At some point, whatever coping mechanisms you have developed to keep on pushing through will likely come to a crashing halt. And then what?
Rethink your goals and priorities
It is time for a serious rethink about your priorities and where exactly you spend your energies. It is time to re-think the publication plan, but not so much that you have nothing on it. The thing about writing is that it is both a joy and a time suck, a respite and an unbelievable pressure, the thing that gets put off and the thing where deadlines start to loom hard. Some of you may have re-set your expectations in the summer, only to have missed the mark (repeatedly) and piled on additional pressure now it is term time.
It is time to get real. But it is also time not to fall into the trap of saying ‘I have no time to write’. This isn’t true. It just isn’t. Writing can take 15 minutes. Everyone can find 15 minutes, but some of us just don’t want to. Cool. Own it. Just own it, and feel that rush of denial just slip out of your body. This is the first crucial step forward.
Writing is a habit, but not the fun kind. It has the inverse effect of most habits. When you break the writing habit, it is unbelievably difficult to start up again. When you have the writing habit, it is like being on a gentle down hill slope - you kick your little pebble along the ground without thinking about it too much. Break the habit, and you are Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the steepest of mountains. Then you think this is what writing is like, and you don’t much care for it. This gets hard wired into your brain - you begin dreading writing - and around we go. Denial. Fear. Avoidance. But that is not the truth of writing. Writing is only like this when you break the habit.
Identify your motivations
When things get tough on the writing front, the most important thing to re-centre is your motivation. Why do you write? What is it about your research that gets you up in the morning? I talk a lot on the course about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the differences between the two, and that what really matters is that you can locate some motivation whatever its form. Be it instrumental (I need x publications to get promoted / a job) or more cerebral (I just have to tell the world about x), it doesn’t matter. Even if it’s ‘I need to keep this job’ that works too. Motivation comes first.
Start the habit
Starting writing again after a long halt is a bit like aversion therapy. Small, repeated exposures build up a tolerance. Don’t start in a rush or start big: ‘today I will start my paper’ is a sure way to fail. Start small: ‘today I will find my notes, read them, for 30 minutes’. Then ‘tomorrow I will open up a document and bullet point/ write headings for 15 minutes'. Slow and steady. Break your writing tasks down into 15 minute jobs. If necessary, do one 15 minute job a day until you start to lessen that fear reaction. Eventually you will build up the momentum you need to get to a 25 minute Pomodoro. A couple of these a day and you are back on the down hill slope, writing merrily without drama.
I made that sound easy, and it isn’t. It requires a concerted effort to change your mindset - that is where the real work is. After that, it is all down hill from there.