The book is here 🎉
So finally….the book is here!
I started writing this alongside my Mastering the Monograph book writers - partly as a way of putting my own advice into practice, but of course, really for the only reason anyone writes a book.
I had something to say!
I’ve been coaching now for 7 years, and an academic for 17 years before that, and across that time I have seen academic life change, dramatically. Some things though remain constant - the importance of writing for your academic career remains, yet many academics experience writing as a source of guilt, pressure and unfinished work. So far, so familiar.
What is exacerbating these familiar academic stories is now the ever diminishing time you have to execute your writing. Let’s be honest, to execute your thinking.
This can start to make academia feel like a prison - one you entered with ideas you wanted to pursue and communicate to others about, and a smaller and smaller (mental) room to do it in. The walls feel like they are closing in. So how to break out of this prison without resorting to being an asshole and metaphorically shivving your students and colleagues in the break room? My mission in this book is to aid your release from this prison, step by step.
What I kept seeing in coaching
Across disciplines and career stages, I see academics blaming themselves for difficulties they have never been taught how to address and that asking for help is shameful, somehow a weakness that needs to be hidden. Senior colleagues may sneer and tell them it just all comes naturally to them (concealing in that statement just how many years of failing and iterating that required). Whether this is about how to balance the myriad pressures and tasks academics must perform daily whilst engaging in world leading research, or how to excel in the craft of writing, there is precious little help inside your institution. Work it out on your own, or die trying?
It does not have to be this way.
The point of this book
Academic writing requires skills, processes and techniques that work in a time pressed environment. You have not been taught them. It is no longer open to you to sit around hoping for inspiration to strike, or imagine editing is about tinkering with one paragraph to infinity. You just don’t have the time that used to be available; time that your mentors or senior colleagues had once upon a time. Escaping writing prison is not just about finishing your next article. It is about two things: escaping the prison inside your own mind - about what being a ‘real’ academic looks like and what ‘real’ academic work should look and feel like; and the prison of your institutional requirements, squeezing out every last drop of effort on everything but ideas, complex thinking and writing.
Reclaiming how you do academia so that you can write with joy, ease and confidence is what this book is all about.
What can you do with this book?
This book is a practical guide, in other words, it is something you put into practice. It is not a meditation on higher education, but a toolkit that enables you to recognise, manage and then overcome your barriers to writing, and then implement the 6 tools of writing I teach you inside the book so that you can rewrite what being an academic writer means to you. You will use this book to create your own ‘Breakout Blueprint’ that you will then implement over successive weeks to change your real life academic practice. It is not meant to be something that is one and done, but something that is used to coach you through these changes over and over. You’ll recognise your own patterns and put new ones in place as you apply ideas to your own practice, and return to it as your circumstances change.
So if you are ready to change how writing - and academia - feels to you, and you want some help on that journey, this book brings me along with you step by step as you make the changes you need to thrive in your academic writing.
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