What’s the ugliest part of your process?*

Last fall, I visited a graduate seminar to talk about my writing and publishing habits. The conversation turned to managing the bad feelings that sometimes accompany writing. One student asked whether I ever get bored with a long-term writing project.

I thought about this for a moment and gave the honest answer, which is that I don’t. One of the wonderful things about academic writing in the humanities is getting to choose fascinating questions and topics. Fascinating for you. For example, I was fascinated by naturalist novels as a graduate student. If you don’t know what a naturalist novel is, basically it’s a 400-600-page tome in which the characters end up doing what you know they are fated to be doing from page one—that thing is dying, typically. Pretty much no one else likes or reads these things and I never teach them because they make students miserable. But I like them.

freedom to pick topics doesn’t mean that I delight in writing at all times or that rainbows shoot from my laptop when I sit down to work.

However, this freedom to pick topics doesn’t mean that I delight in writing at all times or that rainbows shoot from my laptop when I sit down to work. Instead, as I told the graduate students, there tends to be a point in my writing process that bores me.

Over many academic writing projects, I have learned that while I love conceiving a project and even carrying out the labor of the middle (additional archival research, drafting pages), I hate finishing. Because this is such a regular response, I know that it has to do with the project phase, not the project itself.

Perhaps unfortunately, I have termed this phase of the writing process “cleaning up my mess.” It’s not particularly sexy or appealing, but the idea has stuck.

There’s good news here, though. As I told the students, knowing that I hate finishing means that I can prepare for it. I can give myself structures and rewards as a way to pull myself through this difficult phase.

What does this look like? In most cases, consuming a lot of the candy known as Hot Tamales (you may call them red hots). I don’t generally eat a lot of candy, but when I am bringing an article or book chapter across the finish line, I will eat a box of Hot Tamales whenever I am working, even if it’s 8:30am. Less gross than this is that I spread my manuscript pages out on the floor so I can see everything. I also work from a very concrete checklist, moving through clearly delineated and concrete tasks. When the list is done, so am I.

However, for big projects coming to an end, I might need more than this. Most recently, I finished a book manuscript. This represented the completion of a nearly eight-year project, so I had all the bad feelings about making it over the finish line. To draft the last section, I sent myself to the MLA (Modern Language Association) conference in the middle of the Omicron spike and squirreled away in a hotel room for the weekend. To make the final edits, I intentionally scheduled this work for a long flight. These two pushes took place in special spaces and times that allowed me to get through my toughest work. Crucially, I was also without children at both points.

Your tough phase may not be finishing. It might be getting up the energy to start, or it might be sustaining work through the long middle of a project. Also, your mileage may vary on the spicy candy front. In fact, neither I nor my stomach really recommend this as your long-term solution. What I do recommend, however, is identifying the part of projects that you find most challenging and identifying solutions that have worked for you in the past.

you can prepare for the tough time in any project’s lifecycle. How can you expect yourself to behave? What structures do you need to implement? What materials do you need to have on hand?

Armed with this knowledge, you can prepare for the tough time in any project’s lifecycle. How can you expect yourself to behave? What structures do you need to implement? What materials do you need to have on hand?

The same thinking can be applied to the semester-as-project. At my university, we have very long semesters. We go into a week sixteen of teaching before the term ends. Inevitably, students start flagging around week 13, not nearly close enough to the finish line. Rather than fighting this every term, I plan to create breaks and fun assignments in the final weeks. I almost always offer my students an alternative format for the final that allows them to process the class in some creative fashion. Also, I’ll frequently have a week that could be cancelled in favor of a week of student conferences.

For university leaders and department chairs, thinking about faculty energy in a similar way could be valuable. The classic “could this meeting be an email?” applies here. But so could positive boosts, as long as they really are boosts, not new work disguised as a boost.

What’s your least favorite project phase? How do you incentivize yourself to move through it?

*You get bonus points if you caught the Zappa reference in the title.