Do academics need to write everyday?
Should I be writing everyday?
This is a question I used to ask myself all the time. I have the answer for you at the bottom of this post.
It was advice I’d see every now and again in places like Inside Higher Ed and from prolific creative writers I liked, like Julia Cameron, Stephen King, or David Sedaris.
Arguments for academics seemed to be, in a busy academic career, the idea of finding a good chunk of hours to write on a regular basis is an illusion. It’s cloud cuckoo land. If you're waiting for that then don’t hold your breath.
Find time every day, goes the advice. 30 minutes before you do anything else. It could be in the PJs with the morning coffee before even showering or getting ready to go out, timetable permitting. This is great advice for some, but very difficult for others e.g., with small children or an early start to teaching.
But as much as I appreciated this advice, I also started attending (and eventually running) weekly writing groups in the women's network at the university I worked at at the time. Compelled by the accountability and solidarity offered by regular writing, I set one up for the linguists across the university. Lo and behold, I'd managed to fence off around 5-6 hours a week for writing in term-time. And those were 2-3 hour chunks, where I could actually go deep on an idea. Not just bash out a couple of paragraphs. I searched for agreement online that maybe I didn’t have to wrote everyday after all (Helen Sword makes the argument in this article).
Writing everyday is unnecessary, I concluded at this point. You can't even think deeply if you're bashing out 30 minutes anyway, I told myself, so what's the point.
Is heaven real?
That being said, although I had this carefully carved out research time at this point in my career AND I was off social media, had blocked all access to The Guardian, YouTube and even tailored my Stack Overflow browser page so it blocked those fun "hot network questions" in the sidebar, I actually wasn't productive from the output side. Not much was coming out of the other side. This was actually a research pipeline issue, which I talk about here, but putting in these long hours of writing graft made me feel productive, but I didn’t have much to show for it.
Covid split people into two camps -- broadly it was people with children and people without children, but also in academia (and I'm sure elsewhere), people with large admin/roles of responsibility, and those without. I was lucky to fall into the latter camp in both. I had no child at the time and my admin role was Programme Director of a course that had been online for a decade. Win.
What did I do with all the time loosened out of the long commute (which, to be fair, can also be excellent for writing bursts) and the liminal spaces that fall between teaching, coffees, corridor chats? I wrote. In fact, a gang of us who've been friends for a while and spanned both sides of the Atlantic met weekly to write together, and kept a spreadsheet tracker of our daily writing (this is something we'll be doing in The Sisterhood next month!) Surprise, surprise: the Americans wrote massively more. But even in bottom place, I wrote every day for months on end. And the outputs started to show. Articles that had been stuck in the fatberg of the pipeline for years finally started to emerge.
So do you need to write everyday? No, not if you don't want to. You don't have to do anything. But if you want to be highly productive in your research and for that to feel fairly effortless, get your arse in the chair every morning at 9am before you do anything else and at the very least look at your article. Small and consistent pays off big time. Team this with a clear idea of which point is next in your research pipeline and a rough idea of how fast you want the pipeline to move, and it will pay off dividends.
Since I had my son and come back from maternity, I have not been writing everyday. At points I told myself it's not necessary (like I used to), and I'll just do my weekly writing group and a couple of retreats a year (I loved Chapelgarth earlier this year, especially the setting, the host, and the fact it's only vegetarian and vegan). But in reality, the reason I’ve not been writing everyday is because I’ve been sleep deprived and I can't be bothered. I decided to put my energy into just getting by, doing my teaching and running my grant project and I have been good with that for the past two years.
But I'm turning a corner now, and when my sabbatical starts next week, the plan is to write every day. Not because every 30 minute chunk will produce an outstanding idea or even paragraph, but because it keeps the momentum going, it helps with the avoidance, and creating the discipline to sit down and do something, even when you really can’t be arsed, pays off big time. Discipline is sacrifice today for pay-off tomorrow. And 30 mins a day isn’t too much to ask.
