What to do when you feel stuck with your academic writing
If you’re feeling anything like me, you may be struggling with writing productivity these days. It can be really hard to get going on writing tasks right now, or trying to find the motivation to even start on a project. Sometimes I’ll find myself opening the Word fie for a research paper I’m working on, only to immediately minimize the window and spend the next 20 minutes work on other tasks and avoiding writing.
If you can relate to this feeling, you’re not alone! Whether you’re a PhD student or a tenured professor, it’s 100% normal to feel stuck with your writing. When this happens to me, there are a few strategies I can take. Knowing I have these options in my back pocket is super useful and can help to reduce writing dread or anxiety!
1) Break things down into a smaller task list. When I see “Work on paper revisions” or “Write manuscript draft” on my to do list, it can feel really overwhelming. It’s no wonder I struggle to get started, those are really large tasks that will take several days or weeks for me to complete! Instead, I try to break those projects down into much, much smaller tasks. For a new manuscript draft, that might mean putting things on my task list like “Outline methods section” and “Analyze participant demographics.” For paper revisions, I always create a table of all the reviewer comments and suggestions, which then becomes my task list! Much less overwhelming.
2) Start small and follow your energy. Take stock of where your energy is at and what feels like a manageable task right now. Diving right into a literature review for a paper you haven’t worked on in months might feel like a steep hill to climb. Instead, you could start by printing the paper out and re-reading it from beginning to end. Another strategy is to think of tasks that will help you get into the flow of working on the paper. I was recently working on a paper revision and found that addressing the reviewer comments around the methods section felt like a much more attainable goal than to re-visit the intro or discussion. I started with the methods, and then by the end of the day had moved onto the introduction and had addressed 80% of the reviewer comments! I don’t think I would’ve been able to do that if I hadn’t started in a place that acknowledged my energy in the beginning.
3) Fight your inner critic - what’s good enough for right now? For academics, the inner critic can be loud, especially when writing. You might find that the words you type aren’t as eloquent or thoughtful as they appear in your head. For me, having a mantra can be helpful for pushing back against my inner critic: like “good enough is good enough”. It reminds me that it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time, and in fact when I re-visit it later my writing is often not as bad as my inner critic seemed to think. Focus on getting your writing to “good enough” for right now. Maybe that means your first rough draft will be especially rough, but that’s good enough!
4) Give it some distance. This is advice I learned from someone else and it’s especially useful when working on a paper revision: give the work some distance. Pretend that you’ve been tasked with editing this paper and the reviewers have already done the heavy lifting of determining what needs to be changed. You’re simply there to implement the edits they’ve suggested. it can take a lot of the sting out of revising!
5) Make a to do list at the end of your writing session. I do this every time I write and it’s truly been a game-changer! When I’m wrapping up my writing for the day, as a last step I make a list of the task I need to accomplish next time. This might be things I didn’t get to that day or next steps that are most logical based on where I’m at with the paper. When I do this, it makes it soooo much easier to get started the next time I sit down to write. I have my list to start with already prepared! The trick here is to make sure you put that list in a place you’ll have easy access to it next time. For me, that means either putting it in Notion or in my favorite notebook.
6) Celebrate your writing wins. Think about the different ways you might integrate celebration into your writing practice. I’ll be the first one to admit that this one is still hard for me. BUT I also know how important it is to celebrate writing wins when we have them. Even something that may seem small should be celebrated, like spending a few hours on a manuscript you’ve been avoiding. My typical celebration methods are to share publicly about my wins, usually on Instagram Stories or Twitter. I find it really encouraging to have other folks cheer me on and celebrate my accomplishments with me!
