Showing up to a writing session is the first step to writing your article, proposal, thesis, or dissertation. The extensive research projects we write require that we build documents incrementally over time. We must show up & write. regularly if we are to be both successful and happy in academe.
According to Communications scholar, Joli Jensen, the recipe for a rewarding life in academe is “brief, frequent, low stress, and highly rewarding encounters with a project we enjoy.”
Ultimately, we write better when we “contain” our writing to specific times and places. We also write better when we have other writers for company. Rowena Murray and her collaborators have shown the benefits of “writing in social spaces” for reducing task related anxieties, improving overall mood, and increasing productivity (MacLeod et al. 2012; Murray 2014).
show up & write. is a CSU Writes offering that helps writers “contain” their projects in time and space AND provides a writing companion to enhance focus, wellbeing, and productivity.
Writing and social spaces
Writing—regardless of discipline, writer’s skill-level, or genre complexities—can be challenging. For individual researchers and academics who juggle many professional duties, the challenges of creating the time and space to write can be equally great, if not greater, than the very task of writing itself. Education scholar and research dean, Rowena Murray points out that writing can feel solitary but that it mostly relational. “Social writing” or write-together sessions, according to Murray, can be instrumental for “changing writing behaviours” positively and for facilitating a complex “management of competing tasks” (134).
Writing-designated locations help academics manage electronic (email, text messages, phone calls, app alerts) and analog (coworkers, students, family, dogs and cats) distractions. show up & write. sessions are distraction-free zones where people move manuscripts or proposals or other writing-related tasks forward. Working in a writing-designated space with other writers can buoy flagging spirits and keep writers on-task when they might otherwise quit for the day or get sucked into lower priority, but simpler, tasks.
If you have a colleague or lab partner—select a day and time to meet and write together. Or make a regular date with yourself to attend a couple sessions a week to write alongside writers from a variety of programs and departments across campus. show up & write. is open to ALL writers and affirms CSU’s Principles of Community to “create and nurture inclusive environments and welcome, value and affirm all members of our community….”
Productivity and showing up to write
The literature on writing productivity provides numerous and ever-multiplying strategies for academics to try: “schedule every minute” (Newport), “write every day” (Boice), create “BASE habits” (Sword). These approaches vary and may suit the disposition of one writer better than another, but all productivity experts endorse a version of Judy Bridges’ witty imperative that, to be productive, writers must first Shut Up & Write! Bridges reminds us to stop talking about our writing and to just start doing it. Inspired by Bridges, CSU Writes encourages writers first to “show up” and then to work among our quiet and focused companions.
Bibliography
- Boice, Robert. Professors as Writers (1990)
- Bridges, Judy. Shut Up & Write! (2011)
- CSU, Principles of Community (2017)
- Murray, Rowena. Writing in Social Spaces (2015)
- Newport, Cal. Deep Work (2017)
- Schimel, Joshua. Writing Science (2011)
- Sword, Helen. Air & Light & Time & Space. (2017)
