The 2nd Monday in September is the 10th anniversary of the first session of A Meeting With Your Writing!
When I started it in 2012, there was one session per week at 10 a.m. Eastern on Mondays. You had to register for the entire semester, 15 sessions. We used a telephone conference line: phoning in for the opening prompts, hanging up to write for 90 minutes, and then phoning back in for the closing prompts. I paid extra for a service with numbers outside the US (since most of my clients were Canadian), but not for a toll-free number.
In 2022, it looks like an obvious idea. We now have co-working spaces, and a proliferation of Shut Up and Write sessions, even if they are called something else. People offer writing retreats for academics. Individuals use Twitter and other social media to self-organize writing sprints and remote retreats. The Covid pandemic led to many more of these being offered virtually.
But in 2012, I had no idea if anyone would register. There were a few other services offering accountability, but not really a synchronous session in which to write together.
Enough people registered to make it worthwhile. I kept offering it. And here we are 10 years later.
Helping you keep a commitment to yourself.
The format of A Meeting With Your Writing is based on a structure for “accountability groups” that I learned from Jennifer Hofmann. I’d participated in her groups and found them helpful. I am also the kind of person who finds it more helpful to attend a fitness class, especially one where you commit to a particular session for several weeks.
The name was chosen because I knew that many people treated meetings with others differently than commitments to themselves. Your colleagues might, too. A meeting feels like something you can’t just blow off on a whim. It’s easier to protect your writing time if you can say “I have a meeting” or “I have a conference call”.
Despite the group nature of A Meeting With Your Writing, you are not really meeting with other people. Your meeting agenda is to work on your writing. You are in the company of others, but the meeting is with your writing.
There are no penalties for not attending. I don’t chastise people or chase them up. I just know, from my own experience, that knowing there will be familiar faces (or voices) and that you paid for a thing, can add a little extra nudge to keeping a commitment you wanted to make for yourself.
Just enough structure.
Over time and with experience of running A Meeting With Your Writing, I was able to articulate what made it work more clearly. Although many people who join are seeking accountability, that really isn’t central to how I organize it. (Unlike other groups, I do not prompt you to set a goal for the session, nor to evaluate your progress in relation to a goal.) The first thing that became obvious to me was about structure. (See Just Enough Structure)
In the 10 years since I started running this group, I’ve learned more about ADHD, focus, and brain chemicals. There are good reasons that having a limited time helps you focus. The prompts at the beginning and end of the session help you transition into, and out of, a time devoted to one project. 90 minutes is long enough to get into flow, if that would benefit your project today. It can also be divided into shorter sessions, if the work you are doing benefits from that more intense focus. (See The impact of time on your focus)
Committing to a regular Meeting every week reduces the number of decisions you need to make. You schedule your writing in the same way you schedule your teaching. The nature of the opening prompts mean you don’t need to get super detailed about what will happen during this time, beyond working on your writing. This flexibility is helpful for those who benefit from keeping spontaneity in their routines, or rebel against too much structure. (see Freedom and scheduling)
Many participants have told me that this structure is very ADHD friendly, and friendly to other forms of neurodivergence. Looking back, I realize that the person I borrowed the structure from was very open about her own adult ADHD diagnosis.
Compassion.
Looking back at 10 years of A Meeting With Your Writing, I realize that part of my resistance to “accountability” is the way in which it often contributes to feelings of inadequacy. I genuinely believe that all of my clients are intelligent people, with interesting research questions, and the ability to do good work.
When I started the group, I was thinking of those grant proposal clients who worked in smaller institutions with higher teaching loads. They were frustrated that their publishing records made them less competitive for funding. It felt like the system was stacked against them.
A Meeting With Your Writing is purposefully scheduled during the normal working week, because writing is part of your normal academic workload. I encourage people to try committing to one session a week, even when it feels like it isn’t enough, and see what difference it makes.
The opening prompts focus on what your project needs, and deciding what type of work you will do during this particular session. We don’t get caught up in trying to predict how much progress you might make. The focus is on working consistently during this time. The closing prompts encourage you to notice how much you did.
This approach enables participants to learn about themselves. Instead of pushing yourself to achieve some arbitrary goal and then feeling bad about yourself, you learn about your own capacity, and your own process. I remind you that what you can accomplish in 90 minutes will vary.
Over the years, the prompts have shifted but the focus remains on learning what works for you specifically, and paying attention to variation from one day to another. You build up self-knowledge about what you can accomplish and also about what helps you focus. I remind you that it is normal to be distracted, and help you refocus.
I want you to enjoy your writing. I want you to treat the tedious or frustrating parts of the process as just part of the process. I want you to feel competent. I want you to believe that you are intelligent, have interesting research questions, and can do good work.
Many participants have confirmed that attending the Monday morning session has extra benefits. Writing at the beginning of the week changes how they feel about the place of writing in their workload. It also often inspires them to find time for writing on other days of the week. This is what I’d hoped would happen.
Community.
If 10 years of a Meeting With Your Writing has taught me anything, it’s that what really makes this kind of co-working session effective is community. This is often surprising. After all, we don’t talk about what we are writing about. There is no Slack group, or forum, or whatever that goes along with the sessions. Until 2019, participants didn’t even see each other. We used a telephone line. We hung up to write.
Some of the early participants told me they were surprised at how important it was to know other people were writing at the same time. They had not expected that. I remember once when a participant told me that she’d looked at the clock one day and realized it was 10:15 and she should be writing. She knew we would have already hung up so she just started working. After 90 minutes, she phoned in for the closing prompts and was surprised no one else was there. Then she realized it was Wednesday. The sense of other people writing together worked, even when she’d muddled up the day!
Because this sense of community was there despite not seeing each other, knowing each other’s names, or talking about the writing itself, I resisted switching to Zoom for a long time. I felt like I was late to that party (at least amongst my solo-entrepreneur friends) when I started experimenting with it in 2019.
Some participants still leave the meeting to write, and rejoin at the end. Others find that seeing other people writing helps them stay focused or return to focus more quickly when they get distracted. It might be an ADHD thing. Or maybe some of us just appreciate the visual reminder of community.
I now encourage everyone to share one thing they did during the session in the chat at the end. The purpose is community and compassion. Celebrating the good days. Commiserating about the bad days. And reminding ourselves that it’s normal for your output to vary from one session to the next.
Another 10 years?
A Meeting With Your Writing is now a core element of the Academic Writing Studio. The Studio enables me to complement it with Quarterly Planning Classes, and open group coaching (called Office Hours). I’ve been able to use the Studio as a container to experiment with other complementary classes, including Establishing a Writing Practice, Getting to Grips with Email, Dealing With Reviewer Comments, and writing clinics on topics like prioritizing your writing projects and writing books.
I now have staff who host some of the sessions. A Meeting With Your Writing runs every week even if I’m on holiday or ill. We take a break for 2 weeks over the Christmas/New Year period, but it happens on all of the other bank holidays. We offer 3 sessions a week, though some of those might not work in your time zone. Members are welcome to attend more than one session a week, but making a commitment to one session a week will make a bigger difference than you think it will. (New around here? Explore more about how MWYW works.)
As I look towards the next 10 years, I am committed to keeping A Meeting With Your Writing. I’m developing new things, and rejigging some of the classes to work as asynchronous material with synchronous group coaching sessions. I know some people would benefit from those other things who don’t need or want A Meeting With Your Writing.
And I know some people find A Meeting With Your Writing really helpful. Participants have used it to establish their own habits, that they now maintain on their own. Some attend when they are teaching and drop out in summers and when they have research leave. Others attend for a bit of structure during the summer or their sabbatical. And many use A Meeting With Your Writing as an ongoing support.
10 years on, I am really pleased with the impact this simple idea has had. I look forward to 10 more years.
A 10 year retrospective seems like an appropriate moment to thank those who helped make this happen. This post is already kind of long. And my first draft of that acknowledgements section was over 1000 words! I’ve decided to publish it as a separate post.
Related Posts:
Introducing: the Academic Writing Studio
4 years of A Meeting With Your Writing
A story from… A Meeting With Your Writing
