When I started A Meeting With Your Writing, co-working groups for academics were practically unheard of Shut Up and Write didn’t exist yet. The most popular “accountability group” for academic writers, The Academic Ladder, didn’t include co-working. There is now a proliferation of options, both specifically for academics, and more generally. It is common to describe […]
Read More »accountability
Accountability vs Community
I’ve been reading Rowena Murray‘s Writing in Social Spaces, and it has helped me articulate something that underpins a lot of my work. Community is important to your ability to do this work. This got long, if what you really want are suggestions for creating writing community, jump here. When I talk about A Meeting […]
Read More »The dangers of counting words
A lot of people count words as a way of measuring their writing progress. Although there are stages of the writing process where this is helpful, there are also points in the process where counting words could actually be damaging. What you measure, affects your process If you measure the number of words, you are going […]
Read More »Thoughts on accountability, deadlines & goals
You want to write more. You want to finish and submit more of your writing. You may think that the only way to do that is to do one or more of the following: set concrete (product-oriented) goals give yourself deadlines for achieving those goals make yourself accountable to someone else for those goals and/or […]
Read More »Process vs Product
I have an ambivalent relationship with goals. I know they are important but I find setting specific goals with an output and a deadline stalls my work rather than motivating it. I see that a lot of you struggle with similar issues in your writing. This post uses a long analogy to my own process […]
Read More »How I help with writing
A hadn’t been publishing. He wrote regularly despite a full teaching load. But he wasn’t getting things finished. And he wasn’t submitting them. Writing was an intellectually satisfying process for A. In thinking about why he didn’t finish he realized that he wasn’t motivated by the product — an article or a book — but […]
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