Writing an academic book is challenging, but it doesn’t have to feel like torture. Join me, Jane Joanne Jones, writing coach and developmental editor to Women and non-binary scholars in academia. As I teach you how to write your academic book with ease, clarity, and purpose, let’s bend the rules, expose the hidden curriculum and write your book the right way, your way. Hello friends and welcome back. I really hope you’re enjoying the first season of the Wright Prose Podcast. This is the final episode of the season. If you’ve been listening, I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and if you’re new, go listen to the rest of the season. There are only two episodes that you really need to listen to in order they’re the two right before this one, but otherwise you can binge however you’d like. Now, let’s get into today’s topic, which is about treating your writing like a dress rehearsal. 

Let’s start with a very simple truth. A lot of you’re scared to put words on paper for a couple of reasons. There’s fear of judgment, perfectionism, and concerns about the revision process. We are going to get into each of these reasons, and then of course, I’m going to give you some options for reframing how you think about writing so that you can make progress. So let’s talk about fear of judgment. I have a coaching program called Elevate. It’s for women and non-binary scholars who want to transform their dissertations into publication worthy books. And I’m telling you this because within this program we host editorial workshops. This is where you share a very short segment of your work on the screen, and our developmental editor has a conversation with you about the writing. Now, even in this very low stakes environment, we have small cohorts in this group. 

The work never leaves the community. But even here, students express that they’re fearful of sharing their work, and it’s not because they’re concerned, that someone will steal it. It’s only shared via video for a short amount of time. Instead, they’re worried about being judged. They’re worried that the editors in the program will think they’re bad writers. We never think that our only thought is how we can help you take the next step to make progress. In your writing, you might be similarly concerned about what people will think if you share your ideas. But guess what? Before you share it, you’re the one who’s looking at it and thinking it’s bad, rather than thinking that the draft you have is a necessary step in your process. And I love using this example with clients because it’s so silly, but it brings the point forward. Have you ever looked at a baby who’s walking and been like, you are bad at walking? 

You’re just not a good walker, baby? No, of course not. You’d be terrible if you did that. You know the baby is a work in progress just like you’re writing. So here’s how I suggest you think about your drafts. Drafts are simultaneously invaluable and absolutely inconsequential. They’re invaluable because they’re the way you work out your thoughts and figure out how to move forward. They’re inconsequential because nobody who has any type of gatekeeping power over you ever has to see them. You can be ultra selective about who looks at your drafts. You don’t have to share them with the world. You don’t have to post them on the internet. They’re drafts. They can be your secret. You can share it with people you fully trust and leave it there. Like I said, you could be ultra selective about who looks at them. Now, the second factor is perfectionism, and this is the idea that I’m supposed to get it right the first time. 

Now, whenever you hear that you’re supposed to, whether you hear it from yourself or from somebody else, your senses should go up. You should get little goosebumps, right? The question here is why are you supposed to get it right the first time because you have a PhD because you’re supposed to be an expert because of some other pressure filled standard you have set for yourself. What is this doing for you? Really? How does it serve you? Do you magically start writing pristine first drafts when you say to yourself, I’m supposed to get this right the first time, I’m guessing no. So even as we have this thought, and of course perfectionism runs rampant in academia, we have to stop ourselves and say, Hey, I have this thought that I should get it right the first time. What is a thought doing for me? Is it helping me be more attentive or am I already very attentive? 

Is it helping me work harder? Or do I already have a really strong work ethic? What is it doing? Is it just making me feel bad about myself? Is it causing me to pause and delay my work because I’m worried about what I’m going to put on the page and I want to avoid getting it down? If that’s what it’s doing, it isn’t helping you. It isn’t helping you reach a higher standard, but the sense of perfectionism is pervasive, and it is related to our final factor, which is a fear of revision. Now, I remember a client saying to me, and I’m paraphrasing of course, to protect, I never give you exact details of client situations, but I remember a client, an Elevate student saying to me concerning an early draft, I don’t want to leave a mess for future me to clean up referring to their draft. 

That comment has stayed with me for years. This idea that revision is like cleanup duty, and I’m not going to go on a ramp, I promise. But I think that when we use the pejorative language, like shitty first draft, we really begin to believe that our first efforts are terrible. And in fairness, sometimes we use that language because we want to normalize not doing things right the first time. But I think sometimes we go to the other extreme where we say things like shitty first draft and we’re like, oh, this is actually terrible, so terrible that I won’t be able to fix it, that I can improve this. But in reality, what we can’t fix is that which doesn’t exist. So if your fear of getting things on paper is preventing you from writing, then it will be impossible for you to improve it, right? 

Because there’s nothing there to improve. This is why I preach neutrality towards our writing. The fact that you have to revise something actually does not mean that the first version was bad. The first version was what you can do with the capacity, resources, and knowledge that you had at that time. It was a step in the process. Okay, imagine making a pie, right? And you have your pie dough, your pie dough, and it’s chilling, and it’s not obviously shaped like a pie yet. You don’t look at it and say, oh, this is crap because it doesn’t look like a pie. No, you say, this is step one. This is the first step, and then I roll it out and put it in my pie pan. I am not a baker. Put it in my pie pan and make it look like a pie. We recognize that there are steps in the process and that each one of those steps is essential to getting us to the final product. We don’t look down on the early steps because they don’t look like the finished product. 

So we recognize in so many areas of life that it’s going to take us more than a few times to get something right, or it’s a hit or stride, or just that there are multiple steps until we get to completion. So when it comes to our scholarship, we should give ourselves an equal amount of grace. So in preparation for this episode, I was reading a profile of a violinist named Hillary Han, where she discusses not just practicing the violin, but creating a practice, practice as a noun that includes self-compassion and being comfortable with sharing even when her playing isn’t perfect. She also discusses how she was never exposed to musicians practicing and she really had no idea how anyone improved, and I couldn’t help but compare this to academia where we usually see the finished work, but don’t discuss what goes into creating it. The process is opaque. 

So you’re left to your own devices to imagine how people work, and for some reason, you always imagine that their work process must be superior to yours. Now, things have gotten a lot better than they were when I was in grad school. I started grad school like 20 years ago. I don’t even want to say that. But now people are a bit more transparent about the number of drafts they write, the effort they put into their work, the privilege that allows them to do certain types of work, and the obstacles that they face. I hope that I have added to that transparency with this podcast. So in closing, this is what I want you to remember. It’s not your job to get it right the first time. It’s your job to put in the work to improve whether improvement means enjoying the process more, enhancing the quality of your writing, sharpening your ideas, coming up with a new idea, or whatever it is that brings you more pleasure and ease in your writing. Thank you so much for listening, and you take good care of yourself. Bye for now. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. If you like what you heard, please share the podcast with a friend. Or if you’re an Apple listener, leave a review. It helps other folks find the podcast so we can continue the conversation and make sure that when it’s time to write your book, you can do it on your terms, your way.