The Writing Process

I always get questions from my neighbors and friends about what professors do in the summer time. I have to explain that I write papers in the summer and that my job is more than just giving lectures and grading papers. They check out my grubby t-shirt and my hair in a knotty pony tail and then give me a skeptical look. The thought bubbles over their head are saying, "sure. She’s watching Oprah and lazing about."

No really. I’m writing. And it is very, very painful.

I started a paper on the Internet and American politics a few weeks after the end of the semester. It a theoretical paper, which brings together a lot of literature and adds my own spin to things. I wanted to write without the pressure of deadline in order to produce something better than the rush jobs that I usually do in the summer, so I decided to give the end of summer APSA conference a miss this year.

By last week, I had forty pages of stuff. Well, forty pages of bad stuff. I was too caught up in making every small point that I had ever thought up and not the overall picture. I wrote pages and pages of long descriptive passages with eloquent language. But I had buried the big point somewhere on page 30. I had started writing a book, rather an article. I finally realized what I had done over the weekend. On Sunday, I made a new outline. All week, I’ve been hacking and slashing and things are finally coming together. The goal is to have a decent rough draft by next week, when the kids finish camp.

There something tortuous about this process. Each sentence requires a certain amount of blood letting. One paragraph comes out easily, but keeping my ADHD riddled mind focused enough to write a second and third paragraph requires a mental whipping. Editing makes waterboarding look good.

I experimented with offering myself little treats and incentives. I tried writing at home for a while, then moved to my office, and now I’m backing writing at home.

I know I’ll be pleased when it’s all done and I suppose it beats a day job, but this writing process sure hurts.

The Wordle of my paper:

UPDATE: Funny conversation between Dan and his brother about Dan’s summer "research" projects.