Thread by @GJosephRoche

Short thread on academic writing, based on a writing retreat I recently did.

Bear with me. I promise it is about academic writing.

So first of all, it was a writing retreat. I stayed in a renovated pig sty on a farm. Lovely. It cost me $891 for the week.

So, first writing tip: make sure you have money.

If you have a stable income that provides you with surplus money, use that. If not, you're going to have to bust your guts doing some capitalism. I did a bit of on the clock casual academic laboring to pay for mine.

So, it was a retreat, which meant I was able to focus on my writing 24-7. I could do that because I'd left my children behind with my partner, who had support from her parents.

So you need not only some money, probably a fair bit of money, but you also need support from people around you.

I forgot to mention food! I probably spent $150 on food for the week because I wanted to have nice stuff to eat while I worked. So, in order to write, first you need money and support from other people. Anyone who leaves these out of their writing advice is lying.

OK, we're alone in the pig-sty and ready to write. Here's how I planned my day.

I tried to work eight hour days. A 4-hour session in the morning, and 4 in the afternoon. Each of those 4-hour sessions was broken down into two parts.

For the first two hours of writing, I only wrote notes, by hand, on paper. Quotes, summaries, paraphrases, diagrams, trial sentences, etc.

For the second two hours of writing, I would open my laptop, have my notes beside me, and do pomodoro sessions: 25 minutes of writing, followed by a five minute break. Times four.

Guidelines for pomodoro sessions: Get up and walk around during the five minutes. Stretch. Eat. Hydrate. When writing, always stop at the 25 minute mark. This helps maintain momentum.

While doing pomodoro sessions, if I got stuck, I would take notes on pen and paper - questions to help me think, sources to look up, etc. Inevitably though, I would get stuck with nothing to write, especially in the last of four sessions.

So you actually spend about 200 minutes in the day writing. That's a full day of writing imho.

Then - planning across the week. I did this routine for six days straight, and half a day on the seventh. I set milestones but not daily word count targets (nor sessional word count targets).

I had to write 6,200 words, and already about 1,000 words written. (And importantly, I'd done most of the reading I needed to, so I was mostly only re-reading things).

So, I started on Monday, and my aim was to get a first draft, of about 5,000 words, by the end of Wednesday. Which I did, though I had to put in an additional shift after dinner that day to get to that point.

The draft was very rough, with gaps missing in paragraphs, sentences highlighted for revision, occasional passages that said ???remember to talk about X here??? But the important thing was that I could see the whole thing together: how the pieces fit together.

Then, from Thursday onwards, I worked to tidy the whole thing up. Finish incomplete paragraphs. Answer questions to myself. Rewrite the bad sentences (i.e., every single one).

This stage was much harder and much slower.

By the time I had to leave on Sunday, I had a full draft, with some citations missing, and a very incomplete bibliography, and it was also several hundred words over the limit.

So the final stages involved a top-to-bottom edit, deleting whole sentences and one or two entire paragraphs to keep within the word limit, and then another top-to-bottom read to put the bibliography together (because I don't use citation management software).

I was then able to submit the article on time and to start feeling horrified at all the things I realized I left out, etc.

Anyway, academic writing. It's good to think about your writing and to try new things, but it's also important to remember that your capacity to use those technique relies on material resources, other people's labor, and social support.

Hang on, there's one more important point to make. Being in a nice place, having good food to eat, and taking it relatively easy in terms of hours worked were all crucial to this being a successful bout of thinking and writing. Being at ease is really helpful for writing...

...and that's practically impossible for most academics, because the majority of workers at universities are under-paid, over-exploited casual workers who don't get holiday pay and can't afford nice things. The rest of them, meanwhile...

...are wrung out by the unreasonable demands placed on them, and worn down by the constant risk of waking up to find that they've become an 'efficiency' in a spreadsheet.

So my final writing tip is that the government should fund higher education, universities should not be run like businesses, and casual workers should be given stable jobs.