Slow Writing

I'm at an interesting confluence of professional development methodologies. For the Xavier University Faculty Writing Group, the guiding premise is Just Do It™ -- force yourself to write, even if only for 15 minutes a day. Squeeze it in however you can. (I've been pushing myself to do 30 minutes.) This makes sense; it's the same advice I was given as a creative writing graduate student; it's the same advice you get from any successful writer: write every day no matter what. But I'm also in a book club that is currently reading and discussion The Slow Professor by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, a book that attempts to embrace the ideals of the Slow movement while living the life of the modern academic. Berg and Seeger, I think, would not agree with the Just Do It™ premise of my writing group.

Berg and Seeger argue for a greater mindfullness of our time, even if they never use that particular language. They argue for faculty to incorporate into their lives what they call "timeless time," sessions that are purposefully (mindfully) organized in order to allow us to focus wholly and completely on an activity... an activity like writing. According to Berg and Seeger, a session of "timeless time" requires several things of us:

• A period of transition, time to focus our energies on the upcoming activity;
• The acceptance that we will probably need more time than we think accomplish this activity;
• A sense of "playfulness"; and
• A silencing of our inner and outer critics who think that such activity is a waste of time (and money).

So on the one hand, I'm encouraged to squeeze in 15 or 30 minutes to write, no matter what, to be consistent and regimented -- the same 15 or 30 minute every day of the week, while on the other, I'm encouraged to not simply carve out a chunk of time during which to write, but to create an extended session of timelessness -- a meditative, almost spiritual experience.

At first, this seemed contradictory, but they're not. They just need to balance each other. So I'll be trying something new in the next week: I'm still carving out that 30 minutes each day (I've been doing it at 8:30 every night, after I've read to and put my son to bed, because I'm not a morning person (I'm really just not)), but I'll be leaving the first 5, 10, or 15 minutes to prepare myself to write for the rest of that half hour.

The question now is what to do with that "period of transition." I want to say I'll do some kind of focusing meditation; however, I'm guessing that will often be supplanted by a need to review some research before I start writing. A challenge I've found with the write every day model is that you need to be prepared to write -- not psychically prepared, as Berg and Seeger suggest, but prepared with the research in mind. When I do creative writing, that's often not an issue, as it's all in my head. But scholarly writing, but its nature, can't be all in my head. So I've found myself leaving big gaps in my writing these days, notes to myself to "check the literature on this" and "verify this idea." So that transition period may become a literature review period. We'll see.

Note: This post first appeared on the Xavier University Faculty Writing Group's blog.