3 Ways to Improve Your Summer Writing Practice

SrdjanPav/E+/Getty Images I began the summer after my first year as an assistant professor having written almost nothing. As the constraints of the semester fell away, a wide expanse of time stretched before me to catch up on everything I hadn’t done in the past months. To get started, I wrote down all the projects I wanted to complete before the fall. It was a long, unsorted list, including papers I wanted to publish from my dissertation, analyses I was wrapping up from my postdoc and projects I hoped would help establish my trajectory as a new tenure-line faculty member. A few days later, I handed the list to a graduate student I was working with. She took one look and laughed out loud, saying it was kind of “scary.” While I was initially taken aback by her candor, she was right—the list was a totally unrealistic vision for my summer writing. Most Popular Sixteen years later, I have found better ways to think about my summer writing practice. I’ve found that three questions help me transition not just out of the academic year, but also back into the fall term: Is my writing practice sustainable? Is it portable? And is it adaptable to different seasons of my life? Sustainable. How many times have we told ourselves that we’ll catch up on writing during our next break? As the expanse of multiple weeks of less structured time opens before us, it’s easy to think—as I did—that we’ll be able to bang out manuscript after manuscript. There is some truth to this. A sustained focus and uninterrupted time can help us develop new insights and ideas. At the same time, we can only maintain a deep focus for a few hours at a time , and we need breaks . So while summer can be a good time to experiment with writing in ways that allow us more time to think , we also need to consider regular writing practices and routines that we can sustain over time. Advertisement I will admit I wasn’t so sure about this until I […]

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