on writing...

Want to talk a little about academic writing. I’ve been stuck in a several years long writer’s block, mostly thinking that nothing I have to say is worthy of writing about. It is a common situation experienced by academics---the pressure to produce grand amounts of ‘product’ undermines the creativity and confidence necessary to actual do the work. I have quite a list of things I would like to research and write about, a few of which are simply thought pieces, requiring only my knowledge and experience.

In my role as an academic I serve as an advisor to quite a few doctoral students and I have seen about 14 dissertations come to fruition as chair, with a few more on the way. I have not seen very many of my students publish from their dissertations, however, which has always perplexed me. And, until now, I myself did not write anything from my mine.

This past month I finally cracked open the old beast and proceeded to extract/rip/tear two articles from it. The study was historical in nature so it is actually still relevant and I found it fairly easy to do—which begs the question, why did it take me 15 years to do it?

There is an enormous emotional and psychological investment in a dissertation and for many years I could not even look at mine without getting dizzy and nauseated. I finally re-read it a few years ago –only because enough time had passed for me to forget it. It wasn’t bad, to be honest. Some silly mistakes and I could recognize, or remember, clearly how it had seemed to me at the time to be such an important piece of work, something that would rock the world of library and information science. Which it did not, of course. It is just a study, a freshmen work of a now junior academic.

Perhaps much of this ‘fear’ comes from how we read the works of others, or hear them present their work at conferences or special lectures. I confess that I find it impossible to keep up with all the work being done in my little corner of my beloved LIS field, let alone the broader context of social science and information communication and technologies. The journals I still receive in print form pile up on my desk and the online ones are easily forgotten until I happen to remember to peruse their content, despite the annoying alerts I get to read, read, read!  If I can’t keep up with my reading then how I can inform my research and writing….and teaching!?

The textbook I started 10 years ago lays abandoned, having blown through two publishers. Articles half-heartedly started, or presentations given that never evolved further into some publishable products, book chapters for edited books floundering around on a flash drive somewhere. I have mounds of notebooks with long rambling handwritten missives about some idea or research project that have never amounted to anything.

And, yet, I finally found the confidence and energy I needed to write from the one manuscript that really counted, that has been glaring at me from my bookshelf for 15 years. Perhaps it required me reaching some invisible milestone or some level of maturity that I did not yet possess. I have noticed that in the last few years I have let go of some long-held beliefs about my field, my work, science, and the scientific community that I had inhabited for so long….let go of what I saw as my contribution to it and my place in it. Did that need to happen so I could break the writer’s block? What is the signal that finally set the writing in motion?

Well, who knows really. Maybe I will find out sometime in the next 15 years. It remains to be seen if the journal will actually publish my two articles---the review process has only just begun. But, I have great satisfaction in actually checking this particular item off my writing list.

Pic of title page of my dissertation: