Tips from the NCFDD Monday Motivator: August 2023 edition

Monday, July 24, 2023
Writing through Resistance

by Kerry Ann Rockquemore, PhD
Founder, NCFDD

We've all been there. By some miracle, we manage to secure an hour (maybe more!) of quiet time for writing. Instead of being kept up all night by the family, the news, or a Netflix binge, we slept, and we slept good. In the morning, we brew a coffee and make the perfect breakfast to power us through the day. After eating, we make our way to the computer, hyped about all the brilliance that's about to happen. Surrounding our computer isn't the usual pile of books, article printouts, and month-old coffee mug stains. Just an immaculate surface with the materials you need to get moving on your writing. You look at your screen. Even your computer desktop is immaculate, not littered with miscellaneous files and folders whose contents you've long forgotten. On your browser, you have just one tab open.

"Let's do this!" you tell yourself. "Let's #&%@ write."

An hour later, nothing. A blank word doc. The curse of the blank page.

What the heck happened? You did everything in your power to set yourself up to get some good writing done, and yet, nada.

The culprit, friend, is your resistance.

In some respect, your resistance is a good thing. It's like a bodyguard that protects you from harmful things. For a lot of us, writing puts us in an incredibly vulnerable position. When we write articles or books or grants, we know that our work will eventually be subject to debate and criticism. In the vast majority of cases, most of our writing will be rejected by a journal editor or publisher, which is all too frequent in the earlier stages of our publishing careers (of course, rejection still happens to even the most prolific of scholars). Our resistance keeps us from writing because it thinks it's keeping us safe. The problem is, a major part of our job is to get that writing out the door, and ultimately, published. In this respect, resistance is not our friend.

Resistance pops up in a variety of ways. Maybe you get the urge to check your email (we call this "workcrastination"). Maybe you jump on the socials ("Twit-crastination"). Maybe your body has a physical reaction-it gets hungry, thirsty, cold, hot, sleepy, etc. Maybe you find yourself suddenly compelled to take on other unrelated tasks like clean the bathroom or do your laundry. Or maybe instead of tackling the writing that needs to get done, you fall back on other intellectual work that feels safer ("lit review-crastination," "table making-crastination," "edit-crastination," or Anthony's favorite, "type your references manually-crastination"). Maybe your resistance prompts an existential crisis-Should I really be an academic? Maybe I should go to law school? How about pursuing that second PhD I always wanted? Ultimately, for most academics we meet, resistance falls into one of three buckets: procrastination, avoidance, and denial.

And please believe that resistance too is not immune to the larger structural forces at play in the academy. Underrepresented voices-Black, Indigenous, and People of Color scholars, undocumented scholars, women scholars, scholars with disabilities, first-generation scholars, queer and transgender scholars (or any combination of the above)-are especially likely to have their resistance working on overdrive. That's because the academy, in its original design, was not made with them in mind. For these scholars, navigating the academy can feel like navigating a landmine, so of course, their resistance will emerge more frequently. It's important that scholars from the dominant group acknowledge this and acknowledge the role they play in perpetuating this, whether it's intentional or not.

Anyway, if you have resistance, guess what? You're normal! If you don't, then good for you, we suppose. Lucky you. Spend some of that extra energy helping the other 99% of us out. K, thanks!

For this Monday Motivator, we want you to name your resistance. Like if Shonda Rhimes were developing a new Netflix series called Academia, and she needed to draw up scenes of faculty members experiencing writing resistance (soooo TV-worthy, we know), then your precise descriptions of resistance would merit a serious consultation fee.

For example, when we tracked resistance, one of us came up with this when sitting down to write an article:

• I'm getting sleepy.
• I need more coffee.
• The coffee I make isn't strong enough. I need real coffee.
• Which of the two Starbucks near me to I drive to?
• My brain's feeling overcaffeinated.
• Maybe Twitter friends can cheer me on. Let me post "I'm writing, y'all. Cheer me on."
• Why has it been ten minutes and my tweet only has 3 likes?
• ::delete Twitter::
• I hate this article. I don't feel like writing about this. I'd rather be working on x.
• Where's my dog? He needs cuddles.

This writing day was a wash. But what we realized the next day is that the same sequence of events started to play out when it was time to write. Resistance, what are you doing here?

Once the realization came, we figured out creative ways to muscle through each step of resistance. If you're getting sleepy when that blank word doc is staring you straight in your face, try muscling out a minute of writing. Or five sentences. Or write your thoughts out by hand. If you're literally sleepy (caring for children, hatewatching the news, binging on Netflix till 3am will have that effect, after all), then try doing some basic yoga stretches or bust out a few jumping jacks or meander around your home for ten minutes. When you do this, you'll often find that the resistance starts diminishing, and with enough of a push, you eventually prove to yourself that resistance can be overcome.

Everybody's resistance looks different. The interesting thing is, though, that most academics haven't done a precise tracking of what their resistance looks like. Knowing what you're dealing with makes it a lot easier to overcome. You can literally stare at your resistance symptoms and test out different ways of moving past them. Obviously, there will be a lot of trial and error, but we believe that with enough experimenting, you can figure it out-especially if you do this exercise with some of your writing buddies or fellow academics. In fact, commiserating about your writing challenges is one of the best ways to offset resistance. Knowing that others share your same vulnerabilities makes you feel less bad. Plus, you can crowdsource strategies for overcoming resistance!

The Weekly Challenge

This week, we challenge you to:

• Use a timer each day for your writing. Using a timer is an experiment that has gotten a lot of faculty to shut off the noise in their heads and get to the writing. Conditioning yourself to "just #$*@& write" can help you break through resistance.
• Each day pay attention to what your resistance looks like. Record it. (After all, Shonda Rhimes might be calling you one to consult for Academia one day).
• If your resistance manifests as a behavior (the urge to do something else), record it.
• If your resistance emerges as negative talk, write down what it's saying.
• At the end of the week, take a few minutes to look over your resistance log to see if any patterns emerge.
• Keep that log! We'll be using it next week to create a resistance diagnostic tool that's unique to YOU.

We hope this week brings you the energy to track your resistance, the desire to deepen your relationship with this ever-present piece of your humanity, and the confidence to know that you can move around your resistance each day no matter how it manifests.