" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

I do the same thing every­day and I’ve been doing the same thing every­day for months. I get up at 5 and work. Then break­fast, get dressed, go to the gym. Then home for lunch and the kid’s nap time. “Wow, Dacia, you’re so dis­ci­plined!” they say. “You must be get­ting a lot done!” they say.

Not so much. To clar­ify, I’ve dis­ci­plined my day, how­ever, I have not dis­ci­plined my writ­ing. I carve out time every day for work, but I’m unin­spired. I sit at my desk, butt in the chair, as it were, and not a whole lot hap­pens. Well, a whole lot of noth­ing hap­pens. I busily research. Or I read an arti­cle. Or I write a few med­i­ta­tive pages about what is hap­pen­ing in my head that usu­ally looks like some­thing you’d see carved in a wood plank on the floor of Bri­ar­cliff Manor. I’m not get­ting any­thing done at this rate even if it LOOKS like I’m get­ting work done. So I’m going to face my anx­ious demons head-on, and start doing stuff. I’m shak­ing up my daily sched­ule. Today, I took A. to the library and went for a bike ride. Tomor­row, who knows. I’ve decided to take adven­tures and squeeze in the writ­ing when I need to instead of when I have to. I’ll report back on how this goes.

James Brown is my spirit animal.

You know what that means — It’s Aca­d­e­mic Writ­ing Month! Short­ened to AcW­riMo, Aca­d­e­mic Writ­ing Month was started by Char­lotte Frost from Phd2Published last year as Aca­d­e­mic Book Writ­ing Month, or AcBoW­riMo where, as Frost describes, “We are going to wear comfy clothes, drink a lot of cof­fee, prob­a­bly nap in our offices at strange hours and see how close we can get to writ­ing 50 thou­sand words in one month.” This year, the rules are a lit­tle dif­fer­ent and this year, the goals were expanded to include all aca­d­e­mic writ­ing projects. The rules are simple:

1. Set crazy goals
2. Pub­licly announce those goals
3. Draft a strategy
4. Check in
5. Don’t pro­cras­ti­nate
6. Go pub­lic with your results.

That’s it. To get started, visit the home base of AcW­riMo, fol­low the #acw­rimo hash­tag on twit­ter, and/or join their Face­book page.

My goal is to have an ugly, but work­ing, draft of my dis­ser­ta­tion by Decem­ber 1. That means an aver­age of 1,000 words per day. I’ve rein­stated my word meter over there on the right to track my daily progress, which means you’ll like see a lot more of my writ­ing here. The great thing about #AcW­riMo is it’s like a month-long inten­sive writ­ing camp. Every­thing you do is focused squarely on the craft of writ­ing, the stakes are low, and the sup­port is high. I freak­ing love this stuff.

More arti­cles on Aca­d­e­mic Writ­ing Month:

Aca­d­e­mic Writ­ing Month and the social land­scape of aca­d­e­mic prac­tice — The Guardian Why I changed my mind about #acw­rimo — The The­sis Whisperer

Now get to work.

I hit a block today and when that hap­pens, I usu­ally pop open a how-to guide to dis­ser­ta­tion writ­ing. I remem­ber some­one told me about Rowena Murray’s How to Write A The­sis and decided to take a look. (Luck­ily its avail­able through eBrary, so those of you with uni­ver­sity sub­scrip­tions to read it instantly). When I skimmed the table of con­tents, Chap­ter 8: “It is never too late to start” caught my eye. It’s a very thor­ough, quick-and-dirty recipe for just fin­ish­ing the damn dis­ser­ta­tion already. The chap­ter is full of prac­ti­cal strate­gies and prompts that I won’t go into here, but it was the con­clu­sion that res­onated with me. She described how stu­dents expressed inse­cu­rity and doubt over the quick-and-dirty com­ple­tion method. Because stu­dents are just start­ing out in their fields, they won­der how they can be “sure” about what they’re writ­ing. To which Mur­ray said:

[W]e have to repo­si­tion our­selves in the knowl­edge process. We can­not wait until this hap­pens to us; we have to make it hap­pen. We have to con­struct “sure.” It is an inven­tion. If we do not invent that moment, it will not nec­es­sar­ily occur spon­ta­neously. Occa­sion­ally — per­haps more often than that — we have to force it, even when we feel that being “sure” is a very dis­tant prospect. The­sis writ­ers have to take them­selves to that point. You can then move from being unsure and not writ­ing, to being unsure and writ­ing reg­u­larly. You have to silence the inter­nal edi­tor. We all have to do that.

Word.