AcBoWriMo or WrEvDaDaMo?
It’s day 12 of AcBoWriMo and if you’ve followed along, you’ll notice the progress bar over there is sloooooowly inching toward my goal — “picometering” is more like it. While I have steadily worked on my diss, I have not written much content. In the first days I wrote up a storm, then I found research holes and my writing is in a holding pattern while I research.
Maybe I should think of this as WrEvDaDaMo, that is, Write Every Damn Day Month. I like what Martin Eve had to say about AcBoWriMo. As a person on the receiving end of the rush to finish from my dissertation advisor, the whole finish a book/dissertation by the end of the month holds the potential to feed into that cycle of speed for the sake of speed in doctoral research. He offers a sound critique of the costs and benefits of AcBoWriMo, namely that non scholars (say, school administrators) will look at the results of AcBoWriMo and think that it must be easy to write good scholarly research in a short amount of time, leaving the slower writers out of the running for fellowships, book contracts, and well, jobs.
But I enjoy having to write every day, because to finish the dissertation in any sort of reasonable timeline (not 15 years) I should write every day. Martin also mentioned in the comments that he limits his writing to 600 words per day. Maybe I’ll give that a try.
I’m finding the AcBoWriMo thing fascinating. You may have noticed my response to Martin http://lizit.me.uk/2011/11/03/to-acbowrimo-or-not-to-acbowrimo/ For me the writing challenge has come at the right time and is providing an incentive to do a doable piece of work within a set time. For others, it would be an unnecessary and inappropriate pressure. I think we have to recognise we all work differently — and whatever the pressures of funding bodies, etc, academic research is not all about outputs, but about the processing and reflection that must take place before we put pen to paper. For me, I do not claim to write every day — and at times I go quite long periods of ruminating and writing nothing. When I do write, I tend to produce a lot of words fairly quickly — I know what I want/need to say and it all tumbles out! But I also have to spend a lot of time working on those words later to turn them from a stream of consciousness into something that may make sense! We all work differently and the incentives and methods that work for one, may not work for another and vice versa — at least that’s what I think
I agree with you, but in my case the pressure to finish is overwhelming and, well … it’s fucking with my head. I’m told that the only thing getting in the way of me finishing is me, my nerves, but then I work and work and work and don’t write much of anything, And other times I feel great and words just pour out. I honestly can’t tell if the times when I don’t produce text is “nerves” or just the way this is supposed to work.
When I was writing Chapter 4 (now I’m revising and reading) I focused on 500 a day. For other chapters I aimed for a page, which is sort of the same thing…500 was a clear goal, but it was also an attainable goal (especially with part-time job, freelancing, and baby). Most days I went a little over 500. I think there might’ve been a few days where I was really into it and did close to 1000. Those days are the exception though.