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

When I was 8-years old, Berry Gordy’s Bruce Lee homage The Last Dragon was my favorite movie. I was so in love with this movie that I took kung fu classes, I did fly­ing kicks off my sofa, and I watched Bruce Lee movies with my dad so I could get the references.

This bit of Amer­i­can nos­tal­gia is brought to you by the last day of Aca­d­e­mic Book Writ­ing Month. I first read about AcBoW­riMo on Novem­ber 1 and decided right then and there to par­tic­i­pate. I did it because the dis­ser­ta­tion kicked my ass all over like Sho-Nuff and it was time to declare that I was the mas­ter, not my diss. Now if only I could get that sweet glow while sit­ting at my desk.

As you can see on my counter over there, I only made it to about 1/3 of my whack­adoo 30,000 word goal. But the glass half full ver­sion of this story is that in just one incred­i­bly busy month I have nearly two new chap­ters of my dissertation.

Some responses to this past month address­ing some of the AcBoW­riMo guide­lines:

1. To Word Count or Not to Word Count? In AcBoW­riMo, there was some dis­sent regard­ing the word count goal. In jest: Leave it to aca­d­e­mics to find con­tro­versy in any­thing. I decided to do the word count as a loose bench­mark for me to mea­sure my progress. But I had other bench­marks as well. After talk­ing with a friend about dis­ser­ta­tion goals and progress, she sug­gested a con­cept goal. She works until she gets three ideas or expla­na­tions down on paper. Seem vague? Well, I’m a human­i­ties major so yeah, it’s a lit­tle vague, but it’s also highly ada­p­at­able. I also set time for edit­ing, that way I don’t have pages of word diar­rhea at the end of the month.

2. Com­mu­nity Sup­port. It isn’t hyper­bole when I say I would be NOWHERE with­out the amaz­ing Twit­ter and Google Plus com­mu­nity of schol­ars, writ­ers, par­ents, nerds, activists, et al. My morn­ing rou­tine now includes read­ing the (#AcBoW­riMo) hash­tag on Twit­ter over my cof­fee. Know­ing that I’m not alone in what is often an incon­sis­tent, fit­ful writ­ing process is an incred­i­ble moti­va­tor. So to you all, I do hope you keep the posts com­ing under the new hash­tag #acwri. In addi­tion to read­ing oth­ers’ suc­cesses and slumps, I was account­able to the great wide inter­net. I don’t know about you, but promis­ing a giant word count to hun­dreds of strangers was more moti­va­tion that any­thing my com­mit­tee, hus­band, or brain could ever give me. You all made slack­ing impos­si­ble and you should all get a badge or the Medal of Free­dom or something.

3. Plan. Plan. Plan. This doesn’t mean a minute by minute script of what you should do for the next hour/day/week/month/year. But I found it use­ful to end my writ­ing day with some bul­let points of what to do that day and the next. Also, I use the Pomodoro Tech­nique and the Pomodairo app (Mac and PC) which allows me to label my pomodoros, so I always know where to put my focus for that 30 minutes.

4. Pick­ing up where you left off. I had two dif­fer­ent sets of house­guests this month, a week-long trip to Wash­ing­ton, DC, Thanks­giv­ing, protests, and the flu. These are all some legit rea­sons to aban­don #AcBoW­riMo because I fell behind and my per­fect month of work was sud­denly imper­fect. I learned that all months are imper­fect. Hell, min­utes are imper­fect. But you just deal and then pick up where you left off. I made sure to set aside time to write when my house­guests were here, I worked in DC, and I took time to be sick rather than “pow­er­ing through it” and pro­long­ing the ill­ness until the Spring. If you’re deal­ing with the heav­i­est that life can hurl at you, I highly rec­om­mend Char­lotte Frosts post about work­ing through tragedy.

5. Keep the count. Even though there’s only an hour or so left of AcBoW­riMo here on the east coast, I can say hap­pily that it was awe­some. I plan to keep my word counter over there because I do even­tu­ally need to get to 30,000 words if I’m going to fin­ish my dis­ser­ta­tion. And I love com­ing to my blog and adding to the bar, it’s another moti­va­tor when I’m in the writ­ing muck. I’m also pleased that #acbow­rimo is now #acwri because I want to keep this going, I want to check in with you and I want to read how you’re all doing so long as I can lean on you from time to time.

Thank you so much to Char­lotte Frost and every­one who par­tic­i­pated. This was my best writ­ing month ever, now on to the next one.

Well? Do ya punk?

When I started writ­ing this post, I didn’t feel pro­duc­tive or lucky. I just felt behind, like I ALWAYS feel. I also felt a lit­tle angry, despite rais­ing the stakes of dis­ser­ta­tion com­ple­tion, I’m not really push­ing along any faster. My word surge at the begin­ning of AcBoW­riMo is begin­ning to look increas­ingly like a coin­ci­dence rather than the result of an out­spo­ken oblig­a­tion. A few folks have dis­cussed AcBoW­riMo as being as much about tim­ing as it is pro­duc­tiv­ity. You have to be ready to out­put words, it doesn’t just hap­pen because you’ll say it will hap­pen. Productivity-wise I was pretty pro­duc­tive today: I revised my chap­ters in a more pro­duc­tive man­ner, using the chore­og­ra­phy method in Help­ing Doc­toral Stu­dents Write, (p. 92), I did some read­ing, and I added another 677 new words.

I think the prob­lem with dis­ser­ta­tion writ­ing is that so much of the work is not mea­sur­able. I met with my diss advi­sor early this fall, and she told me she feels like I’m in the same place as I was a year ago. I’ve done a ton of work since then, but it’s all research frag­ments, read­ing, and pro­cess­ing. I want to think that this work is cru­cial to fin­ish­ing, but it doesn’t feel val­ued by my advi­sor or insti­tu­tions at large. So how do we mea­sure progress in the process of writ­ing the dis­ser­ta­tion when so much of it isn’t fluid writ­ing yet?

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.

Today was my last day of “work-cation.” The Mr. was invited to tour the Cap­i­tal build­ing (look at that view!) with the Cap­i­tal Archi­tect today, but it was an archi­tects only kind of thing so I took the kiddo to the National Gallery to point at col­ors and say, “woooooow!”

There’s a Mel Bochner exhibit at the National Gallery and while it wasn’t really the kid’s cup of tea, I was reminded of how much I love his work. He’s con­sid­ered the prog­en­i­tor of Con­cep­tual Art and would “draw” or “paint” por­traits with words. I used to paint, in fact, I was an art major in col­lege and kept up with it until grad school took over. But see­ing the Mel Bochner reminded me of the inter­pre­ta­tive act of putting words on the page. Usu­ally I just stamp them out on my key­board, ren­der them dig­i­tally with­out giv­ing the words them­selves much thought. They are a means to an end of the dis­ser­ta­tion. But when you paint words, you spend time with them, you’re thought­ful in a visual way that would oth­er­wise go ignored. I won­der what this kind of thought­ful­ness and time with words might look like for me now?