How to Write When You Don’t Love Writing

I’m a sociologist and an author, and I find that I’ve been talking a lot about my writing process lately — first with grad students at my department’s seminar on publishing at the University of Oregon (taught by my colleague, Ryan Light) and then as part of a speaker series in sociology at UC Santa Barbara (co-organized by Cate Taylor and Tristan Bridges). I like talking about writing, even if I don’t usually love getting the words on the page. Many writers have insecurities about their own process, so here I’m shedding light on mine in all its messy layers. If your process feels semi-chaotic, rest assured that you’re not alone. I find that the secret is learning to structure the chaos.

Messy thought matters

There’s often debate about what counts as writing. Others can advocate for what they think should or shouldn’t count, but there’s no question that thinking is an integral part of my writing process. I’d say that it’s the most important and most time-consuming part, in fact. I spend most of my time thinking. I puzzle through ideas, talk through them with one of my sisters, type about them on my phone, write about them on random scraps of paper that I may never find again, stare into space with my hand covering half my face as I creep out others in the coffee shop, and the list goes on. I don’t love writing, but it’s when I’m doing deep thinking that I truly feel that I was meant to be an academic.

Explaining how I approach thinking is a little harder. I think the best way to describe it is by allowing myself to think unbridled, potentially nonsensical thoughts. I let my imagination run free and release myself from the strictures of preordered frameworks that are supposed to guide my work. I allow my thoughts to just be in all of their messiness. When the mood strikes, I pluck them out of my mindspace to puzzle through them and work out the remaining kinks. Then, they swirl around again until there’s something to be done with them. As you probably deduced, that means that I’m often thinking about lots of ideas that aren’t necessarily papers or projects, per se. Then one day, I just sense that there’s something there and I sit down to start crafting a paper (or a set of hypotheses for my quant work) drawing on the idea-strand that feels like it’s developed enough. Once I get to that point, writing the paper usually comes pretty quickly.

Idea-reading jumpstarts the process

I’ve never found the read-think-write approach appropriate for me. I tend to separate the literature into camps — idea-reading and paper/empirical-reading. Not to suggest that there are only two camps, but those groups feel the most helpful to describe my process. The idea-reading is always taking place and occupies most of my reading time. It’s often not tied to a particular paper. It’s tied to my broader agenda.

I’m interested in questions of cognition, decision-making, uncertainty, and labeling so I read a lot about those topics as ideas across disciplines. This includes reading about race and gender as socially constructed categories. The thinking that I described above usually involves grappling with stuff that I’ve read in these areas in a kind of idea soup that I connect with whatever specific empirical project is at hand.

When I’m finally clear on the idea for the paper, then I start to write about it. I usually write a bunch of abstracts that I continue to revise as the paper takes shape. I most often write pretty linearly, starting with the introduction and then moving through the paper.

An old-school trick for organizing notes

I get into the nitty-gritty empirical reading, reviewing the lit for authors to cite, as I’m actually working on a paper (or chapter of my book for book writing). As a person who enjoys inductive qualitative work, this sometimes means doing more idea-reading since papers can sometimes change shape in the process of grappling with the most recent substantive literature vis-à-vis my findings.

I specify the argument that I’m going to focus on for the paper, and then take notes on the related literature to construct an argument-driven literature review. I take citeable notes in Zotero whenever I can (see this fantastic book) and then export notes for relevant citations when I’m working on a paper (or grant). I then review the citeable notes and kind of code them to flag themes that I’ll be writing about in the literature review. I’ve tried various approaches to this (using both NVivo and Dedoose), but I’ve found that it’s usually just easiest to read the notes in MS Word, highlight them in different colors for the different themes that I’ll be talking about, and then reorganize them based on said colors.

I’ll note that this isn’t the most efficient approach. I know that. That’s why I’ve tried qualitative coding software programs. That just doesn’t work for me. If we know anything about successful writing, we know it’s about finding what works. Old-school coding in MS Word works really well for me.

Here’s how to avoid editing as you go

Despite how much I try to avoid it, I tend to edit as I write. When I’m being really perfectionistic and it’s slowing me down, I’ll completely dim my screen so I can’t see what I’m typing or I’ll write by hand and type it up later. When it’s not slowing me down, I tend to write a few sentences and inevitably go back and tweak them after a few lines. As such, the actual polishing stage doesn’t take me much time since it’s just going through the paper one last time at the end to add any finishing touches. I enjoy reading sentences that sound good to the ear so going back to edit my writing as I draft makes research writing more enjoyable than just drafting, then adding/cutting, then polishing. I draft for quantity (getting words on the page quickly) when doing other kinds of writing.

One important caveat to my usual research-writing approach is that I changed things up when writing my book. Editing as I wrote quickly became a nightmare and it was clear that I’d never finish if I kept it up. Chapters changed shape midstream. My thinking was never as clear at the outset with my book as it is when I’m writing articles so editing as I went didn’t make sense. Instead, I just focused on writing as much as I could as quickly as I could. This meant that editing was a completely different step (from drafting) and I usually cut a lot and added a lot during the editing stage — much more than I typically do when writing articles before sending them out for review.

That covers things in broad strokes, but let me know if there’s anything you’re wondering about. Note that I’m not saying that others should do what I do (or that they’d even find it acceptable for them). I’m just describing the experience that I find most rewarding. It often can feel overwhelming, but I don’t mind sitting with confusion until I gain clarity.

After talking a lot about my process, I’m curious about what it’s like for others. Leave a comment to let me know or connect with me on Twitter to continue the convo.

Happy writing!