Like so many faculty, I’m grading my Spring semester final exams, preparing to submit final grades, and looking forward to Summer. The uninitiated often refer to this upcoming time as “vacation,” but Summer at the university is only a vacation if you’re a student.
The professor hustle doesn’t end because May rolls around. It just changes. This is particularly true for an untenured professor—which I am. Sure, I'll travel a bit, go to some conferences, and see family, but there’s shit to do every day, all summer. Every. Day. All. Summer.
As an assistant professor working the four class per semester teaching load typical of a teaching university (as compared to research universities where the teaching load could be half or even less), the Summer is the time of year where I can really make some headway into my research and writing.
During the Fall and Spring semesters, I try like hell to work and write through the semester so that I can maintain a consistent level of productivity, but I usually fall back into incredibly condensed and predictable writing bursts around conference/publication deadlines (like mid-October [ECA] and mid-March [NCA]). I know this is a bad habit—and one that makes me resent writing more than I actually do—and I know that I should write all the time. Every semester, I promise myself that I’m going to finally get it together and work out a healthy writing plan. I succeed less than I’d like to admit. Which is to say, I have never succeeded. Like the student in the back of lecture swiping through Tinder, I fail every semester.
I have a whiteboard in my office with checklists of things that have to get done. At the end of this term, it had three columns: grading, writing, and administrative. Each column has around ten things on it. The whole damn board is full. By the end of Spring, the grading was almost done, the administrative stuff was about half done, and one of the writing goals was crossed off. One. Because I can’t get my through-the-semester writing shit together, I start every summer already behind.
Today is the first day of my Summer. Today is the day I make my writing plan, the day I look at my now mostly open calendar and dream about crossing items off the writing section of the white board, the day I lie to myself about how long it takes to write well (or even how long it takes to write crap).
My writing goals for the summer include an essay revision for a major journal, a book chapter revision for an edited collection, finishing the manuscript of my own book, and revising two essays for journal submission. Oh, and I need to generate some new writing that will sustain me for the next few years. No big deal. I figure I’ll knock those out by the end of the month and then have a nice relaxing Summer vacation.
The reality is that I’m probably good for two, maybe three, of those projects. Last Summer, I kept a record of how often and how much I wrote (professor/grad student friends, this is worth doing). The contrast between what I did then and what I hope to do now is telling.
My goals this summer will probably require the following writing (in words)
1. Essay Revision: 3K
2. Chapter Revision: 4K (current draft is really shitty; Like Cleveland Browns first round picks shitty)
3. Book Revision: 25K
4. Submission: 5K
5. Submission 2: 5K
6. New stuff: 5K
Total Writing Goal: 47K
Last Summer (June, July, and August), I wrote ~22k words. If I’m generous and give myself credit for 6K for May (I wasn’t tracking yet) that means I generated ~28K words last summer (May-August). The difference between my actual productivity last Summer and my goals this Summer is 19K words. That’s almost an entire extra Summer of writing. To get caught up on my writing projects, I just need to kick ass all Summer and then kick more ass during a bonus Summer (a pre-tenure sabbatical would nice right about now).
When I look at what I actually wrote—projects worked on/completed (or not) rather than words on pages—the comparison is even more troubling. I worked on four different research projects last summer: I revised—quite heavily—an essay for submission to a journal, I revised one chapter in my book, I wrote a chapter for somebody else’s book, and I wrote a book review.
I submitted the essay revision after working on it for about two months. I revised, but never really finished the book chapter for about two months. I wrote the chapter for the edited collection in about a month—admittedly, it was based on an essay I wrote in grad school and conferenced but hadn’t gotten around to cleaning up yet so I wasn’t starting from scratch. I finished reading the book to review and drafted my review by the end of summer, but didn’t submit the actual review until September.
I worked on four projects for four months and submitted two of them. I made progress on the other projects—and I had no illusions that I’d finish my book—but I only actually submitted two things.
And it’s not like I wasn’t writing last Summer. I wrote almost every day. I felt like I was hellaproductive. Still, I only managed to finish half of the projects I worked on. Four months of mostly uninterrupted writing time and all I came out with was two measly submissions. Two. 15k of those 28k words actually went out to reviewers (and onto my CV). The notion that I’m somehow going to turn out six project this year is ridiculous.
Writing is hard, y’all.
To my fellow academic-writers heading into Summer vacation: if your goal is to catch up, change it. The reality of Summer is that you never catch up. Instead, make it your goal to find ways to keep up with your writing. Take whatever you’re working on, make a list, and then cross out two (or, if your list looks like mine, cross out four). Find ways to live with your writing. And, more importantly, find ways to write every day, all summer.
