The Writing through Uncertainty Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Writing through Uncertainty Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from helensword.com. Welcome to Swordswings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're out walking, riding a car, or on a train or a bus, or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing to someplace new.

Today, we're revisiting my very first WriteSpace special event from back in 2021. In the depths of the pandemic, I invited Michelle Boyd, an award-winning writer, former tenured academic, and founder of Inkwell Academic Writing Retreats, to talk with me on the topic of writing through uncertainty. Michelle has dedicated her career to helping scholars better understand their writing process, especially in times of existential anxiety. I asked Michelle, ‘in difficult moments, how do we keep our writing going?’

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Helen: Well, I have to say the first time I came upon your website online — even though I wouldn't put myself in your target group, which is particularly people who are feeling blocked, feeling frustrated with their writing, need a process and a place, a safe place to get through to the other side of that — I still found the description just so enticing.

Michelle: Thank you.

Helen: You know, I absolutely love retreats and I love the way you describe what happens at your retreats. So can you tell us what would be the number one challenge that you see with the writers who start working with you?

Michelle: The number one challenge is, well, I'll tell you what they think the challenge is, is that they don't have time. But that's actually not the challenge. The number one challenge is that they are afraid of what someone else is going to say about either how they're doing what they're doing, you know, what their process is, how they're going about writing it, or the writing when it comes out on the page. They are filled with fear and they don't trust themselves. And because they don't trust themselves, they have a bunch of strategies that are actually already a part of what they do.

They work really well for them, but they're not necessarily aware of them all the time. And even when they are aware of them, they don't have enough faith in themselves to use them. So fear and self-doubt, I would say.

Helen: They think the challenge is time. You would say it's fear. What would you say…what's this fear of? Fear of what?

Michelle: Oh, so many things. I mean, you know, I think they're afraid of judgment by someone else, be that the reviewers, their colleagues who are in their field, their tenure committee. And, you know, I want to say that this fear is completely rational because all writing is risky, but academic writing has a certain way that that risk shows up, especially when you're a junior faculty member. And what people are worried about is that they are not real Sociologists, psychologists, you know, that they haven't actually proven that they are worth the title. So what's at risk is their academic identity and their sense of self-worth.

They have to worry about keeping their job because they're, you know, if they're junior, it's a very real instance in which your material circumstances are linked to what you do with your writing, right? So they have to worry about getting grants and getting funded. So it's a highly competitive situation, especially for junior faculty members.

But it also has this layer in it that's about whether or not they can truly call themselves smart, can truly call themselves a member of their discipline. And so to me, the things that make people freeze up actually make quite a lot of sense. I don't want to say you should be afraid in those circumstances, but it's certainly reasonable that you would be worried constantly about what other people think.

Helen: Right. And so it's sort of experienced as an internal fear and a kind of internal quality of self-doubt. But in fact, it's being imposed by external circumstances and expectations and kind of our comparing ourselves against all those other mythical academics who've got it all right.

Michelle: Absolutely. I mean, I think there's another thing at work, and that is that we don't typically have really good training in academic writing process in graduate programs, in mentoring programs for junior faculty. There aren't a lot of places where somebody actually uses the word writing process with you. when you're first figuring out how to do it.

Helen: You said ‘really good’. I think that we could replace that with ‘any’.

Michelle: I think so too, but I just try to, you know, I'm a social scientist, so I try to cover all my bases. But yeah, you know, I mean, no one really talks about how do you get from having an idea in your head to words on the page. We learn about method. If we're lucky, we learn how to teach. Even if we don't, you know, learn how to teach, we typically have some models around. We're going through it with other people. The first time we teach, we're probably some of our Colleagues in grad school are doing it too, but we write in isolation.

And so we don't even have the benefit of being in a cohort of people who are, you know, doing a lot of sharing and talking about their struggles. People feel a lot of shame. And so they don't share what they're going through and that just makes the fear worse.

Helen: Right. So we see the products and not the process, whereas it's seeing the process that helps us learn to develop our own successful processes. Absolutely. Probably much more the case for people in the humanities and at the kind of humanities end of the social sciences than for people who are coming in from more kind of collaborative co-writing disciplines like the sciences and the science end of the social sciences. Would that be your experience?

Michelle: I think that's probably true. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a little bit more modelling that happens in that situation. But other kinds of anxiety, no doubt, come from having everything laid bare.

Exactly, exactly. And then you're working with professors who themselves may be feeling the same thing, right? So they're not necessarily... bearing themselves to you and explaining the struggle they went through to even get the draft that they gave you. You know, none of the graduate students know that the first time you get a graduate student to be your RA, they come to your office and you're thinking, ‘oh, shoot, I got to give this person something to do. What should I tell them?’ You know, like junior people are struggling in very similar ways.

Helen: So you give us a really social, I guess, a picture of the social isolation that can happen in academia. in ways that we don't necessarily recognize that lead to a kind of amplification, I guess, of these fears that you've defined. So part of a writing retreat is bringing people out of that social isolation, isn't it, and into a space where it's safe to talk about and hear about and learn about the process.

Michelle: Absolutely. It is one of the three pillars of what I do at Inkwell, and that is social writing. And by social writing, I mean writing in the presence of other people so that you actually have companions nearby, even if they're not in the same building as you, even if they're just on the retreat grounds, that you know they're there. But it also means reflecting on your process with those people. And to do that, of course, I have to work very hard to create a community of practice where people feel safe, where they know that they can trust one another that's something that builds over the course of the week but being willing to be with other people and to talk about what's happening with your writing and then to be able to connect with other people around what's happening with their writing those are things that we have to learn and the best way to learn it is to actually do it.

Helen: So the other two pillars, can you give us a preview and then maybe we'll unfold them as we move along? If you could.

Michelle: Sure, I'm gonna talk about one of them in the next hour, but the other two, one is creating a writing refuge. You just, you can't, and these are not pillars just for writing. These pillars help with ‘just for writing’, but they are specifically about how to move past your writing fears.

So the first one is you have to have a place that feels safe to encounter your writing fears. The second is structuring your writing time so that instead of trying to run away from all the things that make you fearful, you actually intentionally encounter them in every writing session. And then the third is social writing, that you do this in the company of other people with a facilitator who understands how to create connections and safety and community.

Helen: If we take those three pillars and we translate them into maybe some specific techniques… So you've got a blocked writer there. They don't even know how to start with this new project or this article that's due or whatever else. What techniques would you take them through then?

Michelle: So probably the easiest way to answer that is to maybe talk a little bit about the structure. So in the way that I run the retreats, each day we spend time talking about one of the major challenges of a writing session. And one of them is actually, they can't even get themselves to the, yeah, like it's really hard to get to the writing space sometimes. So the principle that I talk about is making a transition—that essentially what's happening when you sit down to write is you're moving from thing one to thing two. And that often means moving from space one to space two, but not always, especially now where we are writing under challenging circumstances and being able to identify what actions easily allow you to move from one role and one set of thoughts and one set of issues that you're giving your attention to and transitioning to another, in this instance writing, is the key to sort of understanding what will help you there.

It's partly the unintentional way we start our writing sessions. We don't do this on purpose, but again, no one sits down and suggests that we should do it differently. But if you're afraid to step into your office, you need something more deliberate. So thinking through, how do you transition in other moments of your day?

How do you transition from other difficult or all-consuming activities to a different set of activities? Thinking through what that looks like for yourself is one way to help you in that moment. And while I teach the principle, what we do with every challenging moment of the writing session, I refer to them as pivot points of the writing session, is I teach the principle and then you figure out what it looks like for you. So the retreat really is about, we talk about these challenging moments. teach some best practices, things we know from the research tend to work. And then each person figures out what that would look like for them. And then you practice it and you practice it and you practice it. So it really is about practising, not just getting work done.

And part of what you're practising is getting over the threshold into that writing space, whatever that may mean. So kind of the emotional space of writing as well as a physical space. You must encounter writers who come with that kind of fixed mindset. I just can't do this. I'm not good, so-and-so is a good writer. I'm not, I've never been a good writer or I'm not very disciplined or, you know, I can't, I can't write every day. It's impossible. Or, you know, those sorts of things.

Helen: How do you help people shift into the growth mindset that kind of welcomes the challenges?

Michelle: Interesting question. Actually, I guess I don't actually ever ask anyone to switch. What I do is I ask people to deliberately and continually reflect on what's happening while they're at the retreat. And I ask people to do this on their own, and then I ask them to do it with other people.

And reflection doesn't typically allow people to hang on for very long to their fear-based assumptions. It typically, especially when they're reflecting on something that they've just done in that day or that previous writing session, they just don't hold up. And so I don't even have to use the language of, you know, growth mindset or Um,

I talk a lot about story, about the way that people, about we, how we all create stories around our experience that don't necessarily, they don't fully represent what's happening. But, but it's typically through the process of just reflecting over and over again, that they come to see that the idea that they had actually doesn't really reflect reality and they undo it themselves.

Helen: Interesting. So that's the coaching philosophy where a lot of what you're doing is not telling people what to do or what to think, but asking them questions that will encourage them to find the solutions themselves. Would that be right?

Michelle: Yeah. And it's a fine line, right? Sometimes people really just need an idea to do something differently, right? Or you just, you need someone to show you a possibility that has not occurred to you. So there is some of that. And there is also a lot of asking people to think through what has happened in a way that's not caught up in the story, and then they reveal it to themselves.

Helen: Well, can I ask you a question of a process? And this is one that can get a bit controversial. It's a particular sort of bugbear of mine, I guess. I published an article a couple of years ago called Write Every Day, A Mantra Dismantled.

I myself had been an adherent of the ‘write every day’ mantra— kind of Robert Boyce, Paul Sylvia, you know, this whole sort of school of you must show up every day to write. That's how you get past your blocks. That's the only way to do it. And then I went out and I interviewed, you know, 100 successful academic writers about how they actually work. And I found that very few of them write every day in that kind of systematic, programmatic way. They write a lot. They find ways to write, but they don't necessarily need that technique to be successful writers. And at the same time, I've encountered a lot of people who have heard or read at some point that they should be writing every day, And it doesn't fit their life or their way of working or whatever else. And then they're just, they've added one more thing to the guilt bucket. You know, I'm not a productive writer. It must be because I didn't follow so-and-so's advice to show up and write every day. So just given, I have a very, I guess, conflicted attitude towards the write everyday mantra myself, which is that, on the one hand, I actually try to follow it as much as possible because I find it personally really useful.

But on the other hand, I've become a lot less prescriptive than I used to be about basically suggesting to other people that that's the way to do it. So where are you on the write everyday controversy?

Michelle: Yeah. I think I'm very close to where you are. I work with people, some of whom are terrified to write or they have a lot of anger about some relationship they had with a co-author or an advisor where their work was stolen, and they can't get past that to sit down to write. I work with a lot of women of color who are writing about topics that are not these abstract ideas but they are atrocities and traumas and injustices that impact people who look like them or maybe members of their family. And it's actually really emotionally challenging to sit down and know that you're going to dive into that topic.

And so for people who have an intense set of emotions around their writing that make a lot of sense, they really turn it into a struggle that's beyond what we face. That's just the intellectual puzzle, right? That's a struggle that's big enough. It does not make sense to say to them ‘you just have to write every day.’ It doesn't fit where they are. And so, especially for the people who come to my retreats, I would never recommend that. I don't think it's, it is not the only way to be a productive writer. That I absolutely can say. It is not the only way to be a productive writer.

And for the people I work with, it's not even necessarily the best way to move past their barriers. The one thing about daily writing that I really appreciate is that regular activity helps bolster your identity around that activity. So when you're writing daily, you are constructing, reconstructing, building up, confirming your identity as a writer.

And it is partly one's identity as a writer that I think can be part of the source of the pleasure and the satisfaction of writing. And so That is where that's the one little place where I sort of want to still say, you know, hooray for everyday writing on that point. But I don't think that you have to write every day in order to bolster your identity as a writer. That's not the only way to do it.

I think the other thing about it is one of the things that I see a lot among, I think this is true for faculty in general, but especially for graduate students is graduate school to me seems to actually divest you of the courage to act independently. A lot of times, like part of what it does, part of what the professional socialization process does, part of what the apprenticeship system does is really wed us to one or two individuals and use them as a model. And this is how we have to do things. And because of the way the tenure process goes also, we're quite dependent on what other people think. So we spend a lot of time engaging in impression management, making sure people understand what our work is about, that they know that we're working, that we're reliable, that we're good colleagues. All of these things are fine. They're legitimate. They make sense.

But to me, part of what I see in that is often that we feel afraid to think independently, to do things our way, as opposed to the way that we're afraid to say something controversial because what if so-and-so who's big in my field doesn't like it. And that's what we're supposed to be doing as scholars, right? We're supposed to feel like we can go with ideas that maybe, you know, no one else is saying, as long as we can practice our craft and actually support those ideas. But I think often how we go through graduate school sort of strips us of this feeling that we can do things our way and it can still work. And so that's why I think I fall more in your camp, Helen, where part of what I want people I work with to do is say, ‘ah, you know, I'm not a five-day a-week or a seven-day a-week writer. It really works for me to do three days a week. I can do that. I can commit to myself and get it done and it will work.’

Helen: I love that phrase ‘impression management’, because I think it applies to the writing process as well as to the other things you were talking about, which is the products of the writing. We're constantly trying to manage the impression that we give to others of what kind of writer we are as well, I think, or there's the risk that we're doing that. And it's fascinating to me that we've come right back around to fear, which is where we started. But with that added element of of power structures thrown in there. And so, for graduate students, the power structures are very real. They've got a supervisor, a committee that they've got to get past. And then the power structures maybe become a little less visible as we move past that for faculty, but they're still there with the peer reviewers and the tenure committees and the hiring committees and the editors and everybody else.

So much of what we do seems to be ruled by fear. It's not surprising that so many people should then be paralyzed by different kinds of fears, I guess, as writers.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. And that's part of what I always want, you know, I don't talk a lot about that in the retreats because people really come so that they can learn to move past their fear. They're a little less interested in my theorizing as a political, you know, as a former political scientist about the power structure that we're operating in as academics. But if you're going to offer individual solutions to people, it's just really, and if part of what you're going to do is ask people to be honest about the ways that they might have some thinking patterns or some response patterns that aren't working for them. You can't do that without acknowledging that those patterns are happening in a broader context, which is making it incredibly difficult for them so that they understand that, sure, these are individual responses, but they happen in a space that makes it difficult and makes it more difficult for some people than for others.

Helen: And so… But ultimately you wanna move past those rather than sit around and complain about them, right?

Michelle: Well, I guess what I wanna do is acknowledge them and acknowledge that you also have some other work that you've decided you wanna do, right? And that is, you're still gonna operate in that context. It's unfair, it's unjust, and you need to understand how it impacts you, but you have some space. I don't want people to leave my retreat feeling disempowered. I want them to feel empowered, even as they recognize that that power is still unequal in their professional setting.

Helen: Yeah, well, that's why I'm writing a book called Writing with Pleasure. There's enough about writing with pain, writing through pain. We already know what that looks like, but having the resources to move on and acknowledge it, as well as to move on, is just the route to empowerment ultimately, isn't it?

Yeah. Well, I sometimes get asked, and I'm sure you do too, people still want the magic elixir, don't they? They want, you know, what's the one thing? And sometimes showing up to write every day is a good start as a one thing. But I'm sure you also get asked, are there specific tools or technologies that I can use to help me be more organized or to help me move my writing forward? Do you have particular ways of working or tools for working with that you recommend, or do you leave those to individuals to discover for themselves?

Michelle: I mean, ultimately I do. I think one of the things that we need most is protection of our writing time and space. So I actually, I don't use this service, but I tested it out and I recommend it all the time. I think Freedom is a great app. I just work with a lot of people who can't let go of their phones. They cannot turn their notifications off. They literally don't even know how to turn notifications off at this point. And so Freedom is an easy, relatively cheap app that if you use it, really will shut down the entrance of other people and their demands and their worries on your writing time. So it's not something I recommend universally to everyone, but I do find it I think it's quite powerful. It's quite flexible.

Helen: It's funny, my daughter's a fiction writer and she uses it, but she's had to adjust it. So, at first, it was nothing until noon. And then I think she's down to 11 a.m. But every now and then, I still get the, ‘oh gosh, can you print this thing out for me?’ Or ‘Can you make this phone call for me? Because I can't get access to my phone yet. And it's until 11 o'clock.’

Michelle: That's funny. I love that. Which is part of the problem with things like that. You know, Freedom is all about confining you, right? It constrains you. You can't get to something else. But Forest is the opposite. Forest is a timer that grows little electronic trees the longer you leave your phone untouched while the timer is on. And it's so... Just, I mean, ridiculously fun to watch the trees grow and you look at them this way that doesn't make any sense.

Helen: I have to get that. I haven't heard of that one, but it reminds me of when I was working on my last book, I wrote about the contrasting styles of an app that was called Write or Die, which basically if you don't write your 400 words a day or whatever you say in a certain amount of time, it actually starts gobbling them up. It erases them! And throws skulls and crossbones at you and things. And I'm like, absolutely no! Then there was another one—I don't know if it's still around—called Written Kitten. And so every hundred words that I write into this text box, I'm going to get a picture of a kitten. Well, I don't use that one either. But when it comes to the psychology of the two, I know which side I would fall on. And yet, there are people who love the write-or-die kind of thing as well. And that really alerted me that there are lots of different styles of working.

Michelle: Absolutely. That's the thing. I mean, you know, whatever works, right? It's hard to write. It doesn't matter why you're writing, who you're writing for, when it's due, how many books you've already written…It's hard to write. So knowing what works for you and doing that is all I really ever want anyone to do.

Helen: We had an earlier message here from Nina when you were talking about the daily writing practice and finding your way into it, that sort of threshold. She talked about a Goldilocks routine that works to set up your mind, body, practice for satisfaction and progress. So Goldilocks being not too little, not too much, just right. And again, I find myself going back again and again to the example of yoga. For most of my life, I thought I hated yoga until I started doing home yoga, — Yoga with Adrienne — where it really is just come and roll out your mat and nobody's looking at you and you don't have to do anything, but if you've done 10 or 20 minutes of breathing, good for you! You showed up on your mat. And I transfer that over to writing practice. And just the fact that I showed up at my computer for a little while before breakfast to think about my writing for the day is more important than whether or not I actually got a new paragraph onto the page or whatever else.

Michelle: Well, and I mean, that also speaks to our very narrow definition of writing that we're often working with, right? Which is that it's only new words, which of course it is so not, I mean, that's almost, I don't want to say the least important, but it's so at the end of the process. What's that?

Helen: I said, ‘Necessary but not sufficient.’

Michelle: Absolutely. But that's not the only mark of progress, definitely.

And taking your dog for a walk. And thinking about your writing and coming back with one insight or even just being excited again about something that you've been dreading. That's progress as well. That's right.

And if we're not going to name it, then who is going to name that? Who is going to say that to us? No one. So we have to do that on our own. No administrator or department chair or journal editor is going to say, ‘oh, good for you. You had an insight.’ You have to take that.

Helen: Yeah, that's exactly right.

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That's the end of today's podcast episode. I hope that both your body and your mind have moved to someplace new since we started, and that some of your writing anxieties have eased. You can watch the full version of my conversation with Michelle Boyd in the videos section of the WriteSpace Library. That's my online membership community where members can also find my full series of sword swing podcasts and transcripts. Simply go to helensword.com and follow the links to the WriteSpace signup page. Then use the discount code FREEWRITE to try free for 30 days. I'd love to see you there.

Thanks for listening and I look forward to walking with you again soon