Reflections on Writing: Battling Blank Screen Days.

As an Assistant Professor, most of my working life is a life of words. Speaking. Teaching. Reading. Emailing. Marking. Researching. And sometimes even ‘proper’ writing too.

Perhaps unusually for someone whose working life is so defined by words, I’ve a rather embarrassing confession. I find the blinking cursors and blank pages of writing incredibly stressful. They make visible to me the confronting difficulty I face writing, when I grasp around at words to find something meaningful to say. In all honesty, the blank page is where most of my working life resides; poised somewhere awkwardly between thinking what to say and committing it to words.

Since I can remember, I’ve rarely found writing easy. It’s something I find deeply uncomfortable. Far from your likely imagination of a university professor, writing is always wrought with frustration. No matter how hard I try, good writing has always felt out of reach for me. I teeter on the cusp of being clear and insightful but remain never quite there; always on the way to being concise and focused, but never without the need for edits. Even when I (eventually) near what I want to say, my writing stutters and splutters at a glacial pace, which always frustrates me.

My writing has been described by teachers and supervisors (and even friends!) as too flouncy, clunky, and overwritten; ‘too much,’ yet lacking and not enough. It’s seemingly nearly there and nowhere near, and sometimes all of these, all at once.

Doing a job which requires me to write and share my thoughts in written form, and then subject these words to open, fair (and sometimes unfair) critique, naturally intensifies the confrontation of writing. It notches up my writing anxieties and emboldens the destabilizing fear of the blank page.

To avert this discomfort, I admit I’ve avoided writing. I’ve unconsciously flitted away possible writing time into avoidable time sinks in my working day. This has become a personal coping strategy which I’ve coupled with reading and talking about writing, rather than actually writing, to salve my continued writing anxieties.

Having admitted my writing struggles, a friend suggested I find more low-stress encounters with writing to help rediscover its joy. This approach is disarmingly simple. Strive for ANY words on a page, and lower the bar for them. Worry less about the quality of the words on the page, and celebrate any words, rather than perfect words, as the 'win.' This approach is really radical. It recasts my word wrangling as a process of thinking through words, rather than failing to craft perfected ones.

Over the last year, I’ve taken on this advice. I carved out time each day, in each week to commit my thoughts to words—however garbled—and trusted in this process. It became my writer’s recovery therapy. Through this practice, I’ve (re)found my authorial voice, and in the process become more comfortable sharing my thoughts in written form. I've even shared pieces online, open to critique and comment, something I’d never think of doing a year ago!

Perhaps more importantly, I’ve rediscovered the fun of writing. Yes, it can be tortuous and annoying. But there’s also possibly a hidden joy in writing; of jotting down words and thinking thoughts, and leaving messy notes to my future self to revisit, revise, and rehash into something neater. There’s a playfulness to finding expression, voicing thoughts, continuing conversations, and piecing together fragments of rough-and-ready ideas into something more. In ditching the need for producing always perfect prose and stunning sentences, I have slowly found writing more enjoyable.

One of the most liberating experiences for me in my ‘writer’s recovery’ has been writing free-flowing ‘blog’ pieces—pieces like this, which hardly anyone reads, but which have allowed me to more meaningfully sit with my ideas in low stress. Part of the success of this approach is using a non-intimidating writing medium—a blog article—to think and write as I am, in less formal and conversational prose. It’s allowed me to show up in my writing, and explore, through my own voice, my own ideas, rather than through the voice of the real ‘academic’ I feel the need to write like. I’ve stopped performing an ‘academic’ voice, and in the process, found my own.

As I acutely feel the pressure to produce—the next journal article or book chapter—I’m increasingly of the opinion that how I write is just as important to me as what I write, and that my writing anxiety has always been less about not having anything to say, and more about my fear of the critique of how I say it. This fear is all the more acute for me as an early-career academic trying (and struggling) to make a positive name for myself whilst navigating time poverty, heavy teaching loads, burnout, and a system of academic critique which can be needlessly ruthless.

I write this to share my writing anxieties with those who also (secretly or otherwise) struggle with writing. I want you to know you’re not alone, or stupid, or weird; in fact, there are loads of us who also find it hard, and continue to! It doesn’t make us any less of an academic, and my hunch is, it’s actually part of being a good one!

My hope from this is that more of us find the courage to candidly reflect on the difficulty of writing and commit to encouraging each other through this difficulty. In doing so, we may continue to find and rediscover our voices and styles of expression. I hope more of us persevere in showing up in our words, however wrought they come, and resist the inner critic which can inhibit us. On those blank-screen days, we need to tell the critic to do one!

Through the resistive resolve of continuing to show up for ourselves, we retain a commitment to bolster confidence in our voices, and an appreciation of the innate value of our soon-to-be-shared contributions. However diverse our tones, styles, or writing conventions, in the days of words, or of none, we remain steadfast in our mission to share them, even in spite of the spaces and mediums which render us needlessly shy. Don’t give in.

Instead, lean in, write more, and sit more confidently than ever before with your writing struggles. For every blank-filled day of no words or no ideas on the page, remember there’s a future filled with eyes, audiences, and minds waiting to read, be moved, and inspired by your wrought-filled words. But only if you wrangle them into being.