I have nothing interesting to say
Todd M. Gureckis · · 4 minutes to readFor several years now I've had a problem. The problem is that I feel I have nothing interesting to say academically. I've even bailed on invited articles after concluding I just have nothing useful to say about a topic I work on every day. So what do you do when you are in a job people describe as "publish or perish" but you don't have the words? Counter-intuitively, I think the only way out of this is to write more useless junk.
I should maybe clarify before my friends and family get worried that I still feel quite productive and happy. Writing is only one part of my job. A more substantial portion is helping students write papers, write grants, collaborate with others, program analyses and code, learn new skills and methods, teach, etc... My self-assessment is that I'm fine on all that (maybe even more energetic and engaged than usual) so this is not like a "don't go work with Todd he's lost it" type thing. The issue is specifically just about personal solo-authored writing.
Why do I think writing more will help me out of this trap?
I recently ran across a very interesting article by Cory Doctorow titled "The Memex Method". Since the premise of this post is that I have nothing original or interesting to say I'm going to crib from his article quite a bit.
Write everyday: One point Doctorow makes, and which you hear over and over in academic circles as well, is that writing frequently makes it easier to write. Some faculty and students make writing groups with regularly scheduled writing sessions. I've never taken part in these things, because I never felt I had a writing issue, and also because it's not going to help me join a writing group when I have nothing I want to write about anyway. However, that doesn't mean the concept isn't mostly right.
Writing is real thinking: Another reason to write more frequently is that, at least for me, thinking is a very ephemeral thing. I can talk to someone in my office for an hour and sketch out in my mind a beautiful paper concept. However, as soon as I go to actually write something I realize all the holes in the idea and how hard it is actually going to be. Thus, writing constantly means you are thinking constantly in more concrete terms.
Writing for a "notional audience": You could write private notes on your computer to help organize your thinking. I have something like 1100 plain text notes on my computer of ideas, reviews, sketches. However, they are sort of a mess and I rarely consult them. The reason is they weren't written for anyone or with any communicative goal in mind. This is why a public blog type thing is very useful for writing. Doctorow says,
"Writing for a notional audience -- particularly an audience of strangers -- demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I'm taking notes for myself.... Writing for an audience keeps me honest."
Lower the bar: Writing an academic paper can be fustrating on several fronts. You have to make it through the review process which can be uneven. The expectations about format and details are laborious. It is not surprising then that writing for academic publication can be hard. However, writing for some other format can be freeing. You can say what you want. With a personal blog you don't have editors even. You can mess up, do something stupid, who cares? Public writing could be more impactful and useful even than strickly academic writing.
Reversing the order of research and publication: Usually you do a lot of research when preparing a paper. Maybe it takes months or years. Then you try to go publish the paper. Writing for a public blog inverts this process. Instead you quickly write up ideas and notes and publish them. Then later at some future point you might reorganize those notes into a more extensive thesis or project. For example, a long time ago I wrote a blog post about some experiments with did with online data collection. The blog attracted a collaboration and we ended up extending and publishing the paper. I think there is several wins there from being open and just writing stuff publicly, even if it is research ideas. Again, Doctorow:
Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gets out of all those disparate, short pieces.
Memory aid: When you write something that is published for a "notional audience" it acts as a powerful memory aid. As an example, if I read a paper and jot a few notes about it on my computer in a text file I will completely forget about it in a few months. I suspect I will not forget writing this blog post for several years (and think to share it if I run into someone having similar writing problems).
Nucleation: This is a new term from Doctorow I never encountered before. The premise is that as you write little short fragment ideas on a frequent schedule. These idea start to connect to one another into some more substantial idea. I've seen this happen myself before in that I once collected project ideas in document with no real goal in mind and then later it all "clicked" and turned into a grant and the basis for several papers. This can happen at the pragmatic level (e.g., maybe in a short writing thing you enter the LaTeX for an equation you need in some future paper and so you've already done part of the work) as well as the conceptual one (the ideas start sticking together to form a more interesting thesis or project).
So these are the arguments for this writing project on this website. The arguments against are that I probably will say stupid things that get me into trouble. Frequent writing will reveal how dumb I am (whereas stoic silence from the perspective of a professor can often pass publically as wisdom). No-one wants to hear my crappy ideas anyway. It is all a waste of time. I find these all very convincing, but I will ignore them for now and see what happens.
As this is my first step in my rehabilitation, I'm not going to demand too much from myself other than output. So maybe this will be notes on papers I'm reading or ideas I find interesting is enough to get going. I also will try not to make everything so self-reflective, personal, or veering toward "advice".
Help me find the words.