Notes for struggling (academic) writers

Writing about the quotidian can help build confidence and clarity

Several recent essays I have read, including

Paul Kimm

’s wonderful one on The Illusion of Honesty on

TBLM

and

Amitava Kumar

’s numerous reflections about his writing and public engagements have reminded me that the writer'’s most powerful contribution is merely to document her life and her reflections about her life with clarity, honesty and detail. But what makes this really daunting is worrying about how our writing will be received. Taking that pressure out of the equation and learning to write for myself has been the single most valuable lesson from many years of writing. It has enabled me the safe space to put into effect a writing practice that is paying off over time, as I slowly gain the confidence to share and be vulnerable.

Last week, I found myself trying to put some of this across to the latest cohort of Fellows of the Writing Urban India Fellowship, an endeavour supported by the Urban Studies Foundation that I had the fortune to be affiliated with right from its inception, when I was at the Centre for Policy Research.

From Vecteezy.com

We have something to say…

WUI, as we fondly call it, is a passion project of a group of like-minded academics who think deeply about the ‘urban’, about how and why cities work, what they mean for the human condition, and so on; scholars who produce a body of work straddling disciplines that is often referred to as ‘urban studies’.

WUI does not respond to the ‘urban’ problem as much as it does to the ‘writing’ problem. We are plagued by questions like:

Why do Indian academics, deeply engaged and brilliant as they are, not write in reputed journals? Why does their scholarship not find its way into reading lists and citations? Why do scholars of India based in European and North American institutions continue to shape knowledge about India’s urbanisation rather than those from and located in India?

This is not an ‘us vs them’ debate. Like many other matters of inclusion and representation that we find ourselves defending currently (sigh! essay for another day!), this is a matter of asymmetrical access to both information and opportunity. WUI is a small step towards correcting that imbalance through one-on-one writing mentorship and peer learning.

Having had much fun but felt a tad frustrated through its first two cohorts, which, owing to the pandemic and other unforeseen circumstances, were held largely online, it has been very exciting to kick off WUI’s third cohort with an old-school offline face-to-face (yes, I use both terms to emphasise the wonder of not just getting off the endless Zooms but celebrate the life-affirming-ness of human interaction and connection). Now anchored by wonderful folks at the National Law School (NLSIU) in Bangalore, WUI 3.0 is off to what I perceive as an amazing start.

What a pleasure it was to be at NLSIU in a face-to-face workshop!

...but writing is such a struggle - why?

Getting back to what I ended up telling the WUI Fellows last week, let me first describe the scene:

Twenty-two Fellows (PhD and post-PhD scholars, one lone practitioner) and five-odd Mentors (university profs, think tank faculty) are sitting around a rather formal table in NLS’ conference facility, deeply engaged in discussions around writing structure, form and style. The walls are peppered with colourful, self-reflective Post-Its from Day One’s ice-breaking exercises. I speak about my own journey, from practice to research and back, from popular to academic writing…and back! Everyone listens, but there is an undercurrent in the room that will not be ignored.

Tuning deeper into the conversations and reading the room, it wasn’t hard to understand that, regardless of how articulate or hesitant they were, or how far along they were in their doctoral journey, all the Fellows were really struggling to write.

Not because they do not have material. But because they are riddled with self-doubt:

what can I say that hasn’t been said before? who will be interested in what I write? am i making sense? why do i read endlessly when i am supposed to be writing?

And because they are unable to find clarity:

i read a lot but i don’t know what is important to include in my literature review. i start with a clear research question, but then i end up writing about many other things. i feel pressurised to cite well-known scholars. i think i know what to write, but i freeze when i start!

This is not a problem particular to this cohort at all. We know this. This is an all-of-us problem, especially if writing is a relatively new medium of communication. If you have to write, because you want to or because your profession demands it, it’s worth thinking about how to fix this.

A Chicken and Egg problem

It might help to clearly see the link between these two apparently different aspects, and consider that, perhaps, the lack of confidence and the lack of clarity - the 2Cs that inhibit us - are locked in a chicken and egg cycle.

Its not hard to see that an education system with colonial antecedents has never really prepared us to have our own voice, and how we are:

• endlessly taught to privilege a scholarship from the outside over our own: think how we sideline the knowledge of indigenous and subaltern people, ignore my less-educated grandmother’s deep wisdom, and refuse to pay heed to our own vast intuition and experience

• set up for failure when we try to write in a language that is not our own: think about how we struggle with sentence-formation in English while we can express effortlessly in Tamil, Bangla, Gujarati, Ahomiya…

So we read, read, read endlessly. We let the proverbial ink dry out of our pen as we hold it over the page for far too long, scared to put it to paper, afraid to write down what we really think. The words of self-doubt become a constant murmur inside us - who will listen, who will pay heed, who will care? am i good enough? am i? good? enough? [The links to bigger struggles - psychological, existential… are clear too. Which PhD student, writer/creator has not gone down this path?]

And because we do not write, we struggle to move from confusion to clarity. Or from many disparate thoughts to some important ones. Or from unlinked ideas to an interconnect logical argument.

So must I have clarity to write clearly and confidently? Or should I be writing muddled stuff in the hope of eventually gaining clarity? This is a quintessential chicken and egg problem, the kind that sends our brain into a spiral. And we freeze, deferring writing to another day. Those of us plagued by the productivity bug (the worst!!) may even - oh no! - read some more. We might be better off sleeping off the brain-freeze instead, as one of the mentors in the WUI 3.0 kickoff workshop suggested!

So what could help?

Here is where I see the value in the advice so many writers are putting out about writing honestly about the everyday and the ordinary.

We live in a hyper opinionated world in which everyone and their cat has a social media handle and, apparently, something important to say. It is no wonder that it feels daunting for us researchers to say anything even when we know we have spent a lot of time reading, investigating, analysing data and formulating a view about something. Social media aside, when our writing is inhibited by the weight of our own thoughts, it really helps to get off the high horse we think we should be on and place our feet firmly on the ground. It helps to see writing as a really simple, ordinary act about simple, ordinary things. More akin to a conversation or like telling a story.

Especially if you struggle to get started and need to teach yourself to write, it might help to start with writing about what is right in front of you. A cup. A cat. Sunlight streaming through the window. The flooded street in your field site in which that little girl is still playing. The conversation you witnessed between the vendor and the pompous uncle that triggered a new hypothesis about why this neighbourhood is a contested place. The data chart you generated after hours of coding, which has its own story to tell.

There is nothing more gratifying than going back to something you wrote yesterday and finding that it is really easy to understand the story, the sequence of events, the details, the punchline.

Writing clearly about ordinary events and everyday thoughts is not easy, but with practice - of writing, reading, rewriting - we learn to make better choices about the words we use. We learn to argue our points better. We learn to provide the details that our readers will need and want to know.

Is the cat friendly in general or is it friendly only to those who feed it? Is the hungry mewling cat fat because it eats a lot or is it skinny with fluffy fur, perennially searching for food? Is the cat important to the story or is she an interesting introduction to a story about an overflowing dustbin in an overlooked neighbourhood?

We fret, we wrestle with our own thoughts. We stare at the sentence on the page, not liking its shape, not wanting its form. We tinker and rewrite till a sentence emerges that we do like, because it says what we want to say, not what we think we should be saying.

Over time, we build a foundation for articulating more complex thoughts. We come to understand that the flaws in our writing are also the flaws in how we see, think and perceive. We start to value honesty and appreciate the words that get closer to the truth we are trying to narrate.

Who will like my writing? Well, you should!

Writers, more so academics, are plagued by the idea of validity. It is a professional hazard in a world of peer-reviewed journals and competitive publishing (and social media likes!). We worry incessantly about who would be the judge of this clarity, honesty and detail in our writing? Who would endorse our writing, and how?

Personally, I think it is dangerous to go down this road too early in our writing journey. Honest and clear writing comes from honest conversations with the literature you read, the peers and mentors you speak with, and most importantly, from the conversation you have with yourself.

I benefit a lot from writing for myself as often as I can and I journal obsessively, migrating, over time, from physical to digital notebooks. But the “note to myself” format remains. Of late, many journal entries are already talking to the world outside of me, an indication that I have already deemed the writing good enough to share with the world. For academic writing too, I write a series of such notes to myself. The arguments emerge through this process and when they are clear enough, I draw on these notes to draft an article. Then refine and edit till submission time! These notes also help a lot when reviewer’s comments come in. They are a treasure trove of extra thoughts and details which are all your own. They almost always help you recognise the value of your own research, an important thing to keep in mind when responding to critique.

Don’t overthink it!

To establish yourself as an academician through your writing is a long game, but I learnt that its ok to travel slowly, step by little step. What helped me enormously was building a regular writing practice, by taking that leap of faith, from thinking and planning, to doing. I built my practice by challenging myself to write daily, and for a whole year, I did! Everyday thoughts and observations. Nothing grand. My original blog - Rambling in the City - which took off in 2012 was on Wordpress and this Substack is an extension of it. [If you are intrigued, see the footnotes for some pieces from the archive]

To all those struggling to get started on your writing journey, please don’t overthink it! Find a way to write as much as you can, as often as you can, about everyday things and events, whatever is present for you. Show your friends. Be open to feedback. Reflect a little. And then write some more! So far, this is working for me, and I hope it will help you too. Good luck!

*****************************

Writing helps me make sense of the world! Here are some glimpses from the ‘Rambling in the City’ archives to show how my writing alternates between the descriptive and the reflective.

• A descriptive piece in 2012 about home-based work in a slum community in East Delhi

• A 2012 reflection on attending an academic lecture, before my own segue into research.

• A self-reflexive note from 2013 about multi-tasking, when I had first started thinking about doing a PhD

• Many early writing efforts were photo essays, where words and images could combine to tell a story. Here is one from 2013. And another from 2016.

• Right from the start, true to my discipline and profession, I wrote about urban planning, governance and policy. Speaking about these issues to the world at large has been a clear purpose of my writing. Here is a 2015 piece that summarises literature about suburbs and 2017 piece capturing debates around demonetisation.

• I was always drawn to personal writing, but stuck to parenting and other relationships, but more recently, I have delved deeper into the genre.