Vignettes from the Professorhood: Writing is hard.
Outside, Cambridge is receiving its first fluffy, sticky snowfall. Big flakes are falling fast, applying a layer of frosting to the MIT buildings around me as I sit on the sixth floor of a conference center on the eastern edge of campus. I took the latter half of the day “off” to attend a conference organized by, among other groups, the MIT Press. It’s called #SpreadingFacts: Communicating Science for a Better World.
I am an assistant professor entering her second year at Harvard, and while I feel like I’ve hit the ground running, this conference reminds me over and over of the one thing I wish I was doing more of: writing. Writing is thinking, and a form of thinking that can, perhaps better than anything else I’ve found, expose the holes in my arguments and help me patch them up, all at once. Looking up at the panelists at the front of the room, fellow professors who got that creative book about their research out and into the world, I feel a pang of… despair? Fear? Sadness? FOMO? Dare I say… envy?
All the ideas I want to write down and communicate to others, when I sit down to write them, I get stuck on the important but secondary questions like, Who am I writing for? How much should I cover? Do I write it as straight-up expository writing or insert myself, the author, into the story? What about sequential art? … My cartoons interspersed with prose?
These are all critical questions for well-styled effective communication, but they get in the way of developing the key ideas themselves. I end up dispersing my stick cartoons, diagrams, bulleted lists, and snippets of text around different minimalist notepad apps, touchscreen devices, and beautifully bound dotted notebooks, as if trying yet another app or surface might release the blockage of publishing even a measly blog post. Most of these ideas dance around the back of my head, taunting me, or, worse, fade away entirely. I’m sure half of them don’t deserve to ever see the light of day, but the others? Only working on them will allow me to find out. Sometimes I find a paper or talk on the same subject as one of those kernels of an idea, and, for a moment, I freeze. Then I have to remind myself there’s still space for me to clarify and express my ideas on the topic. But… not forever.
The previous day, when I sat down with my old Google internship advisor, who just published his first book The Joy of Search, I told him, “I know these negative feelings aren’t helpful. I tell myself, The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. But… I don’t know if I believe myself when I repeat that old proverb.” My old advisor laughed and said, “Well, you gotta believe yourself. Not believe in yourself. You gotta believe yourself.”
Back in the #SpreadingFacts event, one of the speakers said something that caught my semi-distracted ear: “When I go talk to Massachusetts legislators about my research, I include a call to action. And no one wants to feel guilty about having, say, not recycled in the past. So I focus the call to action on what’s new and unique about now as a time to act.” The same way a receiver of a call to action doesn’t want to feel guilt or shame for not having acted before, I don’t want to feel guilt or shame for not having written things down earlier. There’s a reason why I didn’t do it before, and now is the best time to start.
