#40: Why I took SO BLOODY LONG to write my book
I started writing my book, on the philosophy of swearing, in 2015. The original deadline from the publisher was December 2016. I finally submitted it in June 2022, 5-and-a-half years late. Gather round the virtual campfire, friends, and I'll share with you why it took me so long (spoiler: it wasn't because I am lazy, worthless human being) and how I finally got it done (spoiler: it wasn't by being mean to myself).
Here's a link to the Goal Contract mentioned in the episode.
Episode transcript:
You think you're a slow writer? Get the kettle on and listen to this.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi, friends. This episode is going to be a little different from the usual fare, because I’m going to tell you about my experience of writing the book which, as I mentioned in the previous episode, I’ve just finished. While I often mention my own experiences in this podcast, I try not to stick too closely to that - I aim to talk about things that I’ve seen crop up again and again in coaching sessions, in the hope that I can say something useful about issues that arise for many people, rather than ones that are unique to me. In this episode, though, I’m going to focus on my own experience of writing. A big part of the reason for that is that I’m not sure I know anyone who had as much trouble writing a book as I’ve just had. I’m quite an extreme case. Having said that, I’ve seen a lot of the issues that affected my writing process in a lot of other people too. You know, anxiety, guilt, procrastination, even self-loathing. So, I hope that you’ll be able to take something useful from what I’m going to say here. Perhaps, if you’re writing a book yourself, you can take some comfort from the recognition that even though you might not be progressing as quickly as you think you should, you’re at least not as slow as me. My agent, Peter Buckman, who has been incredibly patient, understanding, and sympathetic with me, told me that I’m the slowest client he’s ever had, alive or dead - and it’s hard not to worry when even dead people are more productive than you are. In addition to perhaps helping you feel less bad about your own rate of productivity, I hope that you can learn something from the process I’ve gone through. The most striking lesson, I think, is that - much as, like you, I struggled with being kind to myself - it was only when I stopped beating myself up and started cheering myself on that I started to make serious progress. (And by ‘serious progress’, I’m not talking about churning out thousands of words a day - sometimes it was just a sentence; sometimes nothing at all - and I’ll explain what I mean, in case that makes no sense.)
Now. A word, before I begin. Often, in these episodes, I refer back to previous episodes where I’ve covered a particular issue in greater depth. I’m not going to do that here. There would be too many previous episodes to mention. So, let me just say that if you find that this episode covers anything you’d like to think about in greater depth, have a dig through the archive because you’ll probably find something on it there. If not, get in touch. I’m always happy to hear suggestions for future topics.
Right. So. I started working on this book way back in 2015. The book is a philosophy book about swearing - what’s wrong with swearing and what sense of ‘wrong’ we’re talking about, how swearwords get their power to shock and offend, that sort of thing. There’s very little that’s been written about swearing by philosophers, and that, in a way, should have made this an easy project because there was no existing philosophical literature to catch up with and respond to. It’s also a fun topic - or at least it was for the first couple of years. People were interested in the topic and wanted to talk about it. I did quite a lot of media interviews. Initially I made some pretty good progress with writing the book. But then at some point, a few months in, I hit a wall. My progress slowed down, and it just kept on slowing down. I just couldn’t work on this particular project. I was still managing to churn out shorter things on unrelated topics, but for some reason, the swearing book was a major problem. It got to the point where even the thought of working on it made me anxious. It seemed that, whenever I sat down at the laptop and thought about making a dent in the project, I was gripped by a mysterious force that made literally any activity other than working on the book seem irresistibly enticing. It felt a bit like when you try to push the wrong ends of two magnets together. I couldn’t get near it. I’d spend entire working days sitting at my desk, and would do nothing useful whatsoever. Hours would disappear faffing about online, exploring one internet rabbit hole after another - usually rabbit holes that didn’t interest me at all. I couldn’t work it out. I couldn’t understand what the problem was. I couldn’t understand why there even was a problem.
So, how did I respond to this difficulty? You guessed it: I was mean to myself, of course. I’ve talked about this on this podcast before. It was the usual stuff: I told myself that I was lazy, undisciplined, too distractible, too weak-willed, worse than everyone else, etc etc. And I was so busy feeling like a bad person, and feeling guilty about being a bad person, that I didn’t notice that something wasn’t right: that I couldn’t be lazy when I was getting up super early every morning to work on my writing, I couldn’t be undisciplined when I would sit for hours and hours in front of my laptop, I couldn’t be too distractible when I was capable of focusing on other projects (just not this one) and so on.
Did being mean to myself solve the problem? Did it motivate me to knuckle down and work on my book? I know many of you like to think that it does - that we need to be mean to ourselves to ensure that we keep on striving to do better. But, no, of course it didn’t. It made it worse. I already had a problem, but now I had a bigger problem, because in addition to whatever it was that was making it hard to work on my book, I now had to endure my own negative self-talk every time I tried. Who would be motivated to work on a project when, every time they tried, they’d end up feeling terrible? So, I avoided it. I kind of panicked whenever I tried to get on with it. Better to do anything other than what I really wanted to be doing, which was finishing that book.
So, why didn’t I just stop, then? If being horrible to myself was making it hard to make progress, I could just stop being horrible to myself, and things would become much easier. Well, eventually I did do that - but it took several years. The problem was that I didn’t realise that I was being mean to myself, or that it was a problem. I mean, I realised that I was telling myself that I was lazy, ill-disciplined, and so on - of course I did. But, as far as I was concerned, and in spite of evidence to the contrary, I thought I was just stating the truth. There wasn’t anything particularly mean about it. I mean, I would never in a million years have said those things to another person - but it didn’t occur to me to reflect on that and conclude that maybe I shouldn’t say those things to myself either. That sort of nasty talk was just business as usual for me.
Now, things continued to go downhill from there - but before getting into that, I want to pause to reflect a bit on how and why I was thinking so negatively about my progress in the first place. I mean, sure, I ended up flat out avoiding working on my book, but how did it get to that point in the first place? Why was I faffing so much, instead of just getting on with it? Well, one issue here, I think, was that I had weird and unrealistic ideas about what ‘just getting on with it’ would look like. I think I had in mind that, ideally, the process should be a journey from A to B, taking a direct route, where B is the finished product, and the time in between would involve me toiling away, edging ever closer to B, all the while knowing what and where B was and which direction I needed to go in order to get there. But that simply wasn’t the case. It’s never the case, not if what you’re doing is original research. Part of what doing research involves is working out what the final product is. You don’t know what it’s going to look like - it’s part of your job to find that out. And that means that a lot of the time when you’re doing research - and doing it right - you’re directionless, in an important way. You’re exploring. You’re working out which way is up. And you know what that feels like? It feels like faffing. It feels like pottering around, making no progress, getting nothing done, and when you do get things done, they are often things that end up on the cutting room floor. It feels like wasting time. It is wasting time, if your idea of not wasting time involves adding something concrete to the final product, like writing sentences that are going to end up in your final draft. But this, what feels like time-wasting, is an indispensable part of the process. You can’t build an idea of what the final product is going to be like unless you’ve explored the area properly. And if, while you’re doing this open-ended, directionless exploring, you’re telling yourself that you shouldn’t be doing it, then you’re making it harder for yourself to create that final product in at least two ways that I can think of. The first is that the exploring is part of what you need to do in order to create that final product - the book, the thesis, the article, or whatever - and so telling yourself that you need to stop doing the exploring and instead just get on with the project is … well, it’s nonsensical. It’s confusing. It’s a bit like telling a builder to stop messing about with mixing the cement and just get on with building the house - but of course she is building the house when she’s mixing the cement. Another problem with telling yourself off for doing that open-ended exploring is that it crushes your curiosity, your innate love of the topic, which is what motivates you to work on it in the first place. If you try to force yourself to wear conceptual blinkers (apologies for that expression) and attend only to those specific arguments and ideas that are definitely going to end up in the final piece of work, while ignoring all that cool, interesting, peripherally related but not obviously relevant stuff, then you’re doing a good job of stamping down any joy that you might experience from working on the project - and you need all the joy you can get, especially if you’re working on something lengthy, which will inevitably have its frustrating moments. You need to play the long game, and that means valuing and encouraging those playful aspects of the project that are going to keep you engaged and enthusiastic for as long as possible, because there are going to be days (or even weeks or months) when those aspects are going to be what make the difference between deciding to do a bit of work on your project, or deciding that you simply can’t face it. So, yeah, research - successful research - does often feel like wasting time and getting nowhere. Suck it up. That’s just what it’s like.
Ok. So, back to my book project. I was anxious about it, I was feeling like I was getting nowhere, the whole thing made me feel bad, and the upshot of all that was that I’d do pretty much anything to avoid working on it. But I didn’t really understand why I had such a problem working on it, and actually I still don’t, although I feel like I’m gaining insight into that all the time. 3 years ago, in July 2019, I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I started taking medication. That was a relief - i mean, the biological fact of having too little dopamine and whatever else it might be, is easier to swallow than the morally-loaded judgment that maybe I’m just lazy - but it wasn’t the magic bullet that I’d hoped it might be. The medication helped for a bit, but the problems remained. I was still having the same problems, and they were still problems with this project, the book, rather than with other projects. 2 years ago, I began to realise that anxiety probably had something to do with it. That was surprising to me, because it didn’t really feel like anxiety was involved. I’ve said this before, but anxiety doesn’t always feel the way you’d expect it to feel. It isn’t always a churning stomach and a racing heart. Sometimes it’s a tendency to procrastinate, or an urge to take naps, or a feeling that maybe you shouldn’t be working on this particular thing because there’s that other thing that is probably more urgent. And in addition to ADHD and anxiety, I’ve also recently realised that trauma probably has something to do with it too. I started working on my book at around the time that I finally ended an abusive relationship that I’d been in for many years, and which for a long time I felt trapped in, and couldn’t see a way out. Ending that relationship - and in practical terms, ‘ending it’, in the sense of fully extricating myself from it, was really a process that took place over several years, rather than a single event - ending that relationship meant that I was a single parent with a full time job. Everything was down to me. I have memories of trying to work on my book in the months after I’d ended that relationship. I remember sitting in the garden with my laptop, trying to get some writing done while at the same time keeping an eye on my children, and trying to swallow down this panicky wave of how-in-the-actual-fuck-is-anyone-supposed-to-live-like-this-who-the-hell-am-I-kidding-this-is-bananas. But there was no other option. There was no plan B, and there was nobody to step in and look after things if I decided I couldn’t cope. I had to make it all work, or I’d be out of a job and my children wouldn’t eat. That feeling of being overwhelmed and trapped seeped into the whole book project, and I still felt it to some extent while I was working on the final stages a few weeks ago. I didn’t like to be reminded of that feeling, and I also didn’t realise until very recently that I was being reminded of it when I sat down and tried to work on the book. So. ADHD, anxiety, trauma - anything else? Well, who knows? Probably. I feel like I’ll probably continue to discover reasons why this project was so difficult in the months and years to come. But, never mind about me - what does all of this mean for you?
One thing, I think, is this: if you’re having trouble working in the way that you think you should be working, there could be all sorts of reasons for that. Don’t expect those reasons to be obvious. It might take you months or years before you understand what’s going on and why you’re having trouble with making progress. You might never understand. In any case, it doesn’t matter - at least, it doesn’t have to. Trust that there are good reasons for it, and that those reasons have nothing to do with the sorts of nasty judgey things you’re probably saying to yourself. Go back and listen to the most recent episode if you need a reminder about this. Writing, and making progress in lots of other domains too, is hard, and perhaps it’s less important to understand why it’s hard than it is to just get it done. After all, that’s what keeps us awake at night, isn’t it? It’s not ‘I really need to understand why I’m not productive enough’, it’s ‘I really need to just get this sodding thing done’. The good news is that you can get it done even if you don’t fully understand why it’s hard. But you do need to be open to the likelihood that it’s hard for reasons other than your inherent unworthiness as a human being. Because that sort of thinking really does stand in the way of making any important improvements in your life.
So, I did get my book finished and submitted. That’s the hopeful note here. How did I do it? Well, I’ll get to that in a minute, but let me preface it by saying that the solution was, in a way, extremely simple and easy and even pleasant - but it was also something that I could never have brought myself to do until very recently. And I would never have been able to bring myself to do it if I hadn’t been doing this podcast. Because this podcast, and one of the reasons why I like doing it so much, isn’t about me being super enlightened and having all the answers and passing them on to you. I’m not passing on information that I already know. I’m discovering it along with you. Making these episodes is an opportunity for me to dive into issues that are affecting me and lots of people like me (including you), think hard about them, work out solutions, and then articulate them. I wouldn’t be motivated to do it if I wasn’t getting to share my thoughts about it all on this podcast, but the first person I help with the information in these episodes is myself - and that’s what happened when it came to finishing my book.
Now, all the problems I’ve already described got worse as I neared the end of the book. That strange force, whatever it was, that was keeping me away from working on the book just got stronger the closer I got to the end. I spent months saying to people, ‘There’s probably just a couple of days’ work left on this, if I could just sit down and focus on it properly, but I can’t’ - and they’d just stare at me, no doubt thinking, ‘Just shut up and do it then, you idiot’. But I didn’t. At least, I didn’t sit down and focus on it for a couple of days straight. That very idea makes me laugh. It’s a very different Rebecca that would have been capable of that. Instead, I made painfully slow progress. A sentence, or a few words, per day. Something like that. Sometimes I’d delete it the next day. Sometimes, rarely, that sentence-a-day would gather momentum and there would be a burst of activity and I’d write a few paragraphs. Sometimes I’d get things done faster than I expected, but usually not. And here’s the really important part, the part that would have been simply unthinkable a year or so ago: I only managed to do this by rewarding the absolute fuck out of myself. There was one day when I treated myself to lunch in my favourite cafe as a reward for writing half a sentence. Another day, I binged Better Call Saul episodes guilt-free because I’d worked on my book for almost 10 minutes that morning. Without doing things like this, I simply wouldn’t have got it done. I’d still be working on it (or rather, not working on it). And why wouldn’t I have been able to approach it like this a few months ago? Well, because the idea of rewarding myself for writing half a sentence was just absurd. Half a sentence is tiny. If all I produce in an entire day is part of a sentence, I don’t deserve a reward - what I deserve is more along the lines of a 5-hour sermon from my inner critic about what a lazy piece of crap I am. At least, that’s the way I used to think about these things. The problem is, it didn’t work. On those days when I’d spend hours beating myself up about having written only one sentence that day, I certainly didn’t write a sentence the next day, or the day after that. My inner critic never motivated me to try harder; all she did was stop me from wanting to try at all. The lesson I want you to learn here is this: if you want to get the job done, you need to stop thinking in terms of what you deserve. Just stop. Trust me, you’ll never think you deserve a reward. You need to think, instead, about cause and effect. What’s going to motivate you to get out of bed tomorrow morning and crack on with this thing you want to finish? Certainly not remembering what a worthless piece of shit you are. You need to cheer yourself on. Imagine you’re running a marathon, running along streets lined with spectators who are calling things to you that help motivate you. What are those things that they’re saying? What do they need to be saying if they’re going to inspire you to dig deep and keep pushing? Is it stuff like, ‘Jesus Christ, that 85-year-old in the giraffe costume passed this point half an hour ago and wasn’t even sweating, you better pull something out the bag if you don’t want to be a pathetic failure’? Doubt it. They’re going to be saying nice things. Encouraging things. Nurturing things. It’s going to be carrots all the way, no sticks.
Here’s a final point. Be very very clear about what it is that you’re trying to achieve. What does reaching your goal look like? How will you know when you’re there? If you don’t get clear about this, you’ll end up moving your goalposts. I feel myself doing this. Ok, so I’ve submitted the book to the publisher, but the publisher is going to get reviewers involved and so I’m going to need to make changes so it’s not really finished. I take care to stop these trains of thought. I mean, it’s true that there’ll be further changes to make, but it’s submitting the manuscript that I’ve been aiming at all these years. Be on guard against this goalpost-shifting. Download my goal contract from the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website for some help with this - I’ll link to it in the episode notes.
Good luck, friend. However disillusioned and frustrated and depressed you feel about that thing you’re working on - you’re not unique. You’re not even unusual. You’re completely normal, and the way you feel is exactly the way it feels when you’re doing it right. Keep going. Solidarity.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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