#97: When failure of inspiration strikes
What do you do when you have no idea? When you literally can't think of anything to write about? I don't know why I'm asking. I already know the answer: you panic and run to your favourite productivity websites for a new hack to solve it, right? And you definitely, definitely don't tell anyone, because struggling to come up with ideas is a shameful secret that you must guard with your very life.
Friend, step away from the productivity hacks. Having no idea is something we've all experienced. It's even - hear me out - a completely normal part of the writing process. To fix it, though, you need to do something very scary. You need to relax and let go.
Episode transcript:
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 everyone. Did I ever tell you about that time when I had literally no idea? I can definitely remember mentioning it a couple of times. I had no ideas whatsoever about what I should write about. I’d just got my first academic job - a postdoc at the University of Oxford’s sadly now-defunct Future of Humanity Institute - after several years working outside academia and trying to get back in, writing articles and applying for jobs at the end of the working day to try to keep my CV fresh. Anyway, finally, unbelievably, I was back in academia, which I’d begun to fear I’d never see again from the inside. I can still remember getting the call to say I’d got the job. I floated around on a cloud for the next couple of weeks as I prepared to move from London, where I was living at the time, to Oxford. I’d made it! A fresh start! The break I feared I might never get! And I definitely wasn’t going to mess things up. I wasn’t going to spend days on end faffing about and procrastinating, as I’d done when I was a PhD student. I’d learnt my lesson. I was going to work hard. I was going to remember how lucky I was. I was going to be one of those hyper-focused people who switched on their laser beam of attention in the morning and kept it steadily directed at whatever they were working on until the evening. I was going to be a productivity factory. I’d be churning out those publications. And, perhaps most importantly, I’d be ending every day feeling pleased with myself for not wasting time, for just getting on with it. My approach to returning to academia felt like rekindling a romantic relationship with an ex who I hadn’t treated very well. I was full of promises about how I was going to be different this time, but without any understanding of what went wrong last time, and even whether anything had gone wrong - whatever I was doing in the past had got me my PhD, after all. Anyway. The day arrived, and there I was, sitting at my new desk in my new job. There was a research agenda where I was working - I needed to be working on issues that were very distant from what I’d written my PhD on. So, at the start, I spent quite a bit of time reading stuff and getting a feel for this new world. And, very quickly, anxiety started to creep in. I don’t read very fast and I felt a bit frustrated. What I was doing didn’t feel very productive. I needed to be writing. I needed to show the people who had given me this job that they’d made a good choice. A few weeks went by and I was still, I felt, finding my feet. I still had no clear ideas about what I was going to write about. What if I never found a way to contribute to the research of this community who had welcomed me? What a kick in the teeth that would be for them. Way to show my gratitude for giving me a chance. While this was going on, I overheard a PhD student describe the work of the institute where I was employed as ‘absolutely fascinating’. That gave me pause. Imagine being relaxed enough to find it fascinating, I thought. All I felt was fear. This fear definitely wasn’t based on feedback I was getting from anyone else. Nobody was saying to me, ‘Unless you start doing something useful very soon, you’re out’. The people around me were welcoming and encouraging and often told me explicitly that I was doing a good job. But, in a way, that made it worse, because look at how badly I’d deceived them! They were going to be so hurt and disappointed when they realised what a big fat white elephant they’d employed. So, why wasn’t I writing? Well, I just couldn’t. You can’t force these things. Believe me, I tried. After working for a few years in the corporate world, I was used to being at my desk from 9am until 6pm, and I kept that up in my new academic position. I was in my office the whole time, pretty much. I was, to the best of my ability, behaving just as I’d promised myself I’d behave: I was reading, thinking, making notes, sitting there and toughing it out. But I wasn’t ending my working days feeling satisfied with myself for time productively spent. I was frustrated that there still wasn’t any writing project taking shape. And as more time passed, my frustration became fear. Why didn’t I have any ideas? I literally couldn’t think of anything to write about. Not one thing. This went on for a couple of years. In fact, though, I did write a few things, but some of them were co-authored - which, in my mind, meant that I was the dead wood being carried along by other people’s ideas - or when they were single-authored I found ways to dismiss them so that they didn’t threaten my image of myself as a waste of space: they were not published in the right place, not long enough, not relevant enough, not original enough, whatever. And there were a few original, sole-authored projects that just never made it to the stage of being publishable articles, so they didn’t count either. Things aren’t like that any more. If anything, it’s the reverse: I have too many ideas, and I have to be careful of derailing partly-done projects because I’ve got distracted by the next. But, interestingly, this problem of struggling to come up with good (or indeed any) ideas for new research projects has come up a few times recently - in coaching sessions, and in a couple of cases, in emails that listeners of the podcast have sent to me. So, I thought, let’s dedicate an episode to it. If you’re one of those people who are feeling like an inspiration-free zone, keep listening, and I hope some of what follows will resonate with you. As with many struggles that relate in one way or another to productivity, failure of inspiration has anxiety at the heart of it. I mean, so what if you can’t think of any good research ideas right now? What a great excuse to follow your interest and read all sorts of things that appeal to you as you ponder what to write about. Read, explore, and allow the ideas to emerge when they’re ready. That’s something that people do every day, without worrying about it, without it occurring to them to think of it as a problem, without ever framing it as ‘I can’t think of anything to write about’. It’s all very well if you feel secure in your circumstances, if you don’t have a sense of ‘I need to write something by date X or else’, and if you’re not prone to catastrophising the entire situation by thinking things like, ‘What if I never come up with a good idea?’ and ‘Everyone else is writing productively, I don’t belong here’. But, of course, in the real world, people have deadlines, temporary employment contracts, PhD and tenure reviews, and all sorts of other external pressures that stand in the way of being able to relax and trust the process, letting the ideas form in their own time. And very often, people who are struggling and under pressure and lacking support end up blaming their lack of writing progress on their own character flaws: they’re lazy or undisciplined or disorganised or not smart enough. The impostor syndrome kicks in, and that makes them reluctant to seek support even if it’s there, because they’re afraid to unmask themselves as someone who’s having this sort of problem. That was certainly how it was in my case. I had lovely colleagues, and in retrospect I think that if I’d opened up to them about my failure of inspiration, they would have been sympathetic. I’m not sure whether, practically speaking, they would have known how to help me out of my rut, but they would have been able to share their own experiences of writing, and what it’s like when it’s not going well, and I expect that would have helped normalise it for me and removed some of the shame and helped me feel less alone. But, I couldn’t. I didn’t want them to know what was going on because I didn’t want to let them down. I just needed to shut up and publish something. And so the problem just got bigger. Now, there’s a danger I’ve noticed when people - academics - think of themselves as lazy, disorganised, ill-disciplined, and all the rest of it. They end up thinking that the answer to their problems lies in productivity literature. They need just one more hack, and they’ll be back on the right tracks. Maybe if they try this task-scheduling app or that journaling system or the other social-media-blocking timer. I’m not saying that those sorts of things don’t have value, but they can distract people from the real problem. Buying a beautiful new Leuchtturm journal and a pack of highlighter pens is so much more fun than digging into our own sense of inadequacy - and in some cases productivity hacks can make the problem worse. That’s because productivity techniques are basically about gaining or improving control over various aspects of our lives, and people who are struggling to come up with ideas often need to give up control rather than increase it. Remember episode #19: Not writing is an essential part of writing? I talked there about the importance of time away from the desk, to give your mind a chance to wander and form creative connections and new insights and ideas. Archimedes, reportedly, had his ‘eureka!’ moment while sitting in the bath, not while he was hunched over his Macbook in his cubicle at work (he did have a Macbook and work in a cubicle, shut up). And, more prosaically, it’s taken 2 night’s sleep, a nap, a couple of visits to the gym, and a few hours of crochet to feel like I have something novel and worth saying in this episode - before that, my thoughts seemed just to boil down to the stuff I’d already said back in episode 19 and I was wondering whether to find something else to talk about for this one. So, you need down time if you want ideas, which is a problem, because when you tell someone who thinks of themselves as lazy and unproductive that they need time away from their writing, they look at you like you’ve just suggested that they go out and find a toddler to eat for dinner. This seems like a good point to remind you to take what your anxiety is telling you with a big pinch of salt. When your writing isn’t going as well as you’d like, your anxiety might tell you to cling even harder to control - to put in more hours, focus even harder, download yet another productivity app. But while there are times when those strategies can be helpful, failure of inspiration is not one of those times. It’s a bit like the band on the Titanic, who played on - it was their job, after all - instead of running for the lifeboats. Clinging to control, clinging to what makes you feel like you’re achieving something, is not going to give you what you want here. And more generally, your anxiety doesn’t always tell you the truth, or push you towards the most helpful solutions. Even if you can’t yet bring yourself to accept that something other than ‘must try harder’ is the most helpful solution, see if you can at least open your mind to the possibility that your anxiety isn’t always a reliable guide to what is most helpful for you. I wonder whether there’s something else feeding into people’s reluctance to ease back and wait for the ideas to come in their own time, too. Being an independent researcher - someone who needs to identify and formulate their own research questions and problems - involves a lot more open-ended, directionless thinking and reading than being a student. Especially when you’re an undergraduate, you’re handed problems and questions by your lecturers and told to write about them, often with a list of readings to help get you started. This makes it easy to overlook the time and energy it can take to identify a topic to write about, and then whittle it down until you have a research question you can answer. Coming up with a question to answer is, in fact, a big part of the work. I’m constantly telling my dissertation students this. It’s possible even to get through not only your entire undergraduate studies, but also your postgrad studies and first few years as a postdoc without having to come up with your own research questions. There’s lots of PhD students and postdocs who join programs that already have a research agenda, which someone else has come up with, and so those PhD students and postdocs can spend quite a few years working within these guard rails where it’s relatively clear to them what sorts of things they need to be investigating. Some people might be the best part of a decade post-PhD before they’re fully on your own, not working on someone else’s research project, and needing for the very first time to come up with research problems to investigate alone. And because people in that position aren’t exactly early-career, they can get missed by the usual safety nets designed to support and guide researchers who are just starting out. It’s little wonder that there can follow panic and feelings of inadequacy. People can end up mistakenly thinking that they are utterly devoid of inspiration, when actually what they’re experiencing is the completely normal state of needing to spend some time thinking and exploring before they reach the stage where they have in mind a research question they can investigate. To them, this is just not what research is supposed to feel like, and because they’re reluctant to discuss their struggles, nobody puts them straight. So, it’s normal to have periods where you don’t know what you want to be researching. You have no ideas. If there’s no edge of anxiety to that, it can be a fun period where you get to explore and be curious and try things out. Perhaps learning that this is a normal stage of formulating ideas for your research, a stage that everyone goes through, will help blunt that edge of anxiety. It’s much easier if you have some support around you - if you can discuss your experiences as a researcher with colleagues in a supportive setting. Sadly, those sorts of supportive environments are often lacking, as Professor Joli Jensen talked about in episode #93 of this podcast, and in her book, Write No Matter What. I think, though, that often when people complain about having a failure of inspiration, it’s not that they have no ideas whatsoever. Often, there’s something else going on. Sometimes it’s ‘I have an idea but I don’t think I’m smart enough to do it justice’. Or ‘I have an idea but I don’t know how to distil it into the 8,000-word article I need to write by this date for that book’. Or ‘I have an idea but I need to get on with writing about it already and stop this stupid directionless reading and note-taking and going down dead ends’. Some of what’s underlying these problems is a recognition that the process of research doesn’t fit the mould it needs to fit. There’s an interesting problem to investigate but it looks like it’s a year of work and you have 3 weeks to produce something. Or, given the time it takes to turn a finished article into a publication you can put on your CV, you’re going to be unemployed by the time you finish it, and you need a job to be able to finish it. These are very real problems that plenty of us face every day. But let’s be very clear about one thing: the fact that you face these problems is not a result of any problem with you as a researcher, so try to get that idea out of your head. Not being able to come up with an idea for a research project that fits neatly into the timeframe and word count it needs to fit is not the same thing as having no ideas. It’s a problem with a practical solution that - contrary to what you might be telling yourself - doesn’t require doing a makeover of your entire personality and becoming the productive, organised person you wish you were. Here’s one idea for a solution. It’s going to sound a bit of a strange thing to say to people who claim to have no good ideas, but here it is. Allow yourself to have multiple research projects on the go. You can have open-ended ones that have no end in sight and that might or might not materialise in book or article form some time in the future. And then you can also have smaller ones, perhaps spin-offs from the open-ended ones, that you can prune to fit the mould they need to fit. So, if you need to produce a book chapter in the next couple of months, you don’t wail about how your only ideas are far too big and unwieldy for that - instead, you shave a bit off your big project and make it into a smaller article. The smaller article becomes kind of a footnote to the bigger project. It can even help move your big project ideas along a bit, and generate new ideas. Now, when I suggest this to people, they’re often horrified. They have so few ideas as it is - if they take something off the big project to make it into a book chapter or an article, they won’t have anything left for the big project! They basically have just the one idea, and if they use it up for this, they’ll never have another one, ever! Calm down, friends. This is your scarcity mindset talking. Remember episode #12: Delete your scarcity mindset? Ideas are free. Writing about one of them is going to lead to new ones. You’re not going to run out, believe me. This leads me to the second issue that underlies failures of inspiration that aren’t really failures of inspiration: lack of trust in oneself. People have good ideas but they don’t trust themselves to write about them smartly enough. Or they don’t trust themselves to come up with any more good ideas after this one, so they really need to make this one count by publishing it in the best possible place so they can ride the wave for the rest of their career. Jeez, just go ahead and write about it. If this is you, you’re putting obstacles in your own way. Your anxiety is leading you to interpret ‘idea for a research project’ so narrowly that it’s no wonder you’re having difficulties. In an effort to use your own creativity and energy wisely, you’re telling yourself that you need to come up with an idea that’s good but not so good that you’re too stupid for it, and it needs to be mediocre enough that you can write about it now rather than save it for when you can publish it in that stellar journal, and if you do come up with an idea that’s really really good then you’d better not even think of writing about it unless it’s going to be the making of your entire career. Stop it. This is not the way to take care of yourself. Allow yourself to be curious and enjoy exploring, like you used to in the days before your interest in your discipline got smothered by stress and worries about productivity and inadequacy. There are plenty more ideas where those came from. Talking of which, here’s another pitfall to avoid. Lots of good ideas come up in relaxed discussions with colleagues, students, and other researchers, in the pub or over lunch or coffee. But if you’re someone who thinks they’re not productive enough, you’re probably also someone who turns down invitations from colleagues to do something relaxed and fun, which means you’re missing out on an important tool for idea generation - and an important means to relax and unwind. Nattering with colleagues over coffee and cake or going for a run or taking a nap or a bath or a holiday aren’t activities that are going to get things written - but they are things that can help you tap into the creativity that gives you the ideas in the first place. And without that, there’s nothing to write, is there? We’re back again with that idea I mentioned earlier: not every problem can be solved with more control. You can force yourself to sit there and finish off a piece of writing the night before the deadline, but you can’t force creativity in the same way. Sometimes you need to release your grip and trust the process. What would releasing your grip and trusting the process - trusting your own capacity for creativity - look like for you? Is there something you can do today to set it in motion? I dare you. Laters, friends.
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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