If you struggle with writing anxiety, I want to assure you that it is possible to learn to love writing. Such love is the foundation and motivation for a healthy practice. Saying that it’s important to love your work and calling it “a labor of love” might suggest that I’m getting distracted by woo-woo new-age goals, so I want to be clear that my goal is to help anxious writers write more productively, any emotional benefits are secondary. It just so happens, however, that people often manifest high-level performance because they love what they’re doing and consequently spend a lot of time and effort on it. I imagine that anyone in academia has met at least one scholar who did good work and was truly, genuinely excited by and interested in the ideas they were pursuing.
4/7 TAA Webinar – Beyond Productivity: How to Build a Joyful Writing Practice
Are you tired of feeling anxious, overwhelmed, or unconfident as a writer? Do you long to recover your love of inquiry and cultivate a joyful relationship with your writing?
Join us Thursday, April 7, 2022, 1-2 p.m. EST, “Beyond Productivity: How to Build a Joyful Writing Practice”, presented by Michelle Boyd of InkWell Academic Writing Retreats. In this one-hour webinar, she will explain why writing is so emotionally taxing, describe how scholars can use social writing to overcome their writing fears. By the end of the session, each scholar will better understand their own barriers and have a step-by-step plan for implementing their personalized social writing strategy.
New TAA eBook Download: Writing Accountability – Productivity Through Partnership
Download this 17-page eBook, packed with helpful information for textbook and academic authors on how to be more productive through writing accountability, including:
- How a Personal Writing Team Can Increase Your Productivity Through Accountability
- How to Be an Effective Writing Accountability Partner
- Writing Groups: When, Why, How, and Best Practices
- Developing Healthy Collaborative Relationships: Why and How
Don’t want to write? Rev up your intentions
These languid summer days, after some necessary business with my dissertation coaching and editing clients, I resist doing my personal writing. Generally, I manage to balance (or struggle with or squeeze) the ever-ongoing writing projects—novel, stories, essays, poems—with the client work. If I don’t do something on my own writing, the day will feel wasted and I didn’t fulfill at least a little of my writing promise to myself.
To tease myself into writing on a particularly steamy day (despite the air conditioning), I remembered a technique that academic and creative coach Dr. Dominique Chlup (2016) teaches her clients. This is to first set your writing intentions: ask yourself how you want to feel writing during this session or having written.
12 Authors share practical advice with TAA conference attendees
As an exclusive bonus for attendees at TAA’s 2021 Virtual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference, twelve textbook and academic authors have shared practical advice through a series of “How To” videos on topics relating to scholarly writing, time management, productivity, publishing, online presenting, and more. Each video is a brief 5 to 10-minute segment packed with information to move your writing practice forward.
We’d like to thank the following authors for sharing their expertise.
Overcome a startling block: When your writing flows
Your fingers play the keyboard like a concert pianist, your pens run dry with astounding speed, your pages pile up like gold. “Wow,” you think, “this is how it should be! I’m gonna go all night!”
But then, faster than a form rejection, more powerful than an editor’s frown, able to freeze your brain in a single flash, a horrible thought zaps you: I can’t stand it anymore!
What! Why? A strange reason: Your writing’s going just too well.