This is me, being in the moment, taking action and moving towards my goals.
How? Because: I am at work on a day off with the primary goal of working on my writing. This specifically means that I am working through “Writing your journal article in 12 weeks: A guide to academic publishing success” by Wendy Belcher (www.wendybelcher.com) in order to make and execute a plan for writing. And in Chapter 1, p.2, the exercise is to discuss and write about my feelings about my experience of writing. So here goes.
When I am in the moment and writing, writing is both intensely creative and a work of joyful craftsmanship. Starting with the latter, I feel the pleasure of organizing content to best convey meaning, choosing appropriate words, deleting excess ones, choosing illustrative examples and expanding on interesting points. I feel my technical skills and perspectives on writing that have developed over years of reading and writing come into play. My creativity and energy are also sparked as I find myself playing with words, drawing on vocabulary I rarely use, generating new ideas and flows and examples that didn’t exist before. I feel energized and excited to continue when it’s going well. I love to write.
When I haven’t written, I feel weak and unprepared academically. I feel like an academic and professional underachiever (not quite loser, but not a winner either). I feel less intelligent than other friends who have got their PhDs and put them to work. I feel that I’ve failed to carry through past projects to completion, thus letting down the people I worked with and my funders. I feel the weight of the undone projects on my shoulders, I see them as a massive wall stopping me from moving on to other newer exciting work because they MUST be tackled. They are my required tasks and I will not feel free and able to move forward until I’ve dealt with each one of htem in some way.
When I’m starting or approaching a newly reopened project I feel both excitement (maybe I”ll get it done!) combined with discouragement. Sorting through references and literature reviews feels like a massive swamp of information sucking me down. I don’t know how I”ll have the time or intellectual ability to figure out what’s relevant and what isn’t. I read through what I have and feel like not even moving forward when I consider how far it is from a journal article.
Some feelings about writing. And now back to lunch.