This post encourages us to think deeply about how authorship debates are part of broader questions of what authorship is for, who it is for, and who benefits from it. The examples in this post help us to see that there are established of ways of attributing authorship that can acknowledge these collectives, and perhaps encourage us to be innovative or accurate in our authorship practices.
Writing advice gets under people’s skin and into their guts and hearts. When I chat to a person whose self perception of their writing is a long way off the reality I see on the page, I often ask them ‘who told you your writing was like that?’ A school teacher, an undergraduate lecturer, a supervisor. Those comments stick, sometimes for decades.
In other words, yes add to your word count and update your EndNote library. But also take time to mull things over or let things mature. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and. Do your front burner and your back burner work to sustainably, excellently, elegantly, enjoyably create writing that will wow your readers.
There is no one ideal posture that you should take and maintain for the full working day. Instead, the best posture is actually a series of different positions. At home, you already have a range of furniture and spaces available to you, so it’s easier to switch it up. Changing how you sit every so often, even if it’s just moving chairs every few hours, can make a huge different to your comfort and mobility. Move from the desk to the sofa and back again, or out to the balcony. Stand at the breakfast bar, or use that treadmill or stationary bike in the living room.
Your brain is not seperate from your body. Your brain is an organ of your body, and it requires energy, hydration, blood flow and rest.
Are you a ‘Spreader’ or are you a ‘Stacker’? In your writing time, do you prefer to spread it out by writing a little bit every day, or to set aside a ‘writing day’ and stack up all your writing blocks in one go?
I don’t know that I think you should make your writing sacred. But I do think that you could and you might like to. In any case, this thought-experiment about ‘what would it mean to make your writing sacred’ may help you to think through what you do think about your writing, how you define its meaning and place in your life, and what habits and environments you put around it to help you get that thesis written.
I am a massive fan of writing luxuries. Somehow the beautiful pencil or the diffuser scent or the ideal snack makes an outsized difference to how excited I am to sit at my keyboard. Maybe it’s a bourgeois trick, and maybe it’s self-care, and maybe it works for me and anything that works is worth exploring.
This one is going to be a lot of messy thinking aloud about the place of writing and self-care. There will be Latin and Greek! There will be Lorde and Foucault! If you don’t like theory, run very fast in another direction. If you do like theory–this will be a bloggy exemplar of thinking with, not a tight conclusion, and I’d love to talk to you about it!
Join me for an event on 21 June on Writing Well / Being Well in Academia, with my series editor Narelle Lemon (Swinburne University) as
