"Hey Andrew, How Do You Get So Much Writing Done?"

People ask me this and I tell them I write a lot. People sometimes say, "You're really smart. That's how you get so much accomplished." "Well hold your horses," I tell them. "I'm not really THAT smart. I just work hard and I write everyday." And that's the first key. So if you really want to know how I get so much published in journals - though it's probably similar if you are writing books, magazine articles, or for a newspaper - here is what I do. None of this is original. They are ideas I've snagged from other authors, colleagues, peers, friends, mentors. 


1. Always, always write. Whether you are sitting down with a vague idea (Chaos theory and academic conferencing). Write. Or have just a bare sketch (Buffy, Spike, and Foucault). Write. Or are entertaining two opposing thoughts (Abbot and Costello Meet Punk Rock). Write. Or have come up with simply a weird title (like “Kierkegaard and Human Resources in the Modern Corporation,” for example) write. Write a little each day, write a lot each day. Write. Take Anne Lamott’s advice and write that “shitty rough draft.” No one will see it but you, so don’t worry about grammar, punctuation, references, footnotes, or any of that mundane stuff. That’s not writing. That’s editing. That comes later. Just write. Get words on the page. Sometimes they come slowly – word by word. Sometimes they come in a flourish. No matter. Write.

2. Take a break. Seriously. The pressure to publish is insane in academe. So write. Write until your P.O.S. draft is done.  Then stop. Push yourself away from your desk. Close the laptop. Whatever. Just stop. Go outside. Take the Underwater Basket Weaving class that meets every Saturday. Just don’t write. Have a beer at a local water hole. Shoot a game of pool someplace. Smoke crack. Walk the dog. Buy ferrets. Paint your abode. Work on your syllabus. Read some fiction. Go see a kickin' flick. Work on a flier for your upcoming summer class. Don’t write. For three days. Don’t write. This will refresh your mind.


3. Edit. As Bud Goodall once said, “All good writing is re-writing.” This does not mean merely editing. This means giving your work a careful read. By doing so you find concepts that are unclear and need to be expanded. Hack away the passive voice. Keep to your thesis statement. This means re-examining thoughts and ideas that may be tangential to your main argument and dumping them – perhaps they are the germ of a different piece. Like Red Leader said in Star Wars, “Stay on target.” This writing can be the real muck, but don’t be deterred. Revise, refine, rewrite. Put it away again. Just leave it be. 


4. Edit again. Here’s where things get tough. We generally like all the words we write. As the Police song goes, “I'm a walking nightmare, an arsenal of doom” and be a Demolition Wo/Man. Here’s where you kill your children. Some of them are still-births and need to be eliminated. Some of them sound grand and promote a flourish you think is delightful. Kill them. Axe them. Erase them. Murder them. While you want to maintain your voice, anything that is unneeded needs to go. Be a brutal dictator.


5. Show it to peers. For academics this is the hardest part, because we don’t like anyone to think we are stupid. There’s a lot of work and pride that goes into writing. Let me give you a hint. Nothing you write is perfect. Ever. So let it “leave your hand” and go into a colleagues'. This is absolutely important. I wrote a piece for an ethnography class I had as an M.A. student at Saint Louis University. I wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. I sent it out for publication over and over. Well, finally I let some other people read the thing. Turns out I was trying to do too much in that one piece. Bob Krizek read it when it was a class draft. My friend Sam read it. Eric Eisenberg read it. They all gave me great advice. I still could not get it published. Finally, I took it to the Young Scholars class at CSCA. This group of scholars said, “Andrew, its almost like you have two pieces here. One on the process of organizing at a new nonprofit, and one on your own personal narrative as a punk rocker returning to the scene after a dozen years.” They were correct. I broke it into two pieces. One piece is out. The other is in press. If I had never shown it to anyone, I’d never recognized the problem.


6. Edit. Again. Word by word. Punctuation mark by punctuation mark. Line by line. Reference by reference. Work out those transitional sentences that connect paragraph to paragraph. (Confession: I hate those sentences. I stink at them. For me they are the most arduous task. Still they must be done.) Essential tedium.


7. Send it out. Pick a journal that matches what your subject is and what your method is. I’m a qualitative researcher, so as much as I’d like to get something published in Communication Monographs, that’s not going to happen. There’s no goodness of fit. Don’t mess with journals that don’t do what you do. I don’t want to waste my time and the editor’s time either. Search out journals. As a qualitative organizational communication scholar, I had to find my outlets. Like what? Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal. Journal of Loss & Trauma. Qualitative Inquiry. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Studies in Symbolic Interaction. Journal of Organizational Ethnography. International Review of Qualitative Research. Qualitative Communication Research. If it gets rejected outright – send it to the next journal on your list. Don’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself. When you get a revise and resubmit, revise and resubmit. Period.

8. Keep writing. I generally have two or three things always in progress. When something is accepted for publication, I begin a new piece, even if that possible piece is some hackneyed idea like “Adding bleach to the laundry as a speech act.” Brainstorm. Read good fiction ( I prefer Horror and Hard-Boiled Detectives) and nonfiction. Write. Keep writing. Always write. Every day. Every day. That’s the only way to progress.


Bonus step: Unplug. Kill your cable. There's nothing on there anyway. Hulu or Netflix what you really want to watch. Seriously. You'll never realize how much time you have to write until you realize how much time you have to write.