Summer Writing

I finished grading undergraduate papers at 6.45am yesterday and although I still have several projects on my desk, I begin now to look forward to that happy time in the academic's life, the summer writing season. It is similar in length for the British academic and for the American academic but it begins and ends at different times, May to August in the US, June to September in the UK. Usually speaking, I begin the summer full of optimism about how much I am going to write. I then get about half of that done, with all those other projects on my desk crowding it out, reading and editing manuscripts, writing shorter articles for multi-author works, reviewing books, and continuing to excavate the email mountain, to say nothing of housework, family and, I hope, relaxation and travel. This summer I am determined to get more of the top grade kind of writing done (book and articles), spending less time on the "jobbing" kind of writing. The latter is necessary but the former is where one gets the most satisfaction and intellectual stimulation. For this process, lots of discipline is required and I have decided to make a few rules for myself:

(1) Email correspondence will be limited to early mornings and evenings. The day is for writing. In line with this, I have switched off my automatic alerts so that I cannot be distracted by the arrival of interesting (or threatening) looking emails that drag me in.

(2) Pidgin will be switched off all day. The day is for writing.

(3) My best writing time is the morning; I will therefore focus specially on the nitty gritty of writing in the mornings.

(4) I will resist chasing references and following hunches during the day. The day is for writing.

(5) I will only blog during the day if it is directly related to the topic of the book or articles I am writing. Broader blogging is for early morning or evenings.

(6) The New Testament Gateway requires some serious work, but cannot be a priority at this stage. The day is for writing. If I can get back to the New Testament Gateway in due course, that will be fantastic. If I cannot, I am going to have to be selfish and prioritize writing.

These are a few rules I am setting myself. I am also making myself accountable to my blog. The book I am working on at the moment is provisionally entitled Thomas and the Gospels and is about the relationship of the Gospel of Thomas to the Synoptics. My hope is to break the back of this this summer, ideally also finishing a couple of articles I am working on. I'll check in again in August to see what the progress is like.

I am not thinking of giving up blogging

I just want to clarify, in relation to my post about How access to the internet interferes with writing, that I wouldn't dream of giving up blogging, with thanks to comments on Ricoblog and Jim West. I love it, and will continue to do it even if my readership goes down to a handful. Attempts to streamline my use of the internet are more about resisting the urge to follow up every small reference, to satisfy every curiosity as it arises online, to provide full, detailed and speedy responses to every single email received, and so on. Like housework, another thing that occupies far too much of my time, internet usage will always expand to fill the time available, and for academics that means that it seeps into one's writing time and crowds it out. At its best, academic blogging aids the writing task, whether by giving one the opportunity to develop ideas, to engage with others over work in progress, or in getting involved in what's going on in the area. The danger that I see with the internet is not those things but rather that it is ever present, always giving the impression of unexplored territory, ready to provide me with answers to questions I happen to be bothered about at any given point in time.

I think broadband is to blame. When I began writing The Case Against Q in the late 1990s, I was on a dial-up connection, and it was easier to impose discipline. I would just look up my references when I was next in the library, for example. Now, it is too easy to go and check them out straight away, and for one reference to lead one to another article I had not realized existed and so on. None of this is problematic in itself; it is just that the broadband era requires a great deal more discipline in writing practices, at least for me. I liked James McGrath's comment on my previous post, which I will repeat here, a great tip for graduate students and for easily distracted academics:

Your point about not looking up every last reference is also a good one. A nice trick I learned from my doctoral supervisor Jimmy Dunn is to put a sign $$$ in those places where one needs to go back and add a reference or further information. Since that sign has no other use, you just go back later and search for $$$ and track down the missing references then. It is a good way of keeping the writing flowing, even when one could theoretically stop and look for the needed citation.

How access to the internet interferes with writing

I have often wondered how much more productive I would be if I didn't have such easy, regular access to the internet. When I say "productive", I mean in terms of proper, published books and articles and not just extensive web-published materials. I know that we all now spend inordinate amounts of time ploughing through the daily batch of emails, and being away for over two weeks, three including Bellingham and Seattle too, and not having regular access to the net, or time to spend there, impresses me about just how much time I must spend every day working on correspondence, and correspondence related activities, as well as reading blogs, blogging myself and so on. I love the internet; I enjoy corresponding; I love blogging; I love reading materials made available on the internet, yet there is always going to be that part of me that wonders just how much more research and writing I would have done and would be doing were it not for the net.

For the first few days of our recent return to the UK, we had a delightful stay in a secluded cottage in the middle of the country near Llandeilo in South Wales. There was no internet availability, no mobile phone signal, even the radio and TV signals were weak. It was bliss. One night, perhaps because of the jet lag, I couldn't sleep, which is very, very rare for me. I decided to spend the time rethinking the book I am writing on the Gospel of Thomas at the moment. Once satisfied, I was able to sleep. The next day, I found a spare couple of hours to begin writing chapter 5 of the book, which is about parable and allegory in the Synoptics and Thomas, and I don't recall ever having written so quickly, or to have found writing so enjoyable. What intrigued me was that the absence of the availability of the net meant that I could not just keep checking up those little references, following up those little niggles or thoughts that arise all the time. I was able to understand more clearly than before why it is that some scholars are able to bang out such enormous volumes of material.

The moral of the story? It's difficult to find it. I am tempted to say that I should allow myself regular abstinence from the internet, that I should be more selfish with my time, that I should introduce a far more rigorous discipline into the way that I work. Given the joys of regular internet access, I know that that is going to be very difficult to do, but I am inclined to give it a serious try.