If you’re a social scientist working on a book—whether it’s a dissertation-to-book revision or a new project—you may find yourself bumping up against an unexpected challenge. The writing conventions that served you well in journal articles don’t translate directly to the book genre. In fact, they can actively work against you.

This is something I see frequently with coaching clients from sociology, political science, communication, and other social science fields. They know how to write a strong journal article. But when they sit down to write a book, they default to the same structures—and then wonder why the manuscript feels disjointed or why readers struggle to follow the argument.

The good news is that this is a solvable problem. But it requires understanding that you’re working in a different genre, one that draws more heavily on humanistic writing traditions.

If you’ve published in the social sciences, you’re likely very familiar with the IMRAD format—Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion—which dominates empirical journal articles.

Each section has a clear job: the introduction frames the problem and literature, the methods explain how the study was conducted, the results present findings without interpretation, and the discussion makes sense of those findings and situates them in the field.

This structure works well for journals: it’s standardized, signals rigor, and helps readers and reviewers know exactly where to look. But books, especially those meant to reach beyond a narrow subfield, don’t work this way. Academic monographs already speak to broader audiences, and if you’re aiming for a crossover book, moving beyond IMRAD conventions becomes even more important.

Books—including academic monographs—draw on a different tradition.

Rather than separating evidence from interpretation, book chapters integrate them. Rather than cordoning off your literature review into its own section, you weave engagement with other scholars throughout your argument. Rather than saving your analysis for a discussion section at the end, you’re analyzing as you go, giving readers context and making sense of your findings the moment you present them.

Let me give you a concrete example.

In an IMRAD-style article, you might write something like this:

Results: Participants reported high levels of uncertainty about their employment status. Seventy-three percent indicated they did not know whether their position would exist in six months.

And then, pages later in the discussion section:

Discussion: The high levels of employment uncertainty reported by participants reflect broader patterns of labor precarity identified by Smith (2011) and Jones (2018). These findings suggest that gig economy workers experience chronic instability that affects not only their material conditions but also their sense of identity and future planning.

In a book, you wouldn’t separate these. Instead, you’d write something like:

The workers I interviewed lived in a state of perpetual uncertainty. Nearly three-quarters didn’t know whether their jobs would exist in six months—a pattern that reflects what scholars have called the “precariat,” a class defined not by what they do but by the instability of their relationship to work itself (Smith 2011; Jones, 2018). This uncertainty wasn’t just a practical problem to be solved; it shaped how workers understood themselves, making long-term planning feel almost absurd.

Do you see the difference? The book version presents the finding and interprets it in the same breath. It brings in relevant scholarship not as a separate literature review but as a way of making sense of what you’re showing the reader. The evidence and the analysis are interwoven.

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When I work with social scientists who are new to book writing, I often notice them trying to preserve the IMRAD structure in disguised forms.

• They want a standalone literature review chapter that surveys everything scholars have said about their topic.

• They want a theory chapter that explains their theoretical framework before they’ve shown readers why it matters.

• They want a methods chapter that describes their data collection in exhaustive detail.

• And they want to save their analysis for later chapters, presenting “findings” first and interpretation second.

This instinct makes sense—it’s what you’ve been trained to do. But it makes for a less engaging book, one that asks readers to wade through extensive setup before they get to the payoff.

Books need to earn the reader’s attention continuously, not just in the introduction. Your book audience often isn’t just specialists in your subfield—it’s often students at various levels, scholars in adjacent fields, and perhaps even broader publics interested in your topic. They need to be pulled through by an argument, not handed a series of disconnected sections to assemble themselves.

In a book, the introduction does far more heavy lifting.

It’s where you establish the argument, introduce key concepts, and provide enough theoretical and methodological grounding to orient readers without tracing the full genealogy of every framework you use. Rather than separating theory and methods into standalone sections, you weave them into the setup of your intervention.

For example, instead of explaining Foucault’s governmentality in a discrete theory section, you introduce it as part of showing what your book argues and why that concept clarifies your topic. Methods are similarly condensed, sometimes supplemented by a brief appendix, offering just enough detail for readers to trust your evidence and follow your analysis.

There are exceptions—especially when developing or extending theory—but even then, a theory chapter should advance the book’s argument, not just summarize existing scholarship.

The shift I’m describing is fundamentally about integration.

In humanistic writing traditions—and in the book genre more broadly—you don’t separate your “results” from your analysis. You give context and make sense of what a finding means when you first present it. You bring in other scholars not to demonstrate that you’ve read them but because their ideas help illuminate what you’re showing the reader.

This means every chapter is doing multiple things at once: presenting evidence, analyzing that evidence, engaging with relevant scholarship, and advancing your overall argument. It’s more demanding to write this way, but it’s also more engaging to read.

If you find yourself writing a chapter that’s purely “here’s what I found” with no interpretation, or a chapter that’s purely “here’s what other scholars have said” with no connection to your evidence, that’s a sign you may be defaulting to IMRAD habits.

I want to be clear: writing in a more humanistic, integrated style isn’t less rigorous than the IMRAD format. It’s differently rigorous.

You still need to be systematic. You still need to ground your claims in evidence. You still need to engage seriously with existing scholarship.

But the rigor shows up differently. It shows up in the quality of your analysis, in the precision of your prose, and in your ability to weave together evidence and interpretation into a compelling whole. It shows up in an argument that builds and develops across chapters rather than findings that sit in one section waiting to be discussed in another.

If you’re a social scientist writing a book, you don’t have to abandon everything you know. But you do have to expand your repertoire, drawing on humanistic writing conventions to create something that works as a book, which is a sustained argument that pulls readers through from beginning to end.

Your task now is to adapt your familiar writing genre to a different genre—one with its own conventions, challenges, pleasures, and possibilities.

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In this episode, I want to gently dismantle that image, because I don’t think it is consistency at all. I think it is a fantasy. And I think most of us have spent a significant amount of time feeling like failures in relation to a standard that was never real to begin with.

My definition of consistency, arrived at after years of coaching writers and also after years of being a writer who has stared at a blank document wondering how I ended up there again, is this:

Consistency is not sticking to a writing routine perfectly and never getting off track. It is the commitment to return as soon as you can.

That distinction matters more than it might seem at first. I spend time in this episode on the difference between avoidance disguised as busyness and genuine overwhelm that requires triage, because those two things feel different from the inside, even when they look similar from the outside.

I also return to a metaphor I find myself coming back to again and again with clients: the meditation analogy. A meditation practice is not about achieving uninterrupted focus. It is about noticing when your mind has wandered and bringing it back, without drama, without self-flagellation.

Writing consistency works the same way. Returning to your desk after three weeks away carrying a backpack full of shame is not actually productive. The punishment is just another obstacle between you and the sentence.

What I most want you to take from this episode is permission to come back without the accumulated weight of the time you were away. The practices and the structure still matter. And the interruption is not a failure; it is just an interruption. Regardless of the detour, the destination was always there.

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I recently argued here in PNP that academic writers fall into two broad camps: architects, who build the structure first and draft inside it, and explorers, who need to write their way toward the argument before they can see it. Architects outline, then draft. Explorers draft, then figure out what they were trying to say—and then, often, draft again.

Read that post here:

I contend that neither approach is wrong, but that academic writing culture tends to privilege the architect’s process, leaving explorer writers with the nagging suspicion that they are doing it wrong. They are not, dear reader.

But I also want to be honest with you: being an explorer writer comes with a real challenge that the previous post didn’t fully address. Writing your way into an argument produces material. Sometimes a great deal of it. And at a certain point, you have to figure out what to do with all of it—how to take writing that followed the associative, recursive logic of your own thinking and transform it into prose that a reader can actually follow.

This is where a lot of explorer writers get stuck, not in the generating but in the shaping. And this is exactly where the reverse outline comes in.

The Challenge of Exploratory Drafts

Here’s what an exploratory draft often looks like from the inside: you know the ideas are there. You can feel the argument somewhere in the pages. But the writing moves the way your thinking moved—associatively, recursively, doubling back on itself, arriving at the strongest insight three-quarters of the way through rather than at the beginning where a reader would expect to find it.

Your draft is a record of how you came to understand something. The problem is that your reader doesn’t need you to retrace your entire intellectual journey. They need to be taken somewhere, efficiently and clearly, and your draft as it stands is not yet doing that.

This is the moment that can feel defeating for explorer writers, especially those who have spent weeks or months generating material. You have done the hard thinking. The argument is real. But looking at a long, sprawling draft and trying to figure out how to restructure it can feel like being handed a pile of thread and asked to find the beginning. You know it is in there somewhere.

What the Reverse Outline Does

The reverse outline is, in its simplest form, a way of seeing what you have already written from a distance. Instead of outlining before you draft—which, as we have established, doesn’t work for everyone—you create the outline after the draft exists, by reading through what you have written and recording, in a single sentence, what each paragraph or section is actually doing.

That is it. Read a paragraph. Write down its main idea in one sentence. Move to the next. By the time you have worked through the whole draft, you have something you did not have before: a map of the territory you have already covered, built from the writing itself rather than imposed on it in advance.

What that map shows you can be genuinely revelatory.

• You might discover that your actual argument—the sharpest, most original claim in the piece—appears for the first time on page twelve.

• You might find that you have three paragraphs in a row making essentially the same point, and one paragraph doing the work of an entire section all by itself.

• You might notice that two ideas you assumed were separate are actually the same idea approached from different angles, and that realizing this changes how the whole piece is organized.

None of this is visible when you are inside the draft. The reverse outline gives you the bird’s-eye view that exploratory drafting, by its nature, does not.

Now, I want to name something here, because I think it matters: reverse outlining an entire paper at once can itself feel overwhelming, and if that is where you are, I want to give you permission to start smaller. I

nstead of beginning at page one and working through to the end, start with the section that has the most traction—the part that feels closest to your central argument, or where the thinking already feels the most alive. Reverse outline that section first. Work on getting it to flow more clearly for your reader before you move on to the next.

For many writers, especially neurodivergent scholars who can find it difficult to hold many moving pieces in mind at once, this approach is actually more effective than trying to map the whole project in a single sitting. The goal is always the same: to see clearly what you have built. Sometimes the most direct path to that clarity is through a door that is already open.

Why This Is Especially Powerful for Explorers

The reverse outline produces something essential for explorer-writers. It is the moment when the structure becomes visible for the first time.

This is worth sitting with, because I think it reframes something important: explorer-writers are not writers who cannot organize their ideas.

They are writers who often need to generate the material before the organization can emerge from it. The reverse outline is the tool that makes that emergence possible. It is how you move from a draft that reflects the way your mind works to a manuscript that reflects what you actually know and want to argue—which is usually more precise, more original, and more compelling than anything you could have outlined before you began.

I have used this tool on my own drafts more times than I can count, and every time, it shows me something I could not see from inside the writing. An argument I thought was threaded throughout turns out to be concentrated in two sections. A section I thought was essential turns out to be scaffolding — necessary for my own thinking but not for the reader’s. The reverse outline does not judge the exploratory draft. It just helps you see what you built, so you can decide what to keep, what to move, and what the reader actually needs.

The Reassurance I Want to Leave You With

If you are an explorer-writer who has ever looked at a completed draft and felt a sinking sense that the work of writing was somehow only just beginning, I want you to know that you’re not actually behind. I find that if you are naturally an explorer-writer and you lean into allowing yourself to generate freely and then work to develop the structure, you can actually move faster in your writing process than if you try to develop the structure before you’re ready.

Exploration gives you something essential to your writing process: you have thought on the page, followed the idea where it led, and produced something with genuine intellectual density. The reverse outline is not a sign that you did the drafting wrong. It is the next stage of a process that was always going to move this way for you.

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And, believe me, I understand that impulse completely. When your book is bound up with tenure, promotion, years of accumulated work, and your sense of whether you actually belong in this field, critique can stop feeling like feedback and start feeling like a verdict.

But peer review was never designed to tell you whether you are a real scholar or whether your project deserved to exist. It is diagnostic. It shows what is working, what has not yet come clear on the page, and what the project might need in order to become what it is trying to be.

In this episode, I also get into something harder: how to work with feedback that feels frustrating, unfair, or even hostile, without either collapsing under it or dismissing it out of hand. Not every reviewer is right. Not every suggestion should be followed.

But even a poorly framed or seemingly off-base comment can sometimes be pointing at something real—a problem of scope, audience, framing, or significance that the reviewer couldn’t quite name, but you, once you stop wincing, might be able to see.

The approach I want to emphasize here is about treating reviewer feedback as information rather than punishment, so you can sort through it with more steadiness and judgment than the first raw read usually allows. In the end, the goal of peer review is to come through it with a clearer, stronger, more intentional book—and with a little more trust in your own capacity to receive hard things and keep writing anyway.

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In today’s episode, I’ll walk through why significance often crystallizes late in the writing process, why vagueness can feel protective, and how to think about the “so what” as something your book makes possible rather than just a gap it fills.

My hope is that this episode helps you stop treating an elusive significance claim as evidence that something is wrong with your project. Sometimes the "so what" is already there, threaded through the work, waiting for you to see it clearly enough to name it and feel confident enough to claim it.

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“Sustainable writing” is a phrase I use often in my work with scholars, and I want to be clear about what I mean—and what I don’t mean—when I invoke it.

I don’t mean writing that is slow by default, or writing that avoids ambition altogether. I don’t mean lowering your standards or settling for a book that feels half-formed or incomplete. And I certainly don’t mean pursuing some mythical perfectly balanced life where writing never creates friction or tension with other demands.

What I mean is this: writing that you can continue over the long haul without sacrificing your health, your relationships, or your fundamental sense of self. Writing that doesn’t require you to become someone you barely recognize in order to sustain it.

For many scholars—especially those in the thick of a book project—writing has become something to endure rather than inhabit, something to get through rather than engage with.

Writing has become associated with guilt, with urgency, and with the constant gnawing feeling of being behind. Even when progress is being made, it rarely feels like enough. There’s always the next chapter demanding attention, the tenure clock ticking in the background, the sense that everyone else is somehow managing this better than you are.

Sustainability asks a different set of questions about our writing practices.

• Not just Can I produce this? But what does it cost me to do so?

• Not just Is this book impressive? But is this process livable over the time it actually takes to write it?

• Not just Am I meeting this deadline? But what am I sacrificing to meet it, and is that sacrifice one I can continue making semester after semester?

This matters profoundly because books are long projects. They unfold over years, not weeks or months. A pace that is barely survivable in the short term—fueled by adrenaline, coffee, and the promise that things will calm down after this particular deadline—becomes actively destructive when you realize you’re still only partway through the manuscript. What might work for a sprint becomes untenable when you realize a book is actually a series of marathons with inadequate rest in between, run alongside teaching, service, caregiving, and everything else your life actually contains.

Sustainable writing does not eliminate pressure or remove all sources of stress from your work. It changes how pressure is managed and how stress is metabolized. It involves setting boundaries around writing time that you actually honor, being honest with yourself and others about your capacity, and making choices that reflect your deeper values rather than responding solely to the urgency of the tenure clock or the expectations others place on you.

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Sustainable writing also involves recognizing that productivity fluctuates across a book project and that this fluctuation is normal rather than pathological.

There will be seasons of intense output and seasons of slower growth, periods where words pour onto the page and periods where every sentence feels like it’s being extracted with pliers. A chapter might come together in weeks; the next might resist you for months. Sustainability means not treating the hard stretches as a failure or as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you as a writer or scholar.

When I talk about sustainable writing, I mean developing a relationship with your book project that you can maintain despite changing circumstances. One that lives synergistically with you through different semesters, personal challenges, teaching spikes, and the inevitable shifts in energy and focus that come with being a human who is doing far more than just writing.

I’m talking about a writing relationship that allows for real intellectual ambition without burnout and deep commitment to your book without self-erasure or the loss of everything else that matters to you.

Sustainable writing is the foundation of the coaching work I do with academic book writers.

It’s not a formula I can hand you a neat package, complete with specific daily word counts or morning routines that will solve everything, but rather a practice that requires ongoing attention and adjustment—one that looks different for different people depending on their circumstances, their responsibilities, their neurotypes, and their values.

The question I want you to sit with is whether the way you’re working on your book right now is something you can live with for the years this project actually requires, without fundamentally compromising who you are or what you care about beyond your scholarship.

That’s the standard sustainability asks of us. Not some idealized version of scholarly productivity, but livability over the long arc of a book and a career and a life.

And when you find that livability—imperfectly, provisionally, more often than not—something shifts that goes beyond the manuscript. You stop spending so much energy managing the gap between who you are and who you think a productive scholar is supposed to be. You learn to return to the work after disruption without treating the disruption as evidence of failure.

In an institution that has long asked scholars to sacrifice themselves for their work, learning to write in a way that leaves room for the rest of your life might be the most quietly radical thing you do.

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Picture the paragraph you’ve been avoiding all week. The one with the argument that almost works but keeps slipping out from under you when you try to pin it down. You’ve rewritten the topic sentence four times. You’ve cut the middle section into a separate document so you can pretend it doesn’t exist. You’re starting to wonder if there’s a structural problem you can’t see, or worse, that you’re the structural problem.

A few months ago, I was sitting with a chapter that wouldn’t cooperate. I knew, more or less, what I wanted to say, but the structure kept refusing me, and I’d reached the stage where opening the document made my eye twitch and my shoulders would climb up to my ears. What eventually got me moving again wasn’t more outlining or another pass through the literature. It was something that, on the surface, looked like the opposite of serious work: a creative writing exercise. And honestly, I shouldn’t have been surprised, as I’d already been watching this play out in my own classroom for years.

Getting Creative

In my classes, I noticed that when students were given permission to play with language — a five-minute free-write before discussion, a prompt that let them argue a position from a character’s point of view — they later produced better academic writing. Other teachers made similar observations when introducing creative writing techniques into their classroom, and research on the topic seems to back me up as well. Indeed, in other fields, creative writing, or expressive writing has been readily embraced for a long time.

This is what I did: In Gillie Bolton and Stephen Rowland’s Inspirational Writing for Academic Publication, they suggest writing a letter to your “Writer Self”- the person who writes brilliant sentences, is easily in a state of flow, and always knows what’s happening next (a higher self for writers!). I did this, and let me tell you, I was very surprised. I was angry, I was upset with myself for being stuck in the first place, for not having figured out the structure of my chapter. The next part of the exercise is to write a letter back, as in taking on the voice of the Writer Self. I waited a day to do this, but then I did it, not to become magically unstuck, but to at least finish this exercise if I couldn’t make heads or tails of my chapter.

In this instance, my Writer Self sounded a lot like my mother during my childhood, when I’d argue back and forth about the necessity of my chores (make of that what you will, Sigmund Freud!). Just like my mother’s line ”the time you spent arguing could’ve been the time you spent doing the chore”—my writer self told me that all the energy I was spending being mad at myself could’ve gone toward finding a solution. I was only hurting myself here. It still took me a while to figure out where I wanted my chapter to go, but I was in a much better headspace, and once I had figured it out, I just wrote it.

The Research

As I mentioned before, you don’t have to take my word for it; plenty of research backs me up.

In 1986, James W. Pennebaker and Sandra K. Beall ran a study in which they asked 46 students to write about traumatic or emotionally difficult experiences for 15-20 minutes, for four consecutive days. While the writing process itself was stressful (participants had a higher blood pressure), they took fewer trips to the doctor or health center in the following six months. This study has since been replicated over 100 times, exploring a variety of variables- physiological responses, GPA averages, absenteeism at work. Also interesting is Kitty Klein and Adriel Boals’ 2001 study, which showed that expressive writing reduces intrusive and avoidant thoughts, which frees up working memory, and correlates with (not causes!) higher GPAs.

So all of this to say: The mental noise we’re suppressing while trying to write takes up cognitive real estate. Low-stakes writing, whether journaling, free-writing, or prompted exercises, offloads it.

There’s also a second body of research worth knowing about, this one from neuroscience. Meet the default mode network (DMN): the brain network that activates when you’re daydreaming, mind-wandering, or letting a thought drift sideways. Early researchers dismissed it as the brain’s idle mode, what it’s doing when it isn’t doing anything important. We now know that was backwards. The DMN is central to creative idea generation, especially divergent thinking: the capacity to make novel connections between ideas that don’t obviously belong together (Beaty et al., 2014). And in 2022, Ben Shofty and a team of neurosurgeons demonstrated this causally, using direct cortical stimulation during awake brain surgery to temporarily disrupt the DMN (sounds painful!). Creative responses dropped.

Keeping The Spark Alive

The implication for academic writers is uncomfortable. Argumentative prose keeps our executive control network firmly in charge. But the associative leaps that make a scholarly argument actually interesting, an unexpected connection, or an elegant framework, come from the very network we’ve been trained to override. We stay in the gear that kills the spark.

So the research has been out there for a while. Why isn’t it more common to use creative writing techniques? It’s becoming more common, I think, but the root of the resistance can be found in the scarcity mindset that is so commonplace: We already have so little time between all the tasks we juggle every day, sitting down to play with words seems like a frivolous luxury we can’t afford. But I encourage you to view it from a different angle: If your book project is stalled, if you find yourself frustrated and cranky all the time, or worse, nearing burnout, you’re paying in other ways.

How to Leverage Creativity

I already described Bolton and Rowland’s letter to your Writer Self above, but let me give you some more ways to start.

• Tip 1: Focused freewriting on your scholarly problem

This is a technique Peter Elbow pioneered, he literally calls it “exercising the writing muscle.” Set your time for 10 minutes (six if 10 minutes seems too long at first) and do a freewrite on your topic. No stopping, no editing, no worries about correctness. This forces writing (producing) and editing into separate processes, and quiets the internal critic. And just like a little gold nugget covered by river rocks and mud, your argument starts to glint through. I have found this technique to be especially powerful with L2 academics, who often are wrestling with the fear of not sounding like a native English speaker.

• Tip 2: Change the genre of your argument

As someone who was trained as a literary scholar, I find this to be an especially fun one. Write your thesis/article/ book chapter as a letter to a friend. Write a eulogy for the idea that you’re arguing against. A haiku or a sonnet (here you have the added challenge of brevity!). Genre-switching forces associative thinking, and pulls you out of the formal register you’ve been thinking in. It may feel silly or even like dumbing down your work, but it also can be where you discover why you care about your research in the first place..

• Tip 3: Permission-to-write-badly drafting

This is a version of Elbow’s freewrite exercise. Set your timer, and try to write as badly as you can on purpose- what Anne Lamott famously calls “the shitty first draft.” I once did this with a paragraph that I was deeply unhappy with. Instead of trying to improve it, I tried to make it worse. Instead of trying to shorten it to an acceptable length, I tried to make it longer- and as I did this, I realized how many redundant sentences I had in the original paragraph. Perfectionism increases anxiety and narrows cognitive focus; we cannot see the forest for the trees, which then increases stress and anxiety again. Lowering the bar interrupts that cycle.

In my classroom, creative assignments have become a staple. My students, given permission to play, write better academic prose, and they have more fun doing it. I want to pass that permission along.

The next time you’re staring at a stuck paragraph or avoiding a chapter that has somehow become radioactive, try one of these strategies. Not because it will solve the structural problem (it might not, at least not right away), but because the version of you that writes well is probably waiting on the other side of a little play.

Verena Hutter is a writer, editor, and writing coach for academics and non-fiction writers. A former German Studies scholar, she founded WIP Writing to offer developmental editing, coaching, and retreats for writers navigating the long middle of a project. She teaches at the University of Portland and writes the WIP Writing Substack on the joys and pitfalls of writing, researching and reading. She is the author of This Is a Book for People Who Love Tattoos (Running Press/Hachette).

Find Verena at wipwriting.com or subscribe to her Substack:

Work in Progress Writing- Verena Hutter

I’m Verena — writer, teacher, editor, lover of strong coffee and strong ideas. This is where I’ll share my work in progress: writing life, behind-the-scenes process, and the things that inspire me along the way. Come for the words; stay for the process.

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That experience in the gym has an uncanny resemblance to the moment in writing when an argument gets difficult, the structure will not quite settle, and suddenly email, footnotes, or “just a little more reading” starts to look very appealing.

I talk about the difference between real rest and avoidance and why both matter for academic writers. Rest is essential and it is part of how growth happens. But sometimes what looks like rest is actually a retreat from the intellectual discomfort that makes our work stronger. I also reflect on consistency, not as writing every day or meeting some punishing productivity standard, but as the practice of returning to the gym, to the page, and to the hard thing that slowly builds progress over time.

All of this is to say that you can do hard things, and it is the act of doing those hard things that makes the magic happen.

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There’s a particular quality to the first few weeks of summer that I recognize in myself and in the scholars I work with—a kind of forward-leaning anticipation, a sense that this is when it finally gets to happen.

Teaching is in the rear view, the calendar clears, and suddenly the book that’s been living in the back of your mind all year feels close enough to actually touch. That feeling is worth honoring, because the reality is that the summer season provides an opportunity to think more deeply about your research than you can during the school year.

What I want for you this summer is not a heroic sprint — not “protect your mornings” or “write 500 words before coffee” or finally implement the system that’s going to change everything. You’ve heard versions of that advice, and you may even recognize that the problem was never a missing technique.

What I want for you is something slower and more durable: a practice built around how your brain actually works and the summer you’re actually living, not the idealized version of scholarly life that, candidly, has never existed for most of us.

That kind of practice moves faster when you have someone alongside you — someone who knows academic publishing, who can look at your project and your process together and help you find the next right move. It’s not about accountability in the punishing sense. It’s about clarity. And clarity, in my experience, is what actually drives the work.

I have spots available this summer in the Writing Strategy & Structure Program, and my rates have recently changed. If you fill out an inquiry form by May 20th for a June start, I'll honor the previous rate (read on).

Here’s what I’ve watched happen for scholars who’ve done this work:

• Dr. Meaghan McSorley, after working together during the summer following her first year on the tenure track, wrote that our sessions helped her recognize and overcome some specific mindset roadblocks she didn’t even realize she had around writing and that this fundamentally changed her research process.

• Dr. Briana Barner told me that working together helped her prioritize the projects that matter most and find better ways to manage her time as a neurodivergent person and parent.

• Dr. Megan Reynolds described leaving our sessions feeling empowered and excited to move forward—not because I gave her a pep talk, but because we did the slower, more honest work of building a writing and work management structure that fit how her brain actually works.

The Writing Strategy and Structure program is built around you specifically—your manuscript, your workload, your writing process, your life. Here’s what’s included:

• An initial Strategy Session to cut through the noise: clarifying what the book needs right now, so you’re not spending your most precious writing time spinning in the fog of competing priorities.

• Four tailored coaching sessions to support planning, decision-making, and the barriers that tend to surface—perfectionism, competing demands, the fog of a heavy teaching semester.

• An Editorial Snapshot — a bird’s-eye read of an extended abstract of your book that I bring into our sessions as a thinking tool.

• Email or WhatsApp support between sessions for the smaller moments of course correction and accountability that often matter as much as the formal sessions do.

• A Closing Session to consolidate what’s working and map out what comes next.

The program rate just increased, and any newsletter reader who fills out the coaching inquiry form by May 20th and begins coaching in June can lock in the previous rate of $1850.

After you submit the form and I have had a chance to determine whether we are a good fit, I will invite you to a free discovery call to discuss the program further and answer any questions you may have.

If your book has been waiting for this summer, I’d love to be part of what makes it move.

Submit the Coaching Inquiry Form

Note: You can opt out of writing circle emails while still keeping your regular PNP subscription.

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What is the PNP Writing Circle?

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