Rewind: Planning Your Writing Like You Plan Your Syllabus
Publish Not Perish is On Winter Hiatus!
Happy New Year, dear readers! Publish Not Perish is on hiatus until January 9th and I’m rewinding an old post in the meantime.
Many of us will soon return from the holidays and be scrambling to get ready for the new term. Today’s rewind will help with just that. Here is the introduction to Planning Your Writing Like You Plan Your Syllabus, which was first published in August, followed by a link to the complete post.
Ever notice how "I don't feel like teaching today" doesn’t get us out of work like "I don't feel like writing today”?
Writing is often one of the tasks we procrastinate because it doesn’t have the same built-in accountability like other things we do on a regular basis. If my class meets every MWF at 11am, then I have to be prepared to teach each day. I am accountable to my students to show up at regular, scheduled intervals. I cannot say “I’m not quite ready to teach today, so I will do it tomorrow instead.”
Writing, especially for those of us who primarily write individually, doesn’t have the same rigid schedule, so it’s easy to punt to the next day or the next week if something else seems more pressing. Teaching often feels much more urgent and important in the moment because we are accountable to many people multiple times a week.
Today’s post offers some strategies for tackling this upcoming semester in similar ways that you would prepare to teach a course. That course needs a syllabus and weekly work to run and your writing also needs objectives and a plan that you work on each week.
My key point today: if you don’t approach writing with the same level of organization and planning as you do your syllabus, how can you expect to meet your writing objectives by the end of the semester?