There’s a fantasy that circulates with writers, including academic writers, that writing has to feel meaningful, or clear, or inspired before it counts. Today I want to trouble this notion and instead present what I think is a more realistic version of what actually happens in a writing life.
Much of your writing days will be insignificant, banal, or feel like you are going in circles. Yet, when one writing session becomes the referendum on whether years of work on your book or article were worth it, the work is buried under all that weight, and we start requiring impossible conditions before we’ll let ourselves begin to write.
I talk through why “I don’t feel like writing” and “I can’t write today” are two different sentences, even though we treat them as the same one, and what it looks like to let a session be ordinary instead of steeped in ceremony.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that anyone should push through exhaustion, grief, or genuine distress, because there’s a difference between dealing with life stress and managing feelings about writing. I’m talking about the smaller, more common friction: boredom, the dread of opening the document, the sense that we’re not ready or clear enough yet. You don’t need inspiration to write. Instead, inspiration comes through the act of writing itself.
I walk through a few ways to shrink a writing session down to something you can start before you feel like it and why repeated, unglamorous contact with a project does more for it than waiting for the beautiful, spacious afternoon. I hope you find my musings useful!
