Confessions of a (reformed) binge-writer

The below text is from an essay I wrote as part of the excellent Aalto University course "Finding Joy and Productivity in Academic Writing"

23rd November 2020

We’ve all been there: a paper deadline that was months away is suddenly tomorrow, and you’re staring at a blank screen, furious at yourself for doing this again. If you’re a binge-writer like me, this is a common occurrence: you cram at the last minute, fuelled by adrenaline and promises to yourself that next time will be different – you’ll start earlier and be more organised. Yet, again and again, you find yourself in the same situation.

I have always been a binge-writer – that is, someone who writes in long, infrequent sprints or ‘binges’ (Kellogg, 1994). Binge-writers spend more time procrastinating while feeling guilty and anxious than actually writing (Silvia, 2007). Yet, it is not always a bad thing; I love the focus and total absorption that comes with writing binges. In these moments of immersion, I wouldn’t even notice if my flat was on fire. I enjoy writing late into the night, when it feels like the rest of the world is asleep. I love the peace and lack of notifications that 2am brings. Yet, binge-writing comes at a price: an inevitable energy crash, disillusionment with my work, and – perhaps worst of all – the feeling that I could have done better if only I had started writing earlier.

I realised a while ago that my issue with procrastination and binge-writing wasn’t merely an issue of poor time management, but also one of deep-rooted anxieties around failure and a need to please. This was after many years of buying new notebooks and planners, fancy pens and expensive writing software – none of which boosted my productivity. At best, they were short-term fixes.

Doing a PhD has taught me many lessons in tackling my binge-writing habit – particularly that writing a doctoral thesis requires a ‘marathon’ rather than a ‘sprint’ mentality. Suddenly co-authoring scientific articles, I had to rewrite, revise and edit the same pieces of writing over and over again, which I was not used to (I recently joked to my supervisor that if I die and go to hell, my punishment will be revising our current manuscript-in-progress for eternity). While I have made progress with my inconsistent work habits, I still tend to write in binges. This is why I signed up for the Aalto course ‘Finding Joy and Productivity in Academic Writing’. Over the course of three months, I have faced my binge-writing monster head-on. I learned to challenge the writing myths and internal barriers that were keeping me stuck in old habits, and become a more productive writer. Writing science is challenging, but as I’ve learned, slowing down is a great way to increase productivity.

My ‘binge-writing monster’ origin story

Before I discuss how I tackled my inner ‘binge-writing monster’, I must first confess the reasons for its existence.

 First, I held romanticised myths of what it means to be a good writer (I’ll get into these myths later). I had a distorted image of what writing entailed, and my inability to match that image left me feeling apprehensive, anxious and avoidant. In putting other writers on a pedestal, I became plagued by feelings of inadequacy; I was a poster-child for ‘imposter syndrome’ – the wonderful, anxiety-ridden feeling that eventually everyone will find out that you don’t deserve to be where you are. From the discussions I’ve held with colleagues, imposter syndrome seems to be common in academia (particularly for those of us just starting out). We are quick to see our faults, but not so quick to see our successes – we always could have done better. We hold ourselves to impossible standards.

This fear set the stage for the next cause of my binge-writing habit: procrastination. I’ve found a million and one excuses for not writing, including (but not limited to): I’m too tired; I need to read more papers before I can write; the weather is too bad; the weather is too good; I need to do my laundry; I don’t know what to write. With the lofty goal of perfection, I routinely avoided writing until the conditions were ‘just right’, and I knew exactly what I wanted to write. I was doing everything I needed to do, except write the damned thing. This was until a deadline emerged, and I was forced to write in an anxious flurry to finish on time. It is a wicked paradox that in waiting for the perfect words to come before writing, I ended up with imperfect text.

Fortunately, or unfortunately (the jury is still out), I always got away with this kind of working. Throughout school and university, I wrote long reports and essays in one night. I told myself that I ‘work best under pressure’. The problem was that I still got good grades. My method of working, no matter how dysfunctional, got me the results I needed. Yet, I always felt that I could have done better, and struggled to enjoy any achievements.

I have always had extremely high expectations of myself. Yet, as Valian (1977) discusses in her essay on her ‘work problem’, the need to be perfect is a sign of both arrogance and weakness. It is arrogant because it says “I am so smart I can demand perfection of myself, something impossible for lesser mortals” (Valian, 1977, p.172); it is weak because it means you are conflating personal worth with professional perfection (ibid.). This is perhaps unsurprising, given our cultural conditioning to revolve our lives around work and productivity. The only way I knew how to live up to this expectation was to work fast like a ‘hare’, rather than slow and steady like a ‘tortoise’.

My perfectionism stems, I think, from years of being a straight-A student and receiving praise. Chris Hadfield, an astronaut with many great quips about having a growth mindset in his book ‘An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth’, has two key lessons in this. First, early success is a terrible teacher, because it doesn’t give you the tools to deal with failure or how to work hard. Second, Hadfield says he wasn’t born an astronaut, but rather he had to turn himself into one (Hadfield, 2013). I remind myself of this quote often – if I want to be a good writer, I have to turn myself into one and cannot be immediately perfect.

While I’ve spent my life being the hare instead of the tortoise, I’ve come to realise that it comes at a mental and physical cost. For me, that means burnout, fatigue, and my body frequently feeling too ‘amped up’ – I find it difficult to calm my nervous system down after writing for ten hours straight. This isn’t really a problem if it’s infrequent, but over the last ten years, I have been constantly sprinting (and then crashing). I also began to judge my outputs by these binge-writing sessions, and expected myself to always be that ‘switched on’ and productive; writing 200 words was for the weak. As Valian (1977, p.168) said when describing her own experience, “now, though, it didn’t seem attractive to me to be the hare, just self-destructive.”

Combatting these core issues around writing – and work generally – was going to take tackling each one simultaneously. Throughout the autumn period, I focused entirely on improving my writing habits. I read several books and papers on writing (both scientific and creative), attended the Aalto writing course, joined a related ‘agraphia group’ for peer-support, and attended an online writing retreat. I also jumped in head-first and picked up my long-abandoned creative writing habit again (which was also a victim of my infrequent, undisciplined writing bursts). If not now, when?

Confronting writing myths

In order to change my writing habits, I had to first fully understand why they were wrong, and how my beliefs around writing were holding me back. Many of these writing ‘myths’, I learned, are interrelated and reinforce one another. I’ve found that challenging one has a knock-on effect on others.

The first myth that affected my writing is that a good writer can pen a perfect first draft. My own inability to do so therefore led to anxiety and procrastination (and, of course, the last-minute binge-writing frenzy). This is reinforced by the fact that we rarely see works-in-progress – we read polished books and articles without knowing how many rewrites it took for the author to get there. This is particularly damaging to us junior scientists. I have learned that it in fact takes even the best writers many revisions before their work is publishable. They also practise.  Releasing the expectation that my first draft had to be the final product allowed me to write imperfectly, which gave me something to work with and edit. Rewriting and editing is a crucial part of the writing process; writing is a skill which must be developed through regular practice.

Related to this, I believed that to write clearly, I must first think clearly and know what I want to write (after which I could write the ‘perfect first draft’). I’ve long viewed scientific writing as a means to an end – to simply communicate findings and ideas at the end of a project. I spend more time thinking and planning than writing, and I only write when I know what I want to write (aka I procrastinate). However, clear thinking also emerges from clear writing (Montgomery, 2003). The process of writing allows you to test and refine your thoughts (Schimel, 2012). Over the past few months, I’ve therefore taken to viewing writing as a way to develop my ideas, which encourages me to write regularly.

Another writing myth, or ‘specious barrier’ fuelling my binge-writing habit was that to write, I must have a large chunk of time available (Silvia, 2007). I never tried to squeeze in an hour of writing between meetings, because I believed I could only get in the ‘zone’ if I had at least three hours carved out. This perspective also meant that when I was in the zone, I would keep going until I burned out, believing I may never experience such focus again. It was better to make the most of a good writing session and keep going until my fingers ached, than to lose momentum. However, during a recent online writing retreat, we were encouraged by the host to take a break, regardless of how ‘in the zone’ we were. Most of us responded negatively to being forced to stop. However, one colleague created the following analogy: writing is like being at a party – if you leave at 10pm, you’ve had a fun time, can go home to rest, and have positive feelings about it. This means you will look forward to the next party. If, however, you go home at 3am, chances are you’ll be exhausted, you’ve ruined the following day (possibly with a hangover), and now have a negative association with parties. In the same way, if we binge-write, we lose steam, get fed up, and run out of ideas. We don’t look forward to the next writing session because we associate it with being worn out. What’s more, we don’t have a clear starting point because we kept writing until we ran out of ideas. We didn’t ‘park on a slope’ (Bolker, 1998). This is something I have since learned to do, to the extent of leaving a sentence unfinished.

This leads me to the next myth that facilitated my binge-writing habit: good writers only write when they ‘feel like it’. I’ve always felt that you must wait for inspiration to write. Schedules are for the logical minds; creativity abhors logic and structure. This myth has not only short-changed me in terms of my academic writing, but also my creative writing. I enjoy writing stories, but the unfortunate affliction of Adulthood erased my ability to write for fun. I couldn’t develop good story ideas through consistent writing; they had to arrive through a metaphorical ‘muse’. Yet, the muse rarely came, and even when she did, I lacked the discipline and follow-through to finish my stories. I wrote a lot, but sporadically. Many authors have written against this way of thinking, and advocate the elegant policy: ‘butt in chair, fingers on keyboard’ (or BICFOC for short – perhaps not the nicest sounding acronym). As Stephen King says, “don’t wait for the muse” (King, 2000, p. 180). I learned that random binge-writing sessions weren’t going to cut it if I wanted to be a productive writer – regardless of what I told myself, they didn’t make me more creative, they didn’t help me write a lot, and they didn’t help me finish what I started.

This myth was also busted by Silvia (2007), who turned my perspective upside down with two simple graphs (from Boice, 1990), which showed that those who write regularly with a schedule fostered more creative ideas than their non-scheduling counterparts. They also wrote more words per day.

I wondered why this was, and believe again Stephen King puts it most elegantly:

Your schedule… exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.

(King 2000, p. 179-180).

Could something as simple as sitting down at the same time every day to write make me not only more productive, but also more creative? Like getting yourself ready for sleep, a schedule does the ‘heavy lifting’ of getting yourself into the mood to write. With my previous ‘spontaneous’ strategy with writing, I required motivation, negotiation, and sometimes tears, to get myself to sit down and write. The task was always too colossal, and I built it up to be even bigger in my mind through lack of familiarity; writing wasn’t routine for me, so it was difficult to start. I came to realise that my infrequent, unplanned writing sprints were simply not as effective as I wished to believe; I needed a new approach. I needed to become a tortoise, not a hare.

Schedules, routines and ‘leaving the party early’

I learned that in order to challenge my preconceptions of writing and overcome my emotional barriers, I had to ‘write scared’ (Bolker, 1998). This echoes the earlier BICFOC acronym – regardless of how I felt, I had to sit down and write, and I had to do it regularly. Of course, this is easier said than done.

To get into this habit, I used Silvia’s (2007) method of using Excel to track my progress. Unfortunately for me (a creative ‘wait for the muse’ kind of writer), I realised I needed concrete writing goals to measure my progress. I played around with word count goals and time-focused goals, and found both were useful depending on what stage of writing I was at. For example, when I began the writing course, I already had an almost-finished draft of the manuscript I was working on – with the words mostly already on the page, a daily word count goal didn’t make sense, so I stuck to hours. At first, I struggled with knowing what constitutes as ‘writing’ – does reading count? What about fixing figures? I decided that as long as it was useful for the writing project, it was ok. I played around with my goal (my initial 4-hours per day goal unsurprisingly fell flat on its face). I have now ended up at one hour per day, though this has also not been easy at times. Figure 3 shows a screenshot of my Excel file. In total, I’ve written 17,390 words over the last three months.

I typically find the later stages of writing the hardest. I can get raw text down rapidly, but I am relatively unrehearsed at reading my own words back and editing. Because I don’t have a long history of allowing myself time to revise my work, I often feel embarrassed by the words I’ve put on the page. At one point in October, my ‘one hour per day’ streak smashed into a wall of excuses. I was too tired, too busy with other things, I needed a break, and so on. I did indeed need a break from my manuscript – which I took – but I knew my excuses came from avoidance more than anything.

To get out of my writing slump, I scaled my writing goal back to thirty minutes, and allowed myself a few days of easy tasks such as fixing references. I reduced my time goal for two reasons: one, even if I was feeling incredibly anxious or ‘too busy’ to work on my paper, I could usually manage thirty minutes; and two, consistency is more important than word count (Bolker, 1998). It turned out that usually, thirty minutes turned into sixty minutes anyway. But what I had done with this smaller time limit was get past the barrier of starting, and lower the bar for success. This created a positive feedback loop – as I achieved small milestones, I felt good about writing, which made me less avoidant. In reducing my goal and slowing down, I wrote more words, and enjoyed the process. The longest I went without writing (besides weekends) was two days. However, I also included tasks such as ‘referencing’, which was useful for the days when I hit a mental block. Showing up was the most important thing.

Reaching out

While I’ve always seen writing as a solitary task, over these past few months I’ve learned the value of peer-support and community – for me, the final piece of the puzzle to write regularly.  A core part of the writing course was forming an ‘agraphia group’ (very tongue-in-cheek – ‘agraphia’ means ‘the loss of the ability to write’). We formed these small groups to provide accountability and peer-support for our writing. We met once a week to set our writing goals for the upcoming week, and to reflect upon the previous week. We challenged each other on our often vague or lofty goals, and supported each other through a dark, energy-sucking Finnish November.

Simultaneously, I attended an online writing retreat with others in my research group. In these sessions, we were led by a host in spending 75 minutes of uninterrupted time to write. No phones, no emails, no checking references. We also spent some time at the beginning to discuss our feelings around writing (‘tired’ was a common theme), and to set concrete goals for that day’s session. Not only was it incredibly useful to set goals in this way, but having peer-support – even in the form of other faces on Zoom typing furiously – was motivating. If they could do it, so could I. These sessions were so effective for all of us that we continued them after the retreat ended; every Monday and Friday, we have optional online writing sessions. I usually attend at least one session per week, and often get more written in those 75 minutes than I would otherwise in an entire day. There is much to be said about mutual encouragement to reach your writing goals.

Embracing the monster

My final confession: I’m still a binge-writer. I still believe there is value in long, uninterrupted writing sessions – for example, in getting a zero draft onto the page in a steady, imperfect flow of words. However, I have learned it is not the only way to write, nor the most effective if it is the only strategy in a writer’s toolbox.

During November, apparently not satisfied with the daily task of academic writing, I also joined an online writing community called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The idea is to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days, and to spend the month focused on that project without distraction. I was thus confronted with two contradictory approaches to writing: in my academic writing, I was working on starving my inner binge-writing monster by writing in smaller chunks; in my creative writing, I was encouraged to word-vomit every day in a way that I could never sustain in the long-term. However, what I learned the most from NaNoWriMo was how to establish a writing habit – to show up consistently, even when I didn’t feel like it. I dropped the word count goal as soon as I realised it was crazy to expect myself to write 1667 words a day (up from zero per day) in addition to working on my thesis. I started to track this writing too, and had the goal of either 750 words or one hour per day – whichever I hit first. I allowed myself to also spend that time just brainstorming my writing project, since this was new for me. By the end of the month, I have only written 10,000 words for my creative project, but it is 10,000 words more than I’d previously written all year.

I can appreciate the value, however, of having a month of focus on a writing project, with the understanding that it is unsustainable in the long-run. In pushing forward with an ambitious goal, you can avoid the trap of getting stuck at the first chapter, rewriting until it’s ‘perfect’. This approach is valuable for a first draft. The problem comes if you then expect that level of output from yourself every month, or, if you use that month to vomit a first draft but lack the discipline and follow-through to steadily edit and rewrite it for the rest of the year.

I now take advantage of my instinct to binge-write by giving myself short time frames and fake deadlines – how many words can I write in the thirty minutes it takes for dinner to cook? Can I write five pages in a Zoom writing session? This gives me the same feeling of uninterrupted focus as my ten-hour binges, but without the writing hangover – I leave the party early, knowing I’ll be going to another the next day. I also aim to allow myself longer writing sessions at the start of a project, knowing that it will not be forever and will require some recovery time.

I’m not quite there yet. I still slip up and miss writing days. I still depend enormously on my peers for accountability. However, I now have proof that consistent writing can be both effective and enjoyable. I am working on the mindset of being a writer, as opposed to someone who writes intermittently. Yet, I don’t think it has to be quite as black-and-white as being either a hare or tortoise. I choose rather to be somewhere in between – perhaps a cat that sleeps most of the day, and chases a mouse every now and then.