Do you ever get a nagging feeling that you need to do something, but somehow it just does not seem to happen? You don’t have time, energy or money to get started? After I published my book, I continued to contribute to graduate student communities such as Gradshare and Benchfly and I also published monthly newsletters.
It was very rewarding to help students improve time-management skills, communicate with their advisors and write their dissertations. But somehow along the way it became more difficult to receive inspiration.As a full-time scientist and a parent the day-to-day responsibilities started to eat away at my hobby as a writer. Fortunately I never stopped completely. I continued to answer questions on Benchfly and email, but the spontaneity I had for writing weekly blogs in the past seemed to elude me. Yet every Sunday afternoon (which used to be my time set aside for writing) I had a feeling that I was supposed to be writing something, but I did not know how to get started. After all, I had so much to share with the student community, especially now that I have transitioned to a job in industry. Why could I not put my thoughts into words?
All of a sudden it hit me. Finally the inspiration arrived on a Sunday morning. Through the process of writing blogs I was going through the same challenges as graduate students writing their dissertations. What better way to help these students than to show them how I got over my writer’s block? Writer’s block is one of the most disheartening feelings a writer (or a graduate student trying to graduate) can experience. But overcoming the block and feeling the words come pouring out of you again is so liberating that you cannot imagine being back in the black hole again. (Unfortunately you probably will be, but for a much shorter time).
Everyone who has taken a class in writing has probably heard that the way to overcome a writer’s block is to just write. Write whatever comes to mind for about two or three pages a day. After a few days you will have 10 pages and plenty of material to work with. I agree with this strategy, but I would like to add another empowering tool: Have a purpose,that truly resonates with you. When I began writing my first scientific publication I was so overwhelmed that I did not even know where to begin. I typed up a few pages every day, and I had 40 pages after a few weeks. These 40 pages were an incoherent mass (or soup) of ideas. Eventually I put them together into a coherent 10 page document but it was only after answering a few very important questions: What is the purpose of this manuscript? What scientific questions are trying to answer? How will I help the scientific community (and humanity) by writing this manuscript? Once I clarified what I was writing about and, more importantly, why it was so important to write this paper, my energy soared through the ceiling. I woke up every morning with a thought such as: “Today I will summarize the findings by XYZ, and put them into a nice overview table, so that everyone who is working on this can get easy access to this information.”
Receiving inspiration for writing is such a complex topic that many volumes of books were written about it. In the next few weeks I will sharing more strategies for harnessing inspiration and motivating yourself to write or to do research or to get organized. I hope you will join me.