One of my performance goals this year is to write more. My position isn’t tenure-track so there’s no pressure to publish, but finding meaning in my work is important to me and the best way I know how to that is drawing connections between what I’m doing all day and the broader environment in which I’m doing it; in other words, building a reflective practice.
Writing is, at least for me, a deeply uncomfortable process. I suspect this likely because it’s an un-flexed muscle of mine. I applied to write for ACRLog because I wanted to push myself to write more often for a public audience, hoping that the process would get easier, and to get more comfortable articulating my own thoughts about librarianship. Each month, I go through several false starts. I’ll write half a blog post hoping that the thing I want to say will become more clear to me as I write. Sometimes this happens and sometimes it doesn’t, so I’ll often end up switching several times settling on my final topic. I’ve also learned that I need to give myself plenty of time for editing. I wish I were the type of writer who could dash something off, perfectly formed, but I find myself having to back and rewrite and rearrange constantly in order to come up with something I feel really gets to the point I was trying to make in the first place.
It’s also a very vulnerable process to share your writing with other people, even if (maybe especially if?) it’s in a professional context. I think the most engaging writers and the ones I’ve learned the most from manage to be radically honest in their writing, even for an audience of their professional colleagues. While this is what I am working towards, I still find myself worrying in advance about how something I write will be received. I wonder if openness, too, is a muscle that needs to be flexed regularly.
These thoughts have been on my mind recently because I’m about to submit the first draft of the first book chapter I’ve ever worked on, and I’m feeling nervous about sending it off for feedback. I was lucky to collaborate with three of my colleagues on it, and I was reminded of this as I read Michele Santamaria’s recent post on Embracing the Value of Sharing “Rough Work”, in which she writes about the value of being part of a learning community and sharing “rough” work with your peers. The research community she describes challenged and encouraged the author as she was working on a project outside her comfort zone, and I completely relate. Although it wasn’t a formalized learning community, working alongside my colleagues (sometimes literally) on this chapter opened up space to work together on moving from unformed ideas to rough work to an actual chapter. In truth, I don’t think I would have been able to get through a project like this without their solidarity, encouragement, and feedback.
Pushing myself to write and to grapple with the insecurities it brings has helped me grow, but it also helps me empathize more with the undergraduate students I work with (and graduate students and faculty – I’m sure they’re not immune!). It’s easy to talk about “Scholarship as Conversation” and jauntily remind students that they are scholars, too, but writing this chapter reminded me that it is really, really hard sometimes to figure out what it is that you could actually contribute to that conversation and intimidating to assert your own thoughts and ideas in a realm that you may have only experienced as a consumer. There may not be a lightbulb moment where you realize you have a brilliant idea to contribute to the scholarly dialogue. Maybe the only way to get there is to practice.