Seeking the password into the secret clubhouse

Bored with being in limbo, I promised myself I'd come up with an idea for my next big writing project by today, and bingo--it happened. Last night I ran across a two-word phrase that sparked an idea that could inspire interesting academic writing for the rest of the summer, if not longer. 

But by this morning, the second-guessing had set in. The problem is simple: I keep finding myself restating things I've said over and over again, each time with more urgency. What makes me think that this time someone will listen?

And this, in a nutshell, is the problem with academic writing: The process is so slow and uncertain that it's nearly impossible to know whether the words are having any impact. I can look back and see that the articles I've written have aided my tenure and promotion cases, but with no more promotions available, nobody on campus really cares whether I keep writing and publishing.

But I care! Last summer I worked very hard to research and write an essay that serves as an analysis of a particular poem but also engages with current discussions about intersections of race, history, and literature, but the pace of academic publishing is so slow that seven months after submission there’s still no word on whether the essay will be accepted for publication. If it ever gets published, the discussion will have moved on.

I look at my Google Scholar account and see that several of that my articles are steadily being cited, two in particular, but the citations tend to be perfunctory, as if the authors are just checking my work off a list to satisfy someone's demand for comprehensiveness. I tell my students that it's important to contribute to the "scholarly conversation" about their research topics, but I don't see much evidence of such a conversation. I wonder whether that thrilling exchange of ideas is happening in some secret clubhouse where all the cool kids gather while I stumble around trying to find the entrance and remember the password.

I know I have more to say about many topics, but the reading public isn’t exactly lining up outside my door begging me to share my thoughts. Lacking external motivations, I will need to rely on the internal kind. Why keep writing when it's impossible to gauge impact and there’s no clear reward?

Because I still have a few more years of teaching to do and I want to model for my students the importance of maintaining a regular writing habit. (As if they cared.)

Because playing with words engages a part of my brain that I fear will atrophy for lack of use. (Already this week I’ve hovered long over the keyboard to try to dig up the word “unwieldy” in a context where it was the only right word but for some reason my brain refused to supply it.)

Because I’ve always imagined my retirement as a time when I can write for pleasure, but it won’t happen if I’ve forsaken the habit of writing.

Because I’ve thought of myself as a writer since I was about eight years old, and a writer writes.

And there it is: If I am a writer, I will write, regardless of whether anyone ever reads my words.

And if I can't think of anything to write about, I'll write about not writing, a topic on which every scholar I've ever known is an occasional expert.