Writing in a Pandemic

I've been trying to write throughout the pandemic with very little success. Part of it is that I did not realize how much I depended on long weekends and summers and breaks to get my scholarly writing done while balancing my teaching and service workload. I tend to need huge swaths of time to work. Days when I have nothing else to do, when I can just sit at my desk at 7a and have the whole day stretch ahead of me, dedicated to work. I especially need this dedicated time when I first start, when I'm doing the heavy analysis lifting, writing to think. I tend to need shorter chunks of time when I get to adding scholarship, but longer days to read through the scholarship. Editing and revising takes a shorter time, half a day the first pass, another half a day to type up. I like to have time in between so I can play with the pieces in my head, moving them like Tetris pieces, making sure it's the best fit. The last seven years I've published four journal articles and three book chapters in edited collections, with another coming out next year. I've done all this while working multiple jobs, juggling PhD work, and I would have told you that I had a system that worked for getting scholarly work done while balancing all of this.

But the last nine months have shown me that's not true. I've been trying and trying to get this chapter done the entire time and it seemed like every time I thought I had a handle on both the writing process and what I wanted to argue it slipped away from me. I've teaching Advanced Composition in the spring, an upper level English course required for other majors, so I've been thinking a lot about process, and modeling, what we write and how. So I thought I'd share a bit about how this process went now that I finally sent the chapter off to my co-editor for feedback.

I knew I wanted to write about Carol Clover's Final Girl and deal with the idea that her work on this is often a misreading of the Final Girl as some sort of "gurl power" figure. But I went back and forth on what to use to look at it. At first I thought I'd look at American Horror Story 1984, then thought about Final Girls (2015). Ultimately I settled on Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018), revisiting the original Final Girl as a way of revisiting Clover's initial scholarship (1992, not the 1987 article). But that was really just a way in. 

This piece was written in a different way than anything else I've written, and it certainly changed more than anything else I've wrote. Part of my frustration was the last of solid, dedicated writing time, but a lot of it was I felt like I didn't know what I wanted to write, or rather I wanted to write lots of different things that were all similar but I couldn't make up my mind.

I never used to outline my writing, but during my dissertation my director suggested that I use the outline feature in Word to look at the first sentence of each paragraph to help me see the flow of my argument. Since then I've used outlining as one of my first steps of writing before I draft. I outline the topics, and as I draft I use the outline document as my basis so I can make sure I can keep the threads when it's so easy to get lost and veer off when drafting.

When I outline then draft I tend to be super wordy, 8,000-10,000 word chapters for 6,000 word pieces. I don't worry about this when writing, but once I draft I do like to jot down on the project folder what I see as the key ideas. In some ways this works the same as outlining, to keep me on track, but I also try to think of it as the takeaways. Everything for the project goes in this folder- outlines, notes, drafts, revisions, and the folder only gets thrown out/recycled once the article is published, so it contains everything. 

Because I did not have dedicated writing time all semester I kept outlining, revising the outline, then redoing it. It seemed to be the only space I had in my head. This meant I changed my argument a lot over the last months. It also helped though in that I was able to really refine my argument. I never veered away from the idea of the Final Girl, but I kept picking up and putting down ideas. It was a little frustrating, but ultimately the solution was to just finally sit down and draft. I ended up writing it all down, knowing that the heavy work would be done in revision.

In the folder I keep my latest, most final revision as well as my Post-Its and scrap paper notes.

When I revise I always print out my pages then hand write in a pretty color. I have to have a single color. If my pen runs out the revision process stops until I have a replacement pen. The highlighter color has to match the pen. I revise and write on the page, and draw doodles for larger inserts on the opposite page. When the insert is longer than what will fit on the opposite page I write on legal pads, and draw odd symbols or mark page numbers to track where they go.

Sometimes this system works. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes I can't see where I thought these parts fit, so part of revising is having to ask myself where it fits.

I draft in Google Docs until final, final when I export to Word for formatting, so I once I've hand revised, I type up all my notes page by page. One thing I've found though is that the delay between me writing the notes and typing it up ends up with some interesting things sometimes. Sometimes I can't read the note. Sometimes I decide that if I can't read the note it's not important and I just cut it. Sometimes I find better wordsmithing. I usually have multiple tabs of the document open especially as I move whole sections to improve flow and strengthen the argument. But my notes sometimes get muddled- where did the single star section go? Why are there two stars here and three stars there? I don't know why the logic of notes done the day before don't always transfer over. 

This chapter was 6,500 plus words before I added scholarship, so I knew when I revised I'd have to cut. There was a lot of background on Final Girls that I originally included, work about sequels, and comparisons to other Final Girls, but while I think all this stuff is interesting ultimately it did not belong in this chapter. These revisions, these cuts, are a part of the process I never thought I'd like but have come to love. When I can start to see the argument of the piece reveal itself, get condensed down to its purest form, that is one of my favorite parts now.

I also know I'm getting close when I start fiddling with the title, when what comes after the semi-colon starts solidifying. For me those listed parts are the subsections of the piece, the takeaways from the folder. So as I fiddle and play with the title, I pick up and set down the ideas that work or don't. I tend to fiddle with the title throughout the revision process, changing things, but once the title solidifies for me I know I'm close.

The last couple of weeks when I've finally had time to just sit down and write, no other appointments or obligations has been lovely. I love writing. I love this work. I missed doing it all semester. It reminded me too that being able to do this, be a professor, write, teach, is such a privilege and a gift.

I'll still have work to do on this chapter when I get notes back from my co-editor, and I'm currently working on revising our proposal for the collection. Knowing now that pandemic me doesn't have the schedule for academic writing, I'm scheduling accordingly. I'm trying to get both these things finished and the proposal off before we're back in class. Reading and providing feedback on the chapters that come in don't require me to have the same blocks of time as when I write, so that should all be fine this spring. I'm not planning on starting any other projects. This summer I'd be happy if I could revise my Guthlac article and send it somewhere else. But I'm not going to stress about it. There is stilla global pandemic. Teaching in this requires more out of me, and I'm not going to feel bad about that.

While I know I'll get notes on this chapter, I feel good about it. I think it does cool things, and I'm excited for how it fits in the collection, and look forward to you all seeing it.