3 Ways to Improve Your Summer Writing Practice

I began the summer after my first year as an assistant professor having written almost nothing. As the constraints of the semester fell away, a wide expanse of time stretched before me to catch up on everything I hadn’t done in the past months.

To get started, I wrote down all the projects I wanted to complete before the fall. It was a long, unsorted list, including papers I wanted to publish from my dissertation, analyses I was wrapping up from my postdoc and projects I hoped would help establish my trajectory as a new tenure-line faculty member.

A few days later, I handed the list to a graduate student I was working with. She took one look and laughed out loud, saying it was kind of “scary.” While I was initially taken aback by her candor, she was right—the list was a totally unrealistic vision for my summer writing.

Sixteen years later, I have found better ways to think about my summer writing practice. I’ve found that three questions help me transition not just out of the academic year, but also back into the fall term: Is my writing practice sustainable? Is it portable? And is it adaptable to different seasons of my life?

Sustainable. How many times have we told ourselves that we’ll catch up on writing during our next break? As the expanse of multiple weeks of less structured time opens before us, it’s easy to think—as I did—that we’ll be able to bang out manuscript after manuscript.

There is some truth to this. A sustained focus and uninterrupted time can help us develop new insights and ideas. At the same time, we can only maintain a deep focus for a few hours at a time, and we need breaks. So while summer can be a good time to experiment with writing in ways that allow us more time to think, we also need to consider regular writing practices and routines that we can sustain over time.

I will admit I wasn’t so sure about this until I learned about Robert Boice’s research: faculty members who write in regular sessions, rather than waiting for bigger chunks of time, produce more pages of writing and also have more new, creative ideas.

A sustainable writing practice is one that we’re able to keep up year-round, not just in the summer, and not just when we aren’t teaching (or taking classes). It’s writing in a way that makes us feel like we can return again and again, rather than burning out and needing long breaks or doing all the work in spurts in anticipation of periods of time when we are not writing.

Portable. During the summer, we may find ourselves with fewer demands on our time and in spaces that are not an ideal location for writing. We may be traveling, bringing kids and loved ones hither and yon, doing fieldwork, or experiencing other kinds personal and professional reasons to be away from our preferred places to write.

To have a writing practice that can survive such dynamic shifts, I’ve found it helpful to think about how my writing practice is portable—that is, something I can do in a variety of locations, some of which I am able to choose, and others which I am placed in by necessity.

The summertime also allows us the chance to be outside more, and these changes in scenery can stimulate our creativity. Anne Lamott, in her classic book Bird by Bird, suggested carrying around a note card and pencil to capture the ideas that come to us in the in-between spaces. My 21st-century version is to capture my ideas in the Notes app on my cellphone. These words, bullet points or sometimes whole sentences can then be copied and pasted into a document when I’m back at my computer.

Being prepared in advance helps. We can take simple actions like saving local copies of collaborative documents to edit when we’re out of Wi-Fi range, printing physical copies that can be reviewed and annotated during kids’ swimming lessons or downloading journal articles that can be read and annotated on the go. We can even benefit from changing up the places we write. For example, if it’s a nice day, is there a comfortable, shady spot near home or campus where you can write for an hour?

Viewing our writing practice as portable helps us expand from the notion that writing only happens at our desk, on our computer. It helps us capitalize on the ideas and advances we make in those in-between spaces—not only in the summer but also during the semester, when we’re traveling to conferences, commuting or being in other spaces beyond our office.

Adaptable. The previous two questions can help us think about how our writing practice can take place in a variety of venues, and in a way that leaves us with the energy and interest to return to writing the next day. That said, once we figure this out for the summer, what will it look like transitioning into the fall?

A challenge—or, as I think about it, a gift—of the academic calendar is that we have the opportunity to reset multiple times a year. Those changes give us a chance to identify routines that work for us and shift our writing around our classes, meetings and other set events with the beginning of each new semester or quarter.

Our routines also change as we move through different seasons of our lives. Early in my career, I learned that the morning was my best thinking time, and I loved to write over a cup of coffee after I’d walked the dog. But once my kids were born, that pattern morphed into writing the first chance I got, which often was when the kids were dropped off at day care, school or summer camp. Later, when I took a role as an administrator, and my attendance was required at meetings first thing in the morning, writing came much later in the day.

Over time, I’ve learned that my writing practice needs to be adaptable to different times of year—and to the different seasons of my life. I have had to identify the routines—or, as Michael Hyatt calls them, rituals—that help me get in and out of writing. I like to cue up a favorite playlist and then orient myself to where I left off in my writing. I use an app to turn off the internet and distracting websites on my computer and cellphone and use colored pens and a journal to help me think outside the space of a word processor. When I’m finished, I leave myself a note on what I was doing, so I can dig in quickly the next time I can write.

Thinking about how our writing is sustainable, portable and adaptable can help us identify what we need in order to get our writing done and how we are integrating breaks and rest. Rather than holding out to write only in the summer, or to catch up—such as with my “scary list”—they can help us focus on developing a writing practice that’s never totally done, but something more like yoga. It’s a practice that we’re always working on, and what’s most important is that summer, fall or spring, we continue to show up to the page.