Writing with Two Minds

With Dr. Scott Harpin

Scholarly writing is one of the great challenges of academic life, often summarized as “publish or perish.” Yet many of us in this business feel that we are perishing. Despite writing’s importance, the typical faculty feeling about it is something like this: “Writing is a backburner thing: I simply do not have enough time to make it happen.”

Writing is a behavior that’s hard to change despite the existence of real-world consequences. In the worst-case scenario failure to write means that a faculty members don’t get tenure and lose their jobs, but the less-severe consequences include bad annual reviews, lack of recognition for their work, and a personal sense of shame or failure. Even those who are successful at writing by objective measures (publication counts, citation indices) almost always go through periods of writers’ block, anxiety about writing, and self-recrimination for failing to write. Writing is a key to success in academia. Why is it so hard?

In a recent talk about scholarly writing, we recalled Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the rider and the elephant, which describes our two mental systems. The elephant─the Intuitive mind─lumbers through life crashing into things, making its way in elephant society, and generally pursuing its own ends. The rider─which represents the Narrative mind─sits on the elephant’s back and chatters to other riders that are riding around on their respective elephants. Although the rider is the part of the brain that has traditionally been described as the seat of “executive functioning” (i.e., the prefrontal cortex), it’s important to remember that in Haidt’s metaphor the rider isn’t actually steering the elephant. Its more like an in-house PR firm, trying to present the elephant’s actions in a favorable light. In the end, the rider can only go where the elephant takes it and tries to make the best of that situation. As Haidt puts it, "When there's a disagreement between the elephant and the rider, the elephant usually wins."

The rider is so good at its job that even when the elephant blunders into a difficult situation, the rider still comes up with a plausible denial of responsibility. We therefore often hear people say "I don't write because I don't have the time," or "my boss doesn't value my scholarship," or "I don't get workload credit for writing papers." The truth is that if we valued scholarly writing enough, we would certainly make the time, ignore what the boss thinks, or do the work pro bono. When writing happens, nobody asks "why" -- we're just relieved that we got results. But when writing doesn't happen, we get reasons instead of results. Certainly it helps to have time, money, and support. But we should avoid being distracted by the rider's PR messaging. Instead, we must stay focused on steering the elephant to get better results and be the driver of our own destiny.

One set of strategies to increase your writing is designed to affect the Intuitive mind. This part of the brain is the "elephant," and even though it's near-impossible to push around, it does respond well to training, practice, and rewards. A colleague said that the process of steering the elephant is "like training a puppy to stay inside a fence when it wants to get out and run around, except that the puppy is me!" To steer the Intuitive mind in the right direction, you can:

• Build a writing habit by working at the same time each day, or in a different place that is only associated with writing.
• Turn off distractions like email notifications. This one can be surprisingly difficult! "I got distracted" is another helpful reason that the rider uses to excuse its elephant's behavior.
• When the writing gets tough, practice using that as a reminder to re-focus on your goals rather than as a sign that it's time for a switch to Twitter or your favorite news site. For example, you could stop the actual writing and instead make a list of the points that you want to hit next, or jump from the literature review to the Methods section of the paper and work there for a while.
• Schedule specific blocks of time to write; you won't do it if it's only "in your free time." Stick to your times, and don't allow someone else to schedule a meeting with you at those times. You don't have to explain it, just say "I'm busy then, can we look at a different day?"
• Alternatively, develop a rhythm where you have certain times of the semester set aside for writing (think spring break), or go to a conference a few days early and spend the time writing (that also uses the idea of a different context for writing).
• Make quick notes as you go about your other activities, then bring them together during your scheduled writing time. I recently heard about someone who texts herself writing notes using her phone. Having done some "pre-writing" makes the actual writing easier.
• Quit writing in the middle of a sentence, rather than when you are "finished." This idea, originally from Ernest Hemingway, relies on the mind's tendency to continue down a train of thought that it has already begun. Having a clear point of entry for your next writing session will make it easier to get started again when you come back.
• Keep track of your writing time, and use those data to gradually increase your writing. (Google ‘750 Words Challenge,’ or see this example) This is similar to the idea of counting steps for exercise. When trying to establish any daily habit, it’s important to start where you are and slowly build up the amount of time, rather than set an unreachable goal and then fail to meet it.
• Employ a writing buddy to be a motivator, while also keeping them on track with their writing goals. Having an accountability partner is especially nice during these pandemic/post-pandemic times when we’ve lost some casual connections to friends in our everyday work settings.

A different set of writing strategies speaks to the Narrative mind. This is the "rider" in Haidt's analogy. Even though it doesn't have direct control over the elephant, the rider can influence what happens by whispering in an ear about what the other elephants are likely to do or think in response to its own elephant's actions. The Narrative mind is good at envisioning potential consequences, and in particular at social imagination. When the rider frames a situation in terms of how the other elephants will react, or what it means about the kind of elephant one is, then the elephant tends to respond.

• Adopt an attitude that scholarship is not complete until it is shared with the academic community. A sense of professional obligation can be a strong motivator to write.
• Focus on setting a good example. If you work with students or more junior colleagues, talk to them about your writing. It will help them develop a writing habit and reinforce your own.
• Focus on what you want to be known for. Writing enhances your professional reputation and helps you build relationships with peers. Those peers can also help to advance your work. The more successful you are at writing, the less those time and resource constraints will be a barrier.
• Invite co-authors to join you on a paper. This has the same benefits as a writing buddy, and also allows you to divide and conquer the work itself, for a paper where you both get some credit.
• Make a public commitment to complete a piece of writing by a certain date. This can be a high-stakes maneuver because of the potential loss of face if you don’t get the job done. But the Narrative mind’s focus on avoiding negative social evaluations will also provide important motivation to keep writing!
• Focus on the positive feelings associated with publishing such as an emotional high, setting a good example, or publicizing your good work. If there are parts of the writing task that you genuinely enjoy, like writing an interesting conclusion where you explore the broader implications of the study, choose those tasks to get started in a writing session. 

The Intuitive and Narrative strategies have one element in common, which is that they help you become more used to writing as a process rather than as a product. Writing is an activity that you do at specific times and places, and the fact that you do it means that you are a writer. Because of the powerful pull that habit exerts over an elephant's behavior, writing begets more writing. And the more you come to enjoy the process of writing itself, the more likely you will begin to experience "flow," that magical creative state where you lose track of time and become completely immersed in what you are doing. At that point, writing can start to feel like fun rather than a painful obligation. You will write more and write better as a result.

Acknowledgement: Content in this week's blog post came from Dr. Harpin's talk to the CU Nursing faculty on February 17, 2021, "Making Time for Writing: Writing Discipline to Create Scholarship."