How to become a good co-author to your words

Part of my recent rethinking of my writing rhythms and routines in pursuit of a gentle (academic) writing practice has included exploring my relationship with words. This came about because I've been working on a few collaborative research projects at the moment with great people. And I like to think of myself as a good co-author and co-editor: I’m pretty good with deadlines, I give not-mean feedback (and I also can't help but leave enthusiastic comments in the margins), and I quite like doing the editing stuff that most people don’t (hence Hamilton Editorial). I really enjoy working collaboratively.

But when it came to my relationship with words? I was a sucky collaborator. I would sit down to write and expect my poor words to carry way more of the load than could be reasonably expected. The feedback I’d give to my words would make even Reviewer Two think I was being a bit harsh. I would rock up to my calendar-blocked-out writing sessions expecting the words to just flow. I would get frustrated when my words wouldn’t do that. I assumed there was something wrong with my words – why else would they just stop coming?

And then recently, in my trusty research journal, I found myself writing two questions :

What if my writing and I worked together?

How can I be a good collaborator for/with my writing?

Imagine if you were doing a project with someone and every time they thought of working with you, they went “oh god, I don’t want to work on that again with them, that sounds awful”. If they came up with excuses to avoid spending time with you, and kept cancelling meetings with you because they needed to tidy out their inbox. You wouldn’t be all that enthusiastic about the project, right? And you probably wouldn't bring your A-game. You definitely wouldn’t be suggesting working together again.

But that’s exactly what I was doing with my words. 

Every time I thought about the next bit of academic writing I had to do, my heart would drop. It would always get shunted off the bottom of my to-do list in favour of things with a more immediate dopamine hit. I would say awful things about my words to anyone who would listen (how the words had deserted me, how they wouldn’t flow, how they weren’t quite saying what I wanted them to say, how they sounded stupid). And I tell you what – if my co-author was talking about me like that, I would probably be deserting them too at the first opportunity.

And the thing is, in our line of work at least, our relationship with our words really matters. You and your words together are the only way these exact ideas are going to get out into the world. You bring the ideas and your words bring... well, they bring the words. And together, you give your ideas a material form: a journal article, or a PhD dissertation, or you might even write a book together.

So, one way or another, if you want a career in academia, you need to make friends with your words.

But how do we do this? How can we become a good co-author with our words?

First of all, I need to treat my words with more kindness, compassion, and respect. I need to treat their time as valuable (they have other things to do after all - those shopping lists aren't going to write themselves). I have to get rid of the idea that my words are there to serve me; that they are at my beck and call. Inconveniently, it turns out that I need to bring something to the partnership too. My words need me to come prepared, having done the reading, got some quotes, thought about a structure, perhaps drafted some notes by way of an outline, and made a nice cup of tea (and maybe a small slice of cake).

I also trust my human collaborators to work in a way that best suits them, recognising that their rhythms and routines of writing won't be the same as mine. I need to start thinking about my words in the same way; maybe my words don’t feel like coming out for fifteen minutes at 6am every day (they definitely don’t, and same). Maybe your words like hanging out with you in the library; maybe they prefer the company of you as well as a writing group. Your words might like background music or they might need total silence (mine like having the telly on). And just like our human co-authors, if my words are having a bad day, I need to cut them some slack. For me at least, not every day can be a writing day; sometimes my words have more to say than they do at other times, and that’s just what my words are like. There’s no point in fighting it; instead, I want to learn and lean into what works best for both me and my words and do what I can to make writing feel easier/more joyful/less emotionally fraught.

The other thing I want to take from my collaborations with people and apply to my work with words is that I communicate in different registers with my co-authors and editors. We email; we might send each other brief WhatsApp messages; we leave each other little threaded comments in Microsoft Word. We'll sometimes Zoom or have a quick chat by phone or do ‘park laps’ as they have affectionately become known. And some of my very favourite research conversations (plottings) have taken place in front of a giant whiteboard, planning and moving and thinking and noting and connecting in erasable marker. How can I meet with my words like this? We usually work together in Word or Scrivener, but maybe there’s something that would be better puzzled out together using pen and paper (which was the case for my PhD thesis statement)... or the notes app on your phone (as I did with the acknowledgements for my book)... or even spoken out loud into a voice note and transcribed.

Sometimes, your words might want to be written in pencil on a piece of scrap paper – “I just want to try something out,” I can almost hear them saying.

Another thing – if your human co-author came to you and said “I think I've found a fatal flaw in our argument and we need to fix it before we can carry on”, you'd obviously mutter a few curses under your breath and stare at them with undisguised disgust, but you wouldn't ignore them. You’d try to figure out if they were right and then find a way to fix it. And I can’t help but think that, sometimes, when our words aren’t playing ball, they’re actually trying to tell us that something isn’t working. The writer Annie Dillard suggests that writer’s block is often just a case of there being a structural defect that needs fixing – your writing as it currently stands can’t bear the load of what you want it to say next. Or it might be analytical: are you trying to fudge a missing step in your argument or write something that you yourself don’t quite understand? In this case, are we blaming our words for things that really aren’t their fault?

And while I figure out this whole gentle writing lark, I really want to commit to showing up for my words in a way that brings out the best in both of us. (And anyway, it’s not like we have much choice: we need each other.)(But also, and it may just be a coincidence, I don’t know, but I got to test out some of these ideas when doing second-round revisions for a journal article a few days ago, and it was fine. Nice, even. My words and I? We got on swimmingly. We enjoyed writing this blog post together, too. We might even hang out this weekend just for fun – something we haven’t done in literally decades. Could I have… found The Writing Secret I’ve been looking for?)