Writing Your Way Out of Grad School Together

Every student has shared this lonely experience: sitting at your desk, staring at a word processor with a few cursory notes and the infinite mockery of an endlessly blinking text cursor. You’re waiting for inspiration to come and breathe speed into your mind, to set your fingers sailing across the keyboard in a storm of productivity. If that sounds a little much to ask for, you’d even settle for just a dram of motivation to get through one hour of concentrated writing so you have anything to show your advisor.

The further along in your degree you progress, the more serious this problem becomes. The pressure to be productive builds and builds. Your writer’s block is like a dam, behind which mounts a lake of stress flooding the halcyon valleys of your mind where once dwelled fond family memories or jeopardy trivia or whatever it was that occupied your thoughts before you became a graduate student. And even though you sit at your computer surrounded by other students, you feel you’re trapped in a cell—alone but for the leering phantom of your thesis taunting you from the shadowed corner.

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But what if it didn’t need to be this way? What if I told you that the paradigm of the lone writer achieving brilliance by facing down the dark night of the soul is a bunch of bunk? In point of fact, you can increase your productivity and buttress your sanity by writing together with your peers. Peer writing groups are a great way to build positive peer pressure, share productivity tips, and find community with others facing your same challenges. Writing is a daunting process, but writing with others can make it a much lighter and more pleasant task.  

Ph.D. students from the Nicholas School of the Environment used funds from the Professional Development Grant for supplies (in the form of calories and caffeine) to fuel writing on mini-retreats. These were day-long affairs structured into 45-minute pomodoro sessions.

We often feel so much dread at the prospect of getting down exactly what we have in our heads that we can’t even start writing. But writing is an iterative process of refinement that starts with a first draft and ends after multiple rounds of revision. Creative writing exercises help us take the dread out of writing and remind us that we don’t have to nail the final draft on the first try. So, at the beginning of the day, we did a ten-minute creative writing exercise to get our brains warmed up and put ourselves into a free-flowing mindset.

Next we covered how to set SMART goals for our writing—being productive for 45 minutes is easier when you have a plan of attack. It also helps to share these goals out loud with each other, so that you’ve got a sense of accountability to your peers. 

Then we set a timer for 45 minutes, put our heads down, and wrote! This time goes by surprisingly quickly and people were still typing productively when the alarm went off. However if you find 45 minutes to be too much, you can start with 25 or even 15 minutes on the timer. The point is to do what you’re able and do it consistently. After a few of these sessions, it’s time to break for lunch. This is a good time to check in with each other about how things are going. If you’re hitting a wall with something, you can ask your peers for advice. Odds are good that someone has experienced a similar challenge and you can benefit from their experience. Then it’s time to take a break—writing is tiring work and an hour-long break will help fuel more productivity in the afternoon. By 4 pm, after a few more sessions of intense writing, you’ll be plenty tired but hopefully feel like you’ve gotten a lot done!

And now you have all of the tools you need to put together your own writing group! The tricky part is getting a dozen grad students into the same room at a single time. Good luck!

Editors’ note: All Graduate School students can also take advantage of the Graduate Writing Lab (GWL), an ongoing initiative that offers regular accountability and catered feedback. Through a collaboration with the TWP Writing Studio, the GWL is staffed by a graduate student Writing Studio consultant who can provide brief, issue-based consultations and serve as an active listener or reader. Find information about the GWL and other forms of writing support on The Graduate School’s website.

AUTHOR

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Brandon Hays

Ph.D. student, Ecology

Brandon is pursuing a vocation in ecological conservation. Although he studies terrestrial forests and fauna, he is quixotically housed in the Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing lab. Brandon enjoys building community amongst grad students, touching animals, and chopping wood. You can find him on highly limited social medias if you try hard enough, but it would be easier to view his Duke Scholars profile.