A Heretical Post

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

I know it is heresy to say that, so I will repeat it throughout this post. I am really tired of hearing how much I should be suffering and how hard it should all be. I have just never had a hard time writing or  publishing, even though I have pieces I had to submit four times and one I still have not placed although I am sure it is more than good. I also do not think really successful people suffer — I think they enjoy their work.

I have had some illuminations. When I told people I did not like my first professor job, a common reaction was to believe I did not want to work for a living generally. People thought I was comparing working to the fantasy of staying home and being supported in style. Similarly, when I told people I did not like my first book contract, the general reaction was that I did not like to write. This is why they said my disagreement with the project itself was just an excuse. People were making gender based assumptions and I did not understand this.

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

When I was a small stela, it was assumed that women wanted to teach and not to conduct research. If not they were unnatural, which was problematic. That was why women should be lecturers and men, professors. Since this division was no longer entirely legal the only compromise whereby the natural order of things could be maintained was if women conducted research, but let men design their projects. They could then say they were grateful someone brighter had designed their project for them. They could make it clear that they were having a hard time executing it and were not enjoying it but were yet doing a very good job. Then they beamed amid good reviews and talked about how happy they were to be able to get back to the classroom.

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

The book I am reading now has one of those prefaces I dislike, that list all the funding, leave time, help, and culinary support the author had. Without all of this they could never have taken the first step toward formulating their book. This kind of preface makes sure we know the writer has an élite lifestyle, and intimates that writing is impossible without that. These prefaces thus perform a gatekeeping speech act: if you are not in my social stratum, you cannot write. But it is not true that one cannot write while also doing one’s own research and cooking, and it is not true that one cannot do one’s own editing.

I have said it before but I really prefer prefaces that only acknowledge the entities they legally must, and the people who did actual work on the manuscript. I also prefer dedications without long explanations. A marvelous quotation accompanying the dedication can be nice, but I also like the discreet dignity of very formulaic dedications. “To V., in loving memory.”

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

It appears that unlike many professors, I come from a long line of white collar professionals. I never thought I could not be one too, if indeed I prepared for it. What was difficult for me about becoming a professor, or becoming anything of interest, was escaping the expectation that I would not want to. Women should not want jobs. Only insufficient women have jobs. So unlike my colleagues who have escaped the oilfields, I do not say “at least I am working white collar.” I say, “At least I have a salary of my own.”

I was originally told that what was good about being a professor was the that it was a white collar job with security, and that what was bad about it was the research expectation. This is ridiculous, of course, since it is the research component that distinguishes it — if all one wants is a white collar position with security, there is much else to choose from. Why professor jobs might be better than other professional jobs is the interesting question.

My theory on it was that the life of the mind was fascinating, being a research professional was interesting, teaching was fine, and service/administration was all in a day’s work. I had also noted that fieldwork = adventure travel = fun, and that interacting with other intellectually oriented people = fun.

What I did not expect to encounter was the investment of so many professors in suffering and/or false stoicism, and the common idea that suffering = research. I also did not expect to have to work with the assumption that writing + publishing = pain you must endure for survival’s sake only.

I think those proclamations are gatekeeping speech acts like the kind of preface I criticize above. I say that to be a professor you have to like to write academic prose and have some research questions you really want answered. You have to be in a position to insist on pursuing those questions, not just “more sensible” questions (according to someone else). Then:

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

Much of the advice I got as an assistant professor was the standard advice I had also received in graduate school. It was disconcerting to have this entry level advice constantly reiterated. It was assumed that one would not have heard it already, or that one could not be following it because one was not male enough to have understood it the first time. Some of this advice consisted of insightful variations on the standard advice. Some of it was incoherent, willfully misleading, or otherwise inappropriate. It was not always easy to distinguish among these categories of advice because the site was so unfamiliar.

There is one piece of information and advice, however, that I have never been given and that I would like to give everyone, at least in the fields I know: writing is fun, and publishing is easy. That doesn’t mean it is not a lot of work and that you have to really do it, but it remains true that writing is fun, and there are so many places to publish things that in fact it is easy.

I wanted to say these things as an antidote to all the grim repetitions I have seen that you must publish to survive, but that to write is to suffer, and that then it is almost impossible to place what you do produce. I have always been told these things and I have always found this news very discouraging but I have never found it to be actually true. I wonder why, and to whom, it is so important to impart so many warnings and to place such value on fear and suffering.

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

Axé.