Successful Aimlessness: #AcWriMo2022 Last Words

I did not set any goals for this year’s Academic Writing Month. And I believe because of this it was my most productive and most joyful AcWriMo ever.

This is the 13th blog post of the month!

All I wanted to do was: just write.

I just wanted to write again.

Without force, expectations, publisher requirements (which by the way is a whole other blog post) just for the joy of writing and dumping some of the overflowing ideas onto digital paper.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

There were days when all I wrote was the title of a blog post–not to forget an idea I had.

There were days when I edited five different blog posts but didn’t publish a single one.

There were days when I wrote two posts in one go and finished one to go live.

There were even days when I did not write at all. And the most important part: did not feel guilty or pressured about not writing.

Writing for publication. The coercion to produce. The expectation to up your numbers. Thoroughly, wholeheartedly puts me off writing. Writing is knowledge creation, it’s a form of inquiry. Writing is highly personal, it’s emotional, intellectual and in fact physical labour.

So I don’t want to be told how I have to do it.

Some of the writing advice we got during our PhD training was to look at the different journals, literally count how many headings their published papers usually have, observe word-count (per section), number or not number headings, use a certain (usually unreadable) font, watch the size of the margins and so on.

At which point the form has become more important than the content and I freeze. Not sure if this is just an ADHD thing or if this is a general writing becomes a chore thing. Would love to hear from others.

Writing without expectations is a joy! It is creative, productive, rich, sometimes silly, sometimes serious. So that’s what I do. Just write.