It can be hard to write all alone. Whether you’re employed to write and actually have a community, or you’re on your own and trying to write for yourself, sometimes it can feel very lonely to write (and research) without any company or support. (Other times it can feel safer or liberating to write by yourself or thrilling in secret!)
There are so many ways to make writing social, and so many benefits to reaching out to create a community around your writing. It doesn’t have to be particularly complicated or cost money either. Sometimes the best measures are quite low-threshold.
One of the most rewarding social writing initiatives I have been a part of is something I started as research coordinator of my department, the Institute of Foreign Languages (IF). It’s called in Norwegian, IF Fellesforskningstid Fredag - or roughly translated, shared research time Friday, or writing fellowship Friday. At the start of every semester I send out an invite explaining the system and then book everyone who’s interested in their Teams calendar, so they appear busy and that time is reserved in their calendar (for the Fridays they can commit to).
Then the plan each Friday is simple:
9:00 We meet in a lunch room and chat briefly about what research we will work on for the next two hours. I try to bring some pastries. We each identify concrete, realistic goals:
“I plan to write a paragraph of analysis for this article draft.”
“I will work on revisions from the revise-and-resubmit I got.”
“I will read two sources for research for my book.”
“I will open up this old project and start to figure out a plan for getting it going again.”
We talk very little about actual research content, more about research process and what we hope to accomplish. Then we all vow to quit email and put our phones on silent and out of sight :-)
9:15-20 We all go off to our respective offices. Now it’s the honor system—nobody’s looking over your shoulder, but you did just publicly obligate yourself to work on something, so it’s more likely you’ll do it! I also made door signs saying ‘Do not disturb - research time’
11:30 We meet back up in the lunch room with our own lunches and debrief on how it went: got a bit done? wildly optimistic but still got started? got a lot done? got distracted but on valid research-y stuff?
We congratulate, commiserate, and keep good company. We ask advice, we get advice, we learn about each other’s research and accomplishments. We vent, we complain, we resolve to keep on keeping on. It’s not a space for evaluation or judgement or regulation. It’s a space for committing to your own goals and feeling that there are people will give you some encouraging words when you’ve worked towards them for just 2 hours—low threshold, high reward!
Because even though 2 hours doesn’t seem like much, for some people it’s all the time they might carve out for research in a very busy teaching week. That regular contact with writing throughout a semester can be transformative. It keeps momentum going in a way that gives a much bigger return than just 2 hours’ work on its own—it enables you to repeat that throughout an entire busy teaching semester and make real progress by avoiding inertia slowing you down. It confirms that regular, brief contact with your research can be just as valuable as a whole semester of sabbatical.
Coming together in an informal way around our research has been really wonderful for creating a sense of community across the great diversity of our department. I have learned about so much interesting research going on that I would never otherwise had heard of! Professors or PhD students, it doesn’t really matter, just show up and pick a small goal, an item or two to check off your list so you can make a little progress.
After all, we’re much more likely to talk about teaching with our fellow teachers, but we don’t normalize talking about research process. We are 9 different languages; 3 disciplines of literature, linguistics, and didactics; a whole range of research groups that span language and discipline—but it can still easily happen that you kind of fall through the cracks and don’t have any connection to others based on your research, or rather a regular connection that’s more than once or twice a term. Or maybe you don’t necessarily feel comfortable admitting what you have or haven’t gotten done on that book project that’s been languishing for years… but at Fellesforskningstid Fredag, the only important thing is the next 2 hours, and taking some baby steps forward.