Writing, completing, and owning
I’m sure other folk have worked this out, probably well-paid people with degrees in management. But I find that when I get to the second half of a writing project—the editing, revising, responding to peer review, all that is required to complete the work and get it published—my enthusiasm for the project (and thus my ability to make myself keep at it) varies hugely depending on whether (1) it was my idea or someone else’s and (2) whether I am writing it as part of a social effort.
I have the awful habit, or did, of saying “Sure, no problem” when others ask me to produce something. The reasons for accepting are many (helping out, surprised and pleased to be asked), but I have often found myself wondering why I’m working on a problem defined by others when I am neglecting a really interesting project that I discovered. When I was a bit younger, I recognised the self-defeating cycle of taking on a project for the wrong reasons, and then finding that along with all the other obstacles to completing a piece there was considerable resentment. The answer to that is saying ‘sorry, I have enough to finish just now, ask me again in a year or two’. When I finish an article for someone else, I think, ‘Job done.’ When I complete one of my own articles it’s usually a substantial exploration of an otherwise unstudied topic, and it’s really satisfying.
But of course, those projects rarely have an associated deadline: I have worked on some papers for many years. One effect of that is that I have (as most folk do, I expect) vast forests on my hard drive and in my paper archives related to projects that have not been finished, but that I love dearly; and quite a few archives of work towards papers that I wrote in several different versions until I was sure that they just weren’t right or sufficiently interesting. One answer to that challenge is collaboration. When the work is part of a joint effort, a network of scholars or a particular partnership or a community of activists, then there’s a social pull towards getting something out and published. So many disciplinary communities I have encountered were just that—scholars who take a petty delight in sanctioning each other to keep inside the disciplinary norms—that I was startled and delighted to meet the gang of ethnobiologists. Although I have multiple allegiances, it is always the ethnobiologists who are the friendliest and most supportive (and least self-important!) as a discipline; and even where I find I have theoretical issues with ethnobiology per se that might be better answered in the tools and frameworks of ecological anthropology, political ecology, STS, Asian studies, mountain studies, Buddhist studies… the ethnobiologists win on actual, rather than theorised, embodied ecosocial practice. (The STS folk I’ve met are rather good too, but I’ve never dared intrude on an STS conference.) Other communities can learn to be like that too. Within a community that is supportive, creative, constructive, playful, rigorous, and brave, it is wonderful to have shared ownership of work, to be pulled along towards finishing a project through shared enthusiasm and common joy in the research process and results. That can happen through joint authorship or through writing papers as part of a team.
In any case, it seems to me that we don’t say this very often, but we should: It is very important to recognise and remember that the sometimes lonely and fraught business of writing is much less fraught when one feels that it is work that was chosen and is worth doing, and it’s much more fun and rewarding when it’s written as part of a vibrant, brilliant, constructive and supportive collective. As academics and writers, we owe it to ourselves to do writing and research that we actually care about; and we owe it to others and ourselves to build research communities (through respect, love, listening, support, constructive review, play…), un-disciplines, exploration parties, homes for all of us to write with and for.