Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write

“crossing over from salt water into fresh water,” consciously pitching his prose to a general audience. In his third book, he adopted a more conversational voice. But only with his fourth book did he finally succeed in producing the kind of writing that he “had always aspired to”:

So I began to play with more organic, nonlinear ways of writing, paying close attention to my rhythms and moods at different times of the day.

think many academics confuse good thinking with good writing.

What if we were to bring air and light and time and space back into the picture, reimagining ourselves not as suffering artists but as artisans of language:

figurative language inflects the stories we tell about ourselves and our writing.

I went through a William Blake phase as a graduate student, and I like to think that my writing at least makes gestures to—well, beauty is such a big word—a grace that is not just academic, a gracefulness that is not just academic.

read a lot of fiction, so sometimes I borrow techniques from fiction writers: varying paragraph structure or using a variety of sentence lengths for emphasis.

Success is a process, a mindful process. A lot of students make the mistake of comparing their beginning efforts with other people’s final products, which is not a smart thing to do, since rarely do you start with something wonderful. And even if you did, it wouldn’t be any fun.

The more pleasurable the activity, I found, the more likely it was to initiate a new spate of productive writing within the next day or two.