Pantsers, Pantsing, Procrastination

So...while summer is not yet upon us in the academic year (marking and exams have just begun at my university), my writing deadlines loom enormous over the summer timetable I have yet to create. Last autumn passed in an unexpected whirlwind of writing, with a last-minute request to submit a chapter on Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution (specifically related to how she the Historian braids the narrative sections in this text) for a De Gruyter edited collection as part of their Narratologia series. 

I had finally begun to crack through the theoretical groundwork for my monograph's introductory chapter and the request from my research group to submit for the Narratologia book caused me some pause and moving around things in my diary before I (tentatively) accepted. The flurry of writing that ensued shocked me and, looking back now, I am surprised to see that I managed to write an 8k word chapter in a mere six weeks. Six weeks! Normally in a six-week time span I have an average of about 15 hours of research time but for the chapter's deadline in January I added several weekends and evenings to pull it off. Since returning edits in March I've been procrastinating smartly with a conference and a couple of panel papers for seminar series. But now it's May...end of May, okay May is over. And I need to return to the monograph writing. I need to return to the monograph writing and actually write something. Last week I spent a long lunch break feeling overwhelmed at the lack of progress on it and decided I had to pull out the dreaded (for me) 'pantsing' rule for myself.

Let me just say now that I am not a pantser in any situation except going on vacation (or maybe making dinner). I like to plan and re-plan, and re-plan the re-plans when it comes to critical writing. I think this planning pattern is a way of circling close...closer...very close to the subject matter before me in a research project. A way of pushing past the urge to scream and go hide under the duvet for awhile. It's become a method of moving back into a zone I love (the research itself) by easing myself in so gently I don't know it's happening until... But enough is enough. I hear the voice of my good friend Beth say to me--Just get the hell on with it and pants it! And she would be right. 

This summer I don't have the luxury of time to ease myself into the comfort of falling in love with my research again. I need to hear the gunshot and go...To open my document and write without reading back the pages that come before it, without consulting the theory I'm weaving in and which I already know by heart (not that I also can't glance up at my beautiful colour-coded summary of the theory in a chart on my white board)...

So my goal for June, July, August, and yes, even early September is to write like my pants are on fire. Like I have to sit down on the chair to push the flames higher and up through my arms and hands and fingertips, onto the screen to produce words; words that don't have to be good words on the first, pansed, draft but which do have to be written, and the sooner the better!