what am i doing when i'm working but not writing
I keep trying to explain this to people.
No, I don’t have a Word document open. But I am working.
Yes, I’m on my third lap around the block listening to Phoebe Bridgers. I’m working.
This shower has lasted for 45 minutes. Leave me alone—I’m working.
And the most inconceivable of all: I know it looks like I’m binge watching TV, but I’m stiiiillll workinggggg.
Before I became a full-time writer, I was in academia. I did research in college (even published a first-author paper and won a bunch of awards). Then I jumped straight out of college into a full-time research job, followed by grad school, then a post-doc, then a job in academia.
The full-time job was technically a 9-5, but the expectation was very much that you come to work early and stay late. My supervisor once asked me to program an experiment over the weekend in a language I’d never used before. I said that wasn’t enough time, she said yes it is. I said will you at least be available over email if I run into any questions. She said no, don’t be ridiculous, if I can’t handle this then I can’t handle the lab.
(Did I mention this work environment was extremely toxic and abusive?)
I stayed in lab all weekend working on this project. I slept on the floor in my shared basement office, surrounded by the detritus of old consent forms and physiology equipment. On Monday, they checked my work. There was a single error. Not even a runtime error, not the sort of obvious thing that pops up right there in your face. Not anything that affected data, because we weren’t running this on participants yet, we were just code-checking. A tiny, tiny error.
I got in trouble, naturally.
Grad school was cut from the same cloth. Work work work, work until your brain is a grease fire, work until you dream about data sets and Python. You aren’t allowed hobbies in academia. Hobbies distract you from your Passion, which is research. At one of my semesterly “research advisory committee” meetings, a professor in our department asked me how many hours I worked per week. I fumbled for a second, trying to count.
“Maybe 60…?”
He scoffed and shook his head, disappointed. “When I was in grad school, I worked 110 hours a week. I had no hobbies, no girlfriend. I slept in the lab. If you want to be a tenure-track professor at an R1, that’s what’s required. So think carefully about whether you think 60 hours a week is gonna cut it.”
On our way out, headed back to my Ph.D. advisor’s office, my advisor leaned over and murmured, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to work 110 hours a week. Just 90 is fine.”
In grad school, you are perennially on the clock. You might technically have a flexible schedule, but that’s a lie. I was expected to reply within fifteen minutes to emails sent by my advisor at 11 PM, and if I didn’t, he would call my cell phone. One time I went into the lab past midnight to check some data for him, in the -20 degree cold. I did data analysis on Christmas Day, holding back tears as I apologized to my fiance’s family. I was home for a week from my year’s research abroad in Sweden; it was one of two times I would be able to see my fiance that year.
It’s work, I said again and again. I’m so sorry. I have to work. My advisor’s going to be so angry. I’m sorry.
I learned to panic every time I got an email alert. It took years after graduating for that learned fear to go away.
I worked. I worked so damn hard. It was never enough. I won every departmental award, published in the top journals, won field-wide awards, published more papers than any other student in the department, got the best grants. But one time I made a calculation error and my advisor was so humiliated in front of our collaborator by my ineptitude that he had me write a 400-word apology email to that collaborator—with my advisor CCed—promising that I would never be so useless again.
I still love academia. Once I got out from the penumbra of…all that…I had my post-doc with an incredible, supportive, brilliant researcher who helped me slowly piece my heart back together—but it was never the same after that. Academia had broken me down and chewed me up until I was paste. Grad studentship is a type of indentured servitude. You don’t get admitted to a school so much as to one specific advisor. Although you can technically switch advisors, sunk-cost fallacy (and fear of the implicit implication that you are the problem) means you usually don’t. The only way out is through, and you’ve put in too much work to fail now, so you keep pushing. You want your dream. You want academia. You want the freedom to form your own lab one day and ask questions and find answers and maybe in the process find new questions.
After my post-doc, I went into a full-time job in academia, where I lasted six months.
I had three books under contract. I was twenty weeks pregnant. I was dealing with a lupus flare, a possibly devastating prenatal diagnosis for my unborn child, and my morning sickness was still so bad that I had lost twelve pounds in the past two months alone. And it was only going to get worse when—(if, my brain qualified, because we were still waiting on amnio results)—the baby was born.
I had to choose. I couldn’t work three full-time jobs: academic, author, parent. All with chronic illness, no less.
I chose writing.
Those first several months as a full-time writer passed like a fugue state.
I would sit down in front of my laptop, hands on the keys, and find myself unsure what to write. When I’d been in grad school (and later, in my post-doc and job), every free minute was taken by writing. I wrote on my phone on the bus, in my notebook during guest seminars, at two in the morning when even my dog had fallen asleep and I could finally steal the time.
Now, all I had was time.
So why couldn’t I use it?
There were the obvious answers, of course. My difficult, complicated pregnancy, which only got more difficult and complicated as we approached birth. My difficult, complicated recovery with a child who kept losing weight and a C-section scar that became infected and abscessed, necessitating a home health nurse to drain and pack it every day for over two months.
I managed somehow to finish my book on the shortest deadline.
But that feeling of floundering in too-deep water persisted.
Now what?
I called a friend.
Start every day with a journal, he said. Write about what you plan to write about. What revisions you need to do. Get the blank page out of the way.
So I got the blank page out of the way.
Now what?
The interior of my brain was a wasteland of open space without the constant stimulation of academia to fill it.
I started reading books again. I’d never stopped, really—I can’t fall asleep without reading for at least five minutes—but now I really got into it. I read 150 books in a year. I read fanfiction. I read poetry and the news and blogs and substacks and essays and Ancient Greek epics. I read until my mind was spilling over with words.
And the inspiration started to slowly seep back.
That’s what I’ve learned. My writing brain doesn’t function well without sufficient input. I got plenty of it when I was in grad school, but now, as a full-time writer, there was simply too much free time and not enough happening within it.
What are you going to write about, anyway, if you don’t have a life to inspire it?
So now I try to fill my days with things. I take my dog for a long walk with headphones listening to my book playlists. I go to museums. I work at coffee shops where there is plenty of ambient everything to feed my brain a slow drip of white noise.
I read books. I watch TV. I play video games. In the back of my mind, the writer takes notes about story structure and characterization.
I spend very little time, now, staring at a blank page.
What usually happens is that I’ll be working furiously at a project, hit a dead end, and won’t know what happens next. I swear I think non-creative workers believe the solution to this is to sit and think hard enough that the answer comes to you. But that has never worked for me in the past, and it’s not about to start now.
The answer always hits me when I’m off doing something else. I’ll be in the middle of rinsing conditioner out of my hair when I realize oh shit, okay, so she does know he’s the villain—
And then I get my laptop back out and resume the part of my job that actually looks like a job to everyone else.
My partner jokes that my workday is 80% bumming around and 20% actual writing.
That sounds about right.
But it’s all work.
And whatever you might say about bumming around…you can’t deny that I keep finishing and publishing books.
There’s something in that secret sauce.
So the next time someone asks me whether I got a lot of work done today, I’ll think back to my four hours of reading, two hours of errands, and single hour of feverish drafting, and I’ll say…
Yeah. I did.