It’s 2022 (Happy New Year!) and you want to begin a new writing project—congratulations! It’s a resolution many of us have made, me included. So let’s talk about how to assess if your project idea is likely to be viable.
What does “viable” mean to you? For me, it starts with, “how interested am I in the question I am asking?” Interested enough to sustain me for one year? Or the two years that a project might take to move from idea, through background reading, data gathering and interpretation, then multiple drafts of a manuscript, to submission, revision, and hopefully publication? Sure, interest can ebb and flow, but you will have to remain interested during the bulk of that time.
Do you want to spend hours thinking, breathing, dreaming, and worrying about the topic? Writing can be intense—and intensely private—so often it will be just you and your topic, alone together. Can you tolerate it on the difficult days, for they will come. I find it easy to love a topic on the good days, but during the hard days, is when the true viability test happens.
Then think about what you will need to make the project “work.” Do you have the resources you need, especially during the on-going pandemic? Think about if you need journal articles, books, audiovisual materials—are you able to access them remotely (i.e., many are still working from home either full-time or to do our research). If you go into campus to access resources, you might want to schedule when to do that, based on campus-pandemic access, your teaching schedule, etc. Do you have a way to digitally capture these resources so that you can use them at home, especially if your area goes under a “stay at home” order? And if the project requires a lot of travel for data collection, then perhaps 2022 might not be the best year for it.
Another way of thinking about viability of a project involves assessing where you stand in your career. Do you need a major publication? By when? Those type of publications take the longest to produce, of course. They will take lots of time, energy, focus, and determination. I’m not trying to discourage you, but I do want you to think through how such a complex writing project can consume your time and energy. Or is this a time when your institution is focused more on delivering quality teaching (perhaps it has even suspended promotion and tenure clocks during the pandemic?)—then it might be okay to think about a longer, more complex writing project.
Or could a “fast” publication help? Is there a larger piece of research which you might be able to carve up into a smaller, yet still academically important, “chunk”? Especially in the middle of a pandemic, finding manageable writing projects (versus ‘the one big idea’) might be useful. Again—viability is about if you think you can bring the project to the submission stage. No author can predict completely a project’s eventual publication.
Perhaps a scholarship of teaching and learning-research based article on pandemic teaching might be a viable consideration for you. You’ll have to think about the data you gathered from your students, if you have a unique example of pandemic pedagogy, if you would need student permission (for IRB purposes), etc., but we know that colleagues are thirsty for good pedagogical ideas. Most academic disciplines have at least one teaching and learning oriented journal—many have even created special editions during the pandemic, so go to the journal’s site and see if it has a call for manuscripts.
I think that there’s a flip side to viability that scholars don’t talk about enough—knowing when to walk away. I had a research project—I analyzed over 50 biographies and autobiographies of individuals who claimed to have dissociative identity disorder (formerly referred to as ‘multiple personality disorder’). I also had recorded movies and documentaries about the other individuals. I had taken at least twelve notebooks full of notes and quotes. My “intriguing question” was if I could use these narratives to discuss the boundaries between sociology’s view of the self (fluid, different in different social circumstances) and much of psychology’s more fixed view. I STILL believe in this project and that this data offers a unique way of thinking about the self in popular culture and disciplinary boundaries of knowledge.
I spent almost six years (on and off) writing about these narratives, probably writing over thirty drafts of articles. I submitted to three different journals. But I kept hitting a wall. I knew it, editors did too, and so did all the reviewers. They gave me good ideas, don’t get me wrong. Friends read it—we all saw the problem but I could not, for the life of me, write my way out of it. I was never sure if it was a theoretical or a writing wall, or both, but despite all my efforts, I couldn’t fix it. Finally, I realized that—even if it is a great idea, it is not a viable idea for me. I gifted all my notes and resources to a friend who was interested in pushing forward.
So viability is mutable—where one is in one’s personal life and career, mixes with the topic, your skill set in regards to that topic, and one’s time and energy. The mix can lead to creative breakthroughs. This “stuck” project made me realize that I needed to always work on more than one research project at a time. I would stick with a project but I had another, always in a different place in the research process, where I could go to intellectually decompress. So if I was writing on one project, I might be in the reading/notetaking stage in another, etc. And of course, there was always my teaching (preparation and grading) to switch to as well.
So as this new year starts, consider making a list of writing projects and your assessment of their viability. I actually keep a spreadsheet with research ideas I have, what I would need to make that idea come to fruition, and my interest in the project. It helps remind me of ideas and allows me to refine and revise them, increasing the likelihood of viability.
How do you decide what projects will “work?” Share in the comments—let’s talk about it.
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