This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, we share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. Today, we're speaking with Gillian Steinberg, who is a developmental editor and an English teacher at the SAR High School. And previously, Gillian, you were a tenured professor. So I'm wondering if we could open by your explaining how you transitioned to this, I guess, para-academic type of job. Why did you make the move away from being a tenured professor and towards the work you're doing now? 
Sure, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I think it has a lot to do with the structure of universities today, especially writing programs. I was the head of the writing program, the undergraduate writing program at my university. And as often happens with writing programs, I was tenured, but no one else in the program was. And when the university was facing financial difficulties, as so many are, they looked to places where they could cut jobs. And a program that was staffed entirely by full-time non-tenure track faculty seemed like a place to cut. That's something that I had worked hard on. We did not have any per-course adjunct faculty. Everyone was full-time with benefits. And it just seemed, I think, like an easy cut to the provost at the time. 
She ended up asking me to fire all of the faculty members in my program and hire them back as adjuncts. And I refused. And... in a really, I think, pretty low move, gave the faculty about three hours on which to vote on whether we would shut down the writing program or have 21 faculty members across departments who were in those contingent full-time positions in every field fired immediately. And so we voted without even time to meet to discuss it because the vote was closing in three hours. I voted myself to shut down my own program. And after he did that, I helped to lead a vote of no confidence in the university president. I was the spokesperson for that and started looking at local high school positions and gave up tenure and left academia and spent the rest of that semester trying to help all of my faculty members to find positions elsewhere so that they would not have to work for the university as adjuncts. 
And happily, all of them were able to find positions elsewhere except for one who replaced me in a full time position. So so that worked out for them. And I I felt pretty disgusted by the whole thing. Teaching high school, I have found to be a much less cutthroat, competitive kind of environment. It has its own issues, totally different ones. And I wanted to keep a foot in the world of composition studies and the work that I'd been doing at the university. So at the same time that I transitioned to teaching high school full time, I also started this private sort of writing coaching business for academics. And did you know that that world of academic coaching and writing for academics existed before? 
I did not. I totally stumbled on it because I was in a writing group, as I think many academics are, of colleagues. And some of them had recommended me to friends who were saying, Oh, does anyone know someone who could help me with my writing? And so it was very organic. Um, I didn't know that that was a world. I knew that a couple of people had asked if they could, you know, use me as a resource. And then it started to become more than just a, Oh, could you read my one thing? And so I was, you know, starting to charge for it and kind of an informal basis. Um, and it just grew and grew and grew from there. And every year, this is my ninth year doing it. 
It has, um, gotten larger and sort of, I think, more professional as I've gone because it wasn't really a plan to turn it into as big a business as it's become. And for listeners who might be thinking about this move or this work that you're doing for themselves, is there any kind of community of developmental editors or professional association or groups that get together of people who do this kind of work? That's a great question. I actually do not have that sort of contact. There may very well be. I know a couple of other individuals who do it. And on occasion, I've recommended, you know, oh, I don't have time right now in my schedule, but you could reach out to so and so. 
But I don't know of any conferences or professional organizations or anything like that. I also think that sometimes people specialize in certain fields. And so there may be sort of subgroups. I tend to end up working with a lot of people in Jewish studies, not because that's my academic field at all. it's just because I'm Jewish. And so I know people in that field. So that sort of has worked out. But I actually work with people across the humanities, social sciences to some degree, and even a little bit in natural sciences. But I do think that the people I know who do this kind of work often limit themselves to one discipline where they feel a little bit more expert. Yeah. I had not heard of this until very recently. 
And maybe it's because I am Now, my colleagues and peers and I are more in the book writing stage of our career. So it comes up. But how do you think people are hearing about developmental editors or where can they look, actually, if they want to find one? Yeah, I don't. Again, because I don't have that sort of contact, I don't know where people should look. And I don't advertise. Everyone that I've worked with has been totally word of mouth. And I think that that's actually how people find me, at least. Someone says something like, I can't stop crying about my book. And a friend says, oh, I heard of a person who helps people who can't stop crying about their book. Like, I think it gets to a pretty bad point often before people reach out to me. 
Or there's a kind of job pressure, deadline terror that prompts people to start asking around. You know anyone who can help me? I can't seem to get myself writing. I can't get unblocked. I also have a website. called teachingwritingbetter.com. And so a couple of people have reached me through there, although I didn't start the website for the purpose of finding clients. I just wanted to put out some open access materials. But I know people have sometimes found me through there just kind of Googling around, like, how do I find someone to help me with my writing? I wish I could be more helpful on that count because I think there's a lot of need for this. I'm not really sure how to advise that. 
Except, I guess, ask your friends. Maybe they know somebody. Yeah, no, I think you're right. It does sound like it's very, I'd only heard of it in a word of mouth kind of way. Other academics mentioning, oh, I know someone who's using someone called an editorial, a developmental editor. You mentioned the crying over a book situation, which gets at, I think, the very emotional focus of some of your work. I'm sure the work that developmental editors do works. really varies, but it sounds like for you, that is a big part of it. Can you talk about that emotional or psychological focus that you have? Sure, absolutely. This came to me over time, but I realized how much of the work really is emotional. 
And a couple of people call me the writing therapist, although I don't love it. But I see why it feels like that often. And I think often when writers come to me, they'll say something like, I have this problem with this chapter and I sort of can't get through this idea and everything is product focused or, you know, something in a very pragmatic kind of process way. I can't figure out how to balance preparing for class and the writing time that I need to spend, that sort of thing. But two minutes into the conversation, we find that the actual problem is that there's a voice in that writer's head saying, this is so stupid. You're so stupid. And like, before we can talk about 
finding time in your morning, you gotta get rid of that voice. And so I find that the conversations often take a turn very early on in a way that writers didn't expect. When they were saying, well, actually, when I sit down, all I can hear is you have nothing to say, right? Well, that's an emotional conversation that I think that has to be addressed before you can move any further. So it does end up being very emotional and people always apologizing to me for crying Of course it's emotional. What is more vulnerable than writing? And for most academics, writing for your life. So I think having someone say that, acknowledge how deeply felt that is, instead of feeling like, oh, I'm being ridiculous again. 
How can I be crying about this? To say, no, it's real. Those feelings are so real and so important. I think that makes a big difference in starting to figure out how to overcome them instead of saying, I just have to hammer through this chapter and cry all the way there. Right. Well, like, let's deal with the crying first and then maybe we can deal with the chapter. Yeah. I'm, you know, some of those voices that probably all of us have about writing where I feel like we're almost, many of us are not fully conscious of them or sometimes they come out most in conversation with others. If I, even if I'm sharing work with a friend or a colleague, I will also just without even thinking end up voicing, 
voicing some of those insecurities as I'm sharing it. Like, I'm really not sure if this is even a thing or if it was worth going down this path with it or if this was working at all. Like some of those insecurities will start to come out. Do you have kind of, I don't know, tips or strategies for our listeners if they're feeling actually a bit overwhelmed by those voices or it's starting to feel like they're almost paralyzing? I think at times is kind of the one end maybe of the spectrum of how they might affect a writer. What do you advise that we try to do? Yeah, there are a few different things that I love to do as exercises for that. You know, I don't want to spend too much time with people on this because I don't want it to feel too like now we're in improv class or whatever. 
But I do say, how can we replace that voice? So first of all, who is that who's speaking, right? Sometimes we can actually pinpoint it. It's this grad school professor who said this terrible thing to me once, and I just hear it over and over again. It's the anonymous reviewer of this article that got rejected. And all I can see is that line that says, her writing is so wordy, or whatever the thing is that then haunts you for 20 years. So if we can pinpoint it, then it's like, okay, let's actually address that. Is your writing so wordy? We can actually start to try to pull it apart. Or what did you actually think of that professor? Well, he was terrible. He never slept with his students, whatever it was. 
Like, okay, this is not a person you even respect. Do we have to hold on to that voice? Can we replace that voice with a kinder one? Let's think about someone who's actually been really respectful of your work. And I always say, not grandma, right? It can't just be someone who's like, you wrote a thing. It's so great, right? It has to be someone who actually you feel understands what you're doing and you have respect for their ideas. So that when they say, wow, this is really smart. I'd love to hear more about this. You know, it's genuine. It's not just praise for praise's sake. So how do we get that voice in your head instead? And before you start writing, sit for a second, picture that person reading your work. 
You're writing for them, at least in the compositional stage. When we get to very end stage stuff, before we send something to a publisher, fine, let a little bit more critical voice come in. But in that opening stage where the page is blank or you're just forming ideas, let it be a friend who's in there. So that's one technique. I also love to do the Terry Gross experiment. Imagine she's interviewing you about your work. She's so nice about everything, you know? Yeah. And she's so interested in what everyone has to say. So write it out as though Terry Gross is interviewing you or choose your favorite. That's one that my demographic tends to know. So that's an activity I like to do. So I think that some of that is actually naming what's going on and then trying to think about little head games to change the narrative. 
Another thing is, say, if a friend were saying this to you, what would you tell them? If a friend said to you, I'd like you to read this, but I know it's very terrible. Right. Would you say, oh, yeah, it is. It's really pretty terrible. Of course not. So you can't be meaner to yourself than you would be to your friend. So like and when I hear people who really put themselves down a lot to just remind them, you wouldn't say that to a friend. Don't say it to yourself. Right. It's just like a sort of quick interjection in a meeting where we're talking about something else. Right. That's not something you would say to a friend. What would you say to the friend sort of as a way to bring us back to that kind of kind voice? 
Because if over time you switch the narrative. you can actually start to have a nicer voice in your head more regularly. Yeah. What you say reminds me that one of the difficult things that we academics deal with pretty regularly is rejection in the form of articles that aren't accepted or what feel like mean reviews or readers reports can feel like a rejection of us as writers and our work. And then also, you know, job applications that we write, you know, and being rejected for those kinds of things. Is that something you feel like you're in some way working with academics on, dealing with this kind of rejection, which really is a regular part of our lives? Absolutely, because all of that rejection also feeds into your ability to write well, right? 
Or to feel that you have anything worth saying in your writing. Because each time someone says, oh, sorry, I'm not going to bring you in for an on-campus visit or whatever it is, you think, I can't do this. This isn't the life for me. I'm not good enough for this, right? And when you feel you're not good enough for it, then how do you write? So we have to deal with all of that as kind of a package. I do think that those things go together. And each one is a little bit of an individualized conversation and how you deal with it. But I think it's also worth remembering that people who, especially if it's really like unkind stuff in readers reports or something, they're all dealing with their own garbage too. 
Those are just people too. And they... say things like, I can't believe she didn't read X, Y, and Z because they were contributing writers to X, Y, and Z. Seriously, it happens all the time. And so we want to remember their humanity too. And when they have some power, they might use it in cruel ways without even necessarily recognizing the trauma that it's inflicting on the people that they're speaking to because they're just thinking about the way that they feel boxed in. So I tried to talk about that also. And the job search stuff, you know, that's winning the lottery. So you have to kind of remember not to take that too seriously as a comment on your quality as a teacher or thinker or writer, any of it. 
But it's really hard. It's really hard to just be battered again and again and keep coming back for more. Yeah, yeah. We're talking about some of the emotional and psychological issues you deal with. What other kinds of issues do clients come to you with? Lots of avoidance of writing, right? I have a lot of things to do. So instead, I watch some movies, right? So how do we schedule and plan the regularity, the feeling like I'm making progress, circular writing, right? I keep rewriting the same passages over and over. How do I get past that? Fear of showing your stuff to people. So I guess that's an emotional thing too, but there's also a pragmatic part of it. It was like, if it's just do like maybe one more revision, then I'll be ready to share it with my writing group. 
So that kind of thing we work on. For a lot of writers, it's the polish level. I'm embarrassed by my sentence structures. I think my ideas are good, but it doesn't sound sophisticated. So I tend to work with a number of writers whose first language is not English and they compare themselves very often to to the prose that they read that feels really fluid and beautiful and have concerns about not being able to do that or sometimes overstretched to try to do that. And then it doesn't feel like their own voice anymore. We see the same things with students. It's not so different. I think academic writers, adult writers have all the same issues that undergraduate writers have, maybe on a slightly different scale. 
Right. As much as we don't like to admit it, but yeah. Yeah, it's totally true. It was interesting to me switching from college to high school and how very similar the kinds of issues are among the students. You're saying that also makes me wonder if listeners are thinking about a developmental editor now. At what stage of, say, writing an article or a book, do you recommend that they maybe approach a developmental editor? I think earlier is better. I guess that's probably not a surprising answer. But It's always great to talk your ideas out because you start writing sooner, right? We've had that experience in all kinds of situations. You talk about something in a seminar and then you feel more ready to write the paper. 
So I do think that that tends to work well. And there's often a sense of whatever the thing is, the article, the chapter as looming so large that it gets pushed farther and farther off. I just need to read one more thing. I just need to think about it for another day or two. And then you read one more thing and you go, oh, gosh, look at all the footnotes in this one. I need to read three or four more things. And that reading rabbit hole can just go on and on and on. And so I actually think that it's good to have someone saying, you actually know enough to start writing now. It doesn't mean that you don't need to read anymore at any point in the process. 
But the idea that we need to read and read and read and read and that there's one more magic thing you're going to read that's going to give you the confidence to start writing, that's a fallacy. So I think that a developmental editor can help you say, just write down your ideas. And then if you need to read stuff to fill in some gaps, you can do that as you go. I really agree. In grad school, it became a motto of mine that I could always start writing earlier than I think. Yeah, because the reading became one of my favorite forms of procrastination. Exactly. And it's a way of saying, well, I was really productive today. I read all day. But you don't have that much to show for it. 
And sometimes reading more actually makes you feel even less equipped to start writing. So it's taking you backwards a little bit because you just realize how much more there always is to read. Yeah. Speaking of, you know, bringing work to you or developmental editor early on, I'm wondering if there have been cases where you've been able to to tell that maybe this isn't a book, a project that a reader is is thinking of moving forward on as a book manuscript. And if you've ever given that kind of feedback or felt like you could sort of redirect a client to another way of dealing with the subject? That's a good question. That has rarely happened. I think it's pretty common in academia now for people to be turning dissertations into books. 
So if you're at that point, it's pretty unlikely that your dissertation can't in some way become a book. I might say this chapter is probably two chapters Right. Or this chapter might need to be absorbed into another chapter. But if it already passed a dissertation committee, it's pretty likely that it can become a book because there have been some sort of measures in place already. And when I'm working with newish tenure track faculty who are mostly turning dissertations into books, that's where we are. I can think of one client I've had who was not open to hearing what that advice for me was. And we ended up partying ways. She did not continue to work with me after about a year. And that book did not get picked up by a publisher. 
I mean, I think it just, it wasn't enough material to be a book. And that was a tough one because she really believed in what she was doing. But in the years that I've been doing this, I've had like, I don't know, 80 clients or something. And that's the only one I can think of where that's been the case. And it wasn't someone in an academic background. position, which also is a little bit different. My sense is that people in academic positions usually have a decent sense of what a book is. Lots of things about it shift and move as they go. But is this big enough to be a book? They usually know the answer to that before they've got started. Yeah. 
And when someone is approaching you with a book manuscript kind of project, how does the relationship change? How does the interaction look? What kinds of feedback and meeting and being in touchness do you have with your clients? So it depends what their issues are. I really like to tailor it like very particularly to the individual. So I have lots of people who check in with me every day. Wow. Like texts. I don't charge them for texts. They just say text me every day when you're done writing. And I have a little checklist I keep of like who's supposed to text me every day. And if they didn't, I kind of write to them. Or maybe I give them one day grace period and then like, hey, how's it going? 
Just checking in. Didn't hear from you yesterday. And it could be like, oh yeah, my kid got lice and I had to, you know, stuff happens. Or yeah, I kind of freaked out yesterday. Okay, then we need to set up a meeting. And lots of people who just say like, wrote today, went okay. Wrote today, didn't feel great about it. Know what I'm going to do tomorrow, right? And so I sort of keep that. As people start to get into better patterns of writing and feel like they're breaking through some of the procrastination patterns that they might've had before or the over-reading or whatever the things are that they've been going through. We don't have to do check-ins quite as often. I also have a number of people, usually ones I've been meeting with a little bit longer who do Friday afternoon check-ins. 
Let me let you know how the week went. So we do some of those. Some people want to have a regular session, like it's every Monday at two, we're just on the calendar. And some people say, I'll let you know when I'm ready. I'll check in every week until I'm ready to meet. So I really try to be super flexible about that. And I think that also kind of waxes and wanes depending on where they are in a book project. Sometimes early on, it's nice to meet a little more frequently. So I can think of a client now who's like very near the end of her book. And we used to meet really every week to just say, where are you now? What's next? 
How did it go this week? What are the next five pages that you want to try to write? And now she's like revising the last two chapters. And she just wrote to me today and said, This last revision is taking a little longer than I expected. I'll be in touch on Wednesday. Okay, fine. You know, so I don't feel like I need to check on her in the same way. The contract's in place, the deadline's there, right? And so I think we can sort of work together to figure out what the parameters of that relationship are. It's one of the things I value about doing this on more of what I consider a part-time basis because I have a full-time job. I can be really flexible about my time and how I give it to people in various ways and 
I, you know, I feel like be generous with my time. If someone says, do you have a minute right now to just quick phone call? I'm having a bad day. I really love to be able to do that for people. I think if I stopped my teaching job, I wouldn't be able to do this in that same way because I would need more security, like what I'm doing. And so it's really nice that I feel like it's kind of an add on in my life and I can give people the time as they need it and take it away as they need. Yeah. I mean, it's... Sorry, that was a long answer. No, no, no, not at all. It sounds kind of coach-like. 
Do you think of yourself as a writing coach? That's the term I use. Okay. Yeah. I don't actually say developmental editor. I always say writing coach. And I really do think of it as coach-like. And some of it's pragmatic advice, techniques from best practices and composition studies, and some of it's cheerleader, right? Like, you're doing great. I'm so impressed with how you did this week. And I mean it genuinely. I'm not faking it. Like I really do because I think people can also feel if it's fake. So I wouldn't say that to someone if it weren't true, but it's nice for people to hear it because there's no one in academic life who really tells you that so much. So, you know, and I remember that it's like people talk about the solitude of that writing life. 
It's just nice to be able to text someone and say, I did all the writing this week that I thought I was going to do or that I plan to do and have someone write back to you like, That's awesome. So that's what I try to do for people. That's great. About the pragmatic. So I'm guessing with most of your clients, there's also a period when you're reading and commenting. How does that look? Is it you doing track changes on a Word doc? So some people like to work in Google Docs and some people like to work in Word. The tech is not perfect in either of those. Google Docs is not very good with footnotes. It's not great for academic writing. It's really nice because we are always in the same doc and it's live. 
I always do in suggestion mode or track changes. I've never write directly on someone's document, even when I'm doing like grammar cleanup and page proofs or whatever. I always do. So I go very beginning, like brainstorming stages all the way to page proofs. But I still always do everything in track changes. So I feel like it's a nice learning experience, right? for people to go back and accept changes and see, oh, look, here's my writing tick. She took the word however out of your 17 times page. So I think it's useful for people for their writing to see it. But I also don't want them to feel that they have anything less than full ownership over the document. But yeah, if it's just I'm looking it over in preparation for a meeting, I'd leave some little comments or questions in the margins, probably not do any kind of cleanup because, of course, we're not cleaning up sentences that 
might get cut or rearranged or whatever. That's last stage stuff. So, you know, if it's just, I want you to see this chapter to see if you think it holds together as a chapter, then that would be more, you know, big content organization kinds of questions that I might write to myself and notes in marginal notes. And then we'll talk about, and in terms of charging, I don't charge for that time. Right. I just consider that preparation for a meeting. So yeah, So if I'm doing edits of someone's work, then I, then I would have a, I keep a stopwatch on and would charge for that time. But if it's like, Hey, could you look over this chapter in preparation for our meeting together? 
Then I wouldn't. And the comments will be larger scale. And so how do rates work for you? I charge $150 an hour. I have a couple of clients for whom that's a hardship and I charge a hundred dollars an hour. Most of my clients do have some kind of research funding or grant funding and I'm paid a through their universities or their granting institutions. So usually they set it up with like an administrator who, you know, then I'll like fill out the W-9 and all of that through them. Everything is on the books. So I pay taxes on all that income so that people can usually write it off as a business expense. Although I always say, talk to an accountant about that. 
And I prorate. So if we schedule an hour meeting, but we only meet for a half hour, only charge for a half hour. And if you've just read something of a client's and have commented on it is the meeting, they've already looked at your comments and now they might be asking you questions or let's have a conversation about these possible changes or what we think you might do about this problem area. It depends a little bit on timeline. So if they sent me something three days in advance of a meeting, then sure, I would... look at it, write some comments, send it back to them, give them a chance to look at it. If they sent it to me an hour before meeting, I'd say, okay, I'll take a look at this before we meet and we'll just talk about it when we get together. 
So again, I think that's the flexibility that I like to have built into it. I don't want to say to someone, you have to get this to me three days before the meeting or I won't look at it. So I do what I can. People are busy and if they have a chance to send something a few minutes before we meet, they know that I'm not going to have read it as comprehensively, but we can still talk about it when we meet. But then we'll likely be kind of going through the draft together, you know, on the spot. Yeah. Since I heard about you from one of your happy clients, I'm assuming you probably heard back from clients about a bit about what they feel like they're getting out of this or how they might even feel changed as a writer. 
What's your sense of how your clients feel sort of after some time with you? I think the two main things I hear are that they feel more productive than they thought they were capable of being. Mm-hmm. And that writing feels less tortured than they thought it would be. That there was something about writing that felt torturous before they started working with a coach. Painful. Like really. And like sort of like an indulging of your deepest fears and vulnerabilities about yourself and your abilities to be part of this academic world. Like really dark, hard stuff. going through all of it with someone just takes a lot of that burden off, especially someone who's kind of relentlessly positive. So I just think that they feel happier about their writing than they thought they could. 
And then I think the productivity actually comes from the happiness. So when I first meet with clients, the meeting where they're often crying, like, we're going to make this fun. And they look at me like I'm crazy, but that's really my goal. And And what I like to tell people is remember when you chose this because you loved it, you chose this field because you're so passionate about it. And it's so easy to forget because academia is so brutal, right? And it takes the love away, right? Maybe you still remember the love when you're teaching it, but when you're writing about it, all you can think is how awful it is. And so I try to remind people of how great it is to be able to spend your time doing this thing that you love, right? 
And that, sort of pushes away, I think, all of that rejection to a little bit or dampens it a bit. Okay, someone didn't like my article, but someone's paying me to spend my time thinking about this little thing that I care about more than anything. It's awesome, right? It really is. And we want to always keep that at the forefront of our minds because then it makes writing so much better, happier, and more, right? You do more if you like it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that is great to hear. I mean, especially our podcast is very much about that idea of let's make this writing less lonely and less mysterious and more transparent and more of a community around it. In our conversations with folks, we're often hearing about people's, their writing rhythms, what works for them. 
And you must, as someone who works with a bunch of academic authors, actually be aware of a wide range of kind of writing habits. Are you able to give us any idea of sort of the range of how people fit this into their lives or how they schedule their writing in an effective way? So almost everybody is best first thing in the morning. Not absolutely everybody, but almost everybody. I do have some people who are genuinely like nighttime people. But even people who say I'm kind of a night person, they still write better in the morning, mostly. And it's usually better before you started checking your email and like scrolling through news and stuff. So I really encourage people to get some writing done first thing. 
It also just makes the whole rest of your day feel lighter because you can go through the whole day saying, I already did that, like that hard thing on my to-do list and everything else feels like bonus in a way. So I encourage people to do that. And I think it does work for most people to not get mired in email first. It's just so easy to, again, like once you start writing, you just keep going, Oh, I should also respond to this one. And none of it's ever an emergency. So just let that go. I think a lot of people are better in that third space. That's so often talked about. Well, it's a good place to go to it. There's a, I think almost a 50, 50 split. 
You know what I mean by third space? Actually, no. Okay. So not home and not the office. Okay. So a lot of people have a third space. It's kind of, I don't know. It became this before COVID. It was like a phenomenon that people had a third space that they like to And it's like the coffee shop thing, the library, whatever it is. And I think it's almost for my clients, like a 50-50 split between needing a quiet place and a noisy place. I'm very much a noisy place writer. And in fact, during COVID, it was really hard for me. I had a coffee shop noises app because I could not write in a quiet place and every place was a quiet place then. 
But some people much prefer like, this is my desk in the library or this is the corner of that like corner. whatever building on campus I sit in. So I think people need to figure that out. Or is it just like, I need a little bit of sort of quiet music in the background, but not chatter. I really encourage people to try that kind of thing out, what works for you. Similarly, I encourage people to try writing by hand a little bit, especially if they have a lot of writing anxiety or a lot of those negative voices in their heads. Writing by hand takes that pressure down a lot because you don't even accidentally envision someone reading it You know no one's going to read something you wrote by hand. 
You can't picture the cruel grad school professor or whoever it is reading something you wrote by hand. So that can, for people who really feel stuck, add to the fluidity. So those kinds of practices, I think. And then a lot of people do the Pomodoro, the 25-minute, then a break, then another 25-minute. I think that works well for some people because it's like sort of a right-sized chunk. But you can't try to do too many of those. I do start with a lot of writers who think – Something like I'm on sabbatical, so I should probably be writing seven to nine hours a day and it's not doable. They're like, well, you know, full time job. It's like it's not a shifted CVS. 
Like you can't write for that long. So I really try to help them shrink it without feeling guilty about that. Yeah, this might overlap a bit. But another question we ask our guests is if there's something you or maybe you'd answer this from your client's perspective, wish you had known earlier. earlier in your academic career about writing or publishing? Yeah, I was thinking a lot about this because you said that that's one of the questions you like to ask. I can't think of anything for myself. It's not that writing has always been easy for me, not at all, but I'm very much not a perfectionist. And I think a lot of what makes writing hard for people is perfectionist tendencies. And I've always been very much a good enough kind of person about everything. 
And so I think that that's made my life easier in many ways. And, and also not having regrets about things like sort of the decision to leave academia was really big and, and like a, you know, kind of a crazy thing. And I sort of never looked back. I'm like, okay, now I teach high school, whatever. And so I think it's just a personality characteristic. So I don't know that I have a thing like that, but I think it's useful in general for people to, to know that not being a perfectionist is actually okay, that you can hold yourself to a much lower standard and you're probably still doing something amazing and That if you've gotten as far in this career as you have, you're probably pretty fantastic. 
So I think it's nice to say those sorts of things to yourself. Even if you don't totally believe them when you first say them, it's probably true. And that people are probably interested in what you have to say because it's probably worthwhile. So I like for people to feel that. And I think that too often, especially young academics, maybe especially young young female academics don't feel that about their work. So it's something I want everybody to know. Like, great. Yeah. No, I'm really glad you brought that into our conversation. I think it's important for us to consider pushing back against some of those perfectionist tendencies that are pretty common. Another thing we were asking is if there is a writing practice or habit that's been working for you or your clients now or recently. 
Right. So I think I've told you a bunch of them. I Having conversations about your work and then having someone interrupt you and say, write that down, right? When you say something that's good, like write that down, write it down right now. Like that I think is great. The imagining a conversation with a really friendly listener as a technique that I love to use. First thing in the morning I love and then feeling good about it. I like setting a timer for writing and just trying to go through. No deletion is a great technique. Do you ever try that? Does that mean like just writing and not letting yourself delete it first? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't erase anything, right? Even if you spelled a word wrong, just keep going. 
So, I mean, that's something we sometimes tell also our students to do as a way to get themselves into a little bit of a rhythm. But I think that that can work really well. I love color coding. It's a thing I use with my writing all the time. I will print out hard copies of what I've written. I think this is especially good for people who might have issues with the organization. Print out a hard copy and then write a little key of what all of the different ideas of that piece or that chapter are. And then like physically with crayons or colored pencils, like I actually color it in. And then I have a kind of visual map of the organization of the piece. 
And I can see, well, here's a whole yellow paragraph that has one like blue sentence in the middle. I got to move that blue sentence out. Where does it belong? Or I have a yellow paragraph here and another one four pages later with a bunch of other stuff in between. Can I move those together? Sometimes when I do that, I say, oh, actually, those are pretty similar. I should be combining those. I find that so helpful because when you're trying to do that reorganization work, but you're rereading the text over and over, you start to lose yourself in it. You say, did I read that again or was it repetitive? Did I just read that paragraph twice? The colors, it's so quick and easy to look at it and see where things are on the page. 
You can lay it all out in front of you when it's on hard copy. Yeah, that's a great idea. I like that too. I find that... I am so repetitive in writing. Like you'd think I'd remember that just three or four paragraphs ago I had kind of said basically the same thing, but then I bring it up again. But what you're suggesting seems like a great way to kind of be able to recognize that. Yeah. And also like be fine with that. Like let that happen in your draft. It's completely fine because that's your brain working through the ideas. So if you notice that you're saying something again, your tendency might be to say, oh, I think I said that already. I'm going to erase it. 
But then your brain sort of gets stuck in it. I would say let yourself say that. Go through. Write it as many times as you need to write it to get that out. And then you do another round of revision afterwards where you say, where did I really want to make this point? Take out all the rest as opposed to stopping yourself as you go. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Gillian, is there anything else you'd like to add about your work or your clients' sort of development or what they're getting from you? I don't know. I feel like we covered a lot of ground. Yeah, we did. I'd like to give guests an opportunity in case something pops up. But but this was really, really great. 
Thanks. Yeah, I can't think of anything else. Yeah, I think it's just I just find that all the people I work with are so fascinating and so talented. And and it's a shame that they don't always feel that themselves. And I think it's really a shame that the way that our academic world is structured is to push people down. you know, or to make them feel less than or that they always have to be proving themselves. And I think that there can be room for the kind of community that you're trying to create. And I think that I'm trying to create also by saying there's actually space for all of these voices. There's space for all of these books and all of these articles. 
I really think there is. And we can support each other through that instead of feeling like we have to be gatekeeping all the time. Right. Well, thank you very much for that. And for the for this whole conversation. I really appreciate your spending time with us, making time and sharing all of this. I'm eager for our listeners to hear you. Thanks so much. And thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. Follow us on social media at Writing at Pod and subscribe to us so you never miss an episode.