Good academic writing means sitting with a discomfort that never entirely goes away. It’s not a discomfort that comes from having nothing to say. Most of us have more than enough ideas crowding the page. Not that. This discomfort is something more unsettling.

The discomfort I am talking about is not the discomfort of avoidance, the resistance we feel when we would rather be doing almost anything other than sitting down to write. That kind is worth working through, and most of us become fairly good at recognising it for what it is and dealing with it. No.

The discomfort I mean is something more productive and more stubborn. It’s the feeling you get when you are thinking. When the argument you thought you had turns out to have a hole in it. When the theoretical framework you have been relying on starts to creak under the weight of your data. When the sentence you have rewritten four times still does not say what you mean. 

This kind of discomfort is a sign that something is going right. It’s not a sign that something has gone wrong. 

But a good deal of the advice that circulates in doctoral programmes tends to frame discomfort as a problem to be solved. Write every day. Find your routine. Silence your inner critic. These are useful suggestions,. However, they share an implicit premise that the goal is to reach a state of frictionless flow, where the ideas arrive cleanly and the sentences follow obediently behind. 

Anyone who has spent serious time writing knows that this is not quite how it works. And believing it should work that way is one of the more reliable routes to despair.

Academic writing is a form of thinking. It’s not the transcription of thoughts already completed, but a process of thinking itself. One of the ways we make writing harder than it needs to be is by writing as though our argument has arrived fully formed, rather than being wrestled into shape over several drafts. 

The discomfort of not quite knowing what you think yet, of having to follow the argument into territory that makes you uncertain, is the academic work. Pushing at the edges of what you know and can say isn’t easy. And it isn’t always comfortable. Learning to be comfortable with that discomfort is partly a matter of craft. It is also, in a quieter way, a matter of intellectual integrity.

For doctoral students in particular, there is an additional layer here. The thesis is often the first sustained piece of writing in which you are expected to demonstrate mastery of a field and to make an original contribution to it. That is an enormous thing to attempt. The discomfort that accompanies writing the thesis can be a symptom of imposter syndrome but is generally also a realistic recognition of the difficulty of the task.  Peers who appear to sail through their doctorates without struggle are not, in most cases, finding it easy. They are either very good at suppressing the evidence of their uncertainty, or they are not thinking quite hard enough about what they are doing.

The discomfort is the thinking. Suppressing it is often the same as stopping the thinking.

So what does it mean to get comfortable with this kind of discomfort? A few things come to mind, none of them particularly heroic.

The first is to treat the draft as a thinking space rather than a performance space. Early drafts are places where you write as well as you can at the time. But you recognise that it is also OK to get to be wrong, to follow a line of argument that turns out to go nowhere, where you get to write the paragraph that needs to exist before you can write the paragraph that actually belongs in the chapter. This sounds obvious, but the perceived pressures from supervisors, from colleagues, from our own perfectionism to produce polished work can make it difficult to live with the discomfort of an imperfect draft. But it is bearable when you remind yourself that imperfection is not a failure but a method.

The second is to notice the difference between productive discomfort and unproductive stuckness. They might feel similar from the inside, but they are not the same thing. Productive discomfort usually involves a sense, however faint, that you are close to something and that the problem you cannot quite solve is a real problem worth solving. Unproductive stuckness tends to involve a more diffuse anxiety, a sense that everything is impossible rather than that this particular passage is difficult. When you find yourself in the latter state, the solution is rarely to push harder. It is more often to step back, read something tangential, talk the problem through with someone else, or simply take a walk. Give the unconscious mind the room it needs.

The third, and perhaps the most counterintuitive, is to learn to write through the uncertainty rather than waiting for it to resolve. One of the most common forms of writing avoidance among emerging academic writers is the conviction that you are not yet ready to write. You just need to read one more article, conduct one more interview, think the argument through more carefully before committing it to paper. Sometimes this is true. More often it is a sophisticated form of procrastination, driven by the understandable desire to avoid the discomfort of not knowing quite what you think. But writing into the uncertainty  is important. Putting down what you know, what you suspect, and what you are not yet sure about often turns out to be the fastest route to clarity. The act of spelling out what you mean, imperfect as it is, creates the conditions for the next step.

It’s worth thinking about the longer arc of a scholarly life. Think of the researchers and writers whose work you most admire, they’re probably the ones whose prose seems effortless, whose arguments feel inevitable. They are, by and large, people who have accumulated a great deal of experience of living with their discomfort. They have learned, through many encounters with the difficulty of saying exactly what they mean, that the difficulty is survivable. That the draft that feels hopeless at ten in the morning can feel promising by two in the afternoon. That the argument that seems to collapse under scrutiny often has, somewhere in its ruins, the material for a better argument. This is not a glamorous form of expertise, but it’s real, and it is available to anyone willing to stay in the room long enough.

Our goal  as academic writers is not to make the writing feel comfortable. It’s to make the discomfort feel less catastrophic. It’s to develop the kind of relationship with uncertainty that allows us to keep working in spite of it, and often because of it.