What If The Hard Work Is Hard?

In this episode, I dive into the reality that writing is hard because it’s meant to be. The intellectual work of interpreting data, structuring arguments, and expressing your ideas clearly is inherently challenging. I explore why the very things that make writing feel difficult are exactly what make it meaningful, impactful, and essential to your scholarly growth.

Listen in to reframe your relationship with writing, honor the difficulty of the process, and embrace the hard work as a sign you’re doing it right.

Writing Problems vs. Writing Tasks

I unpack the difference between tedious writing tasks—like formatting, emails, or class prep—and the intellectually rigorous problems that make writing challenging. True scholarly writing requires you to solve difficult problems, from sequencing arguments to interpreting data and presenting findings. Recognizing these challenges as meaningful intellectual work can help you stop avoiding writing and start approaching it with curiosity and confidence.

Embracing Difficulty as a Sign of Growth

The hardest parts of writing often indicate that you’re pushing boundaries in your field. I share examples from my own teaching and curriculum updates, highlighting how tackling these “hard” problems leads to personal and scholarly growth. Writing isn’t meant to be easy; it’s meant to challenge you, expand your thinking, and help you produce work that truly makes a difference in your field.

“I think that many scholars have gotten into academia because they are stimulated by the intellectually, interesting conversations and great classroom discussions and debates. You might be really intellectually stimulated by difficult lab work – setting up the lab and figuring out what techniques to use is intellectually rigorous, but the actual collection of data in a lab is just tedious, not intellectually hard, but technically hard. So when it comes to writing, we are finally doing the intellectually hard work and part of the writing process is figuring out how to interpret data, how to express that interpretation, and how to make an argument. All of those things are intellectually difficult.”

“You want writing to be hard because that means you are on to something. If it was easy, then everybody else would have already done it. It would be within the sphere of an already accepted way of thinking about things, but that’s not what you want. You want writing to be hard; you want the work to be hard; you want it to be intellectually difficult because as the work gets harder and harder, the more you grow intellectually.”

We’re receiving applications for our next cohort of Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®. Check out the program details and start your application process here.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Apply here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing,and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. If you would like to hear more from Cathy for free, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter, In the Pipeline, at scholarsvoice.org. It’s a newsletter that she personally writes that goes out once a week with writing and publication tips, strategies, inspiration, book reviews and more.

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