Post-academic life: To write, or not to write

So, I am part of some conversations elsewhere online about transitioning from academic to non-academic jobs. (I feel like I cheated, in that I went back to school rather than trying to convince employers directly that the valuable skills I learned during my Ph.D. make me suited to do something other than teach, publish, or go back to school. But it is what it is, and I take part in these conversations nonetheless.) And recently these conversations have reminded me that although the transition out of the ivory tower is hard, once you're actually out, it's kind of amazing how quickly you can forget your former life.

(Disclaimer: This is just my own experience, not offered as anything universal. My own transition wasn't that bad - just expensive - but there are some good reasons for that. Leaving my last tenure-track job was fairly miserable, as not getting your contract renewed after third-year review sucks, frankly. But although leaving that job was both necessary to and a catalyst for leaving academia, I didn't actually change careers until later. Also, since I went back to school, my first introduction to this new career took place under very familiar academic structures and culture. It wasn't like I got dropped into a law firm and had to learn both the substance and the culture of the law at the same time. Finally, I had had my shot at academia - I worked as a full-time professor for nine years, and while I enjoyed it and left more because I couldn't find another academic job than because I flat out decided academia didn't work for me, I could walk away thinking, "Well, been there, done that." Not entirely - I never got tenure - but I knew what I was walking away from from long experience. I think the toughest transition is for people who wanted academic jobs but never got one. Not that deciding academia doesn't work for you and you need to find something else isn't hard, but in a different way. In any case. I digress. The point I was trying to make is that I can't really speak to the experience of all former academics (or aspiring academics), since I recognize my own experience wasn't really that terrible and not necessarily representative of anyone else's.)

So, as I was saying: it's amazing how quickly academia recedes into the background. I mean, in some ways, not - the fact that I'm so much older than most (though not all) entry level lawyers makes it hard to forget that I'm different, that I've done all these other things before going to law school. But then, there are tons of people in law school who did other stuff previously. They, too, have developed all kinds of skills and abilities that stood them in good stead in school and now in their careers; so in that respect, we're not all that different. I just took more time than a lot of them. 

But when I was applying to law schools I talked once with a former medievalist who became a lawyer, and she said you really quickly forget about academia, and she was totally, completely right. 

(For me, this is generally an excellent thing. I have always been good at making a clean break and walking away from things that didn't work; I'm congenitally averse to regrets. Academia was cool; I had that experience; now I'm doing other stuff. And as I've said before, I don't miss academia. I miss the familiarity, and knowing what the hell I was doing, and not being the low-person-on-the-totem-pole, but I don't miss the actual work.)

And I have changed. It's a cliche that law school makes you think like a lawyer, but it does. NLLDH laughs at me when I see liability everywhere (for instance, we visited his family and bought our niece a donut with a paper sports team logo on it; he and she were wondering if it was edible, and I said, "It has to be edible, because if it wasn't, they'd have to warn buyers it's not edible, or else they'd be liable for any injuries from eating it." This, to me, has become a perfectly normal reaction, but NLLDH thought it was hysterical). I can't read academic work in the humanities anymore - I want it to work the way legal scholarship works, and I get impatient with the long sentences and long chapters and lack of headings. (When I started law school, I disdained headings as the refuge of the lazy - I believed you should be able to signal transitions in the text without needing headings. I have now come to believe headings are so very helpful!) I have a different perspective on higher ed. I don't agree with my academic friends' perspectives as much as I used to (I respect them, but don't always agree with them). Partly, I've gained a new field of expertise that informs the way I look at things, and partly, going back to school reminded me what it's like to be a student, and broke my automatic sympathy with the faculty perspective. (And partly, I just don't care about all of it anymore.)

Perhaps the last part of the academic identity that I let go of was the idea of myself as a writer. Now, I have always considered myself a writer, since I started writing what was really probably fanfiction around 4th grade or so (if you can write fanfiction about Nancy Drew and the like). The cool thing about being an academic was that it meant I legitimately wrote for a living. Sure, a lot of that writing was syllabi and student assignments, but still, there was actual published writing in there. 

During law school, I carved out an identity as "good writer." I won a prize for being the top student in my legal writing section. I "wrote on" to law review. During 2L and 3L, I wrote a seminar paper or the equivalent in every semester (in my law school, seminars were small, writing-focused classes, and you had to take one before you graduated; I took two official seminars and two de facto seminars. To give you some perspective, something like 90 students in my class of ~165 took their seminar in their final semester). In one of those classes I received the top grade awarded. (Yes, law school tells you these things, and you care. It's kind of sick.) Of course, that means I didn't get the top grade in three of them, so I'm not claiming I was brilliant, but still. Profs told me my exams were well-written and I got one of my top grades (and probably near-top grade in that class) in an exam where the prof explicitly told us she was going to grade on quality of writing. (And I got one of my lowest grades on an exam for a prof who, I later figured out, did not care at all about quality of writing and valued only high volume of correct info.)

And throughout law school, I always kind of assumed that I would continue to write scholarly stuff. Eventually, once I'd learned enough law to have something to say about it. I knew I wouldn't continue to write medieval history. I loved it when I did it (very occasionally I suffer a pang that I won't work on the next project I'd identified for myself, which was going to be a study of social climbers. I mean, seriously, wouldn't that have been cool?), but I have always said that I wouldn't be an independent scholar, and that if I wasn't a history professor, I wouldn't keep writing history. (Not knocking independent scholars - just what works for me.) But I thought I would continue to write scholarly stuff, and I sort of kept a mental notebook of stuff I'd be interested in writing about.

And you know what? That notebook is largely blank, and sitting, undisturbed and dusty, abandoned on some mental back cupboard.

I find myself almost entirely uninterested in writing any more. There are a lot of reasons for this - right now, at work, I do nothing but research and write, and when I get home at the end of the day I'm just. not. interested; I've actually reclaimed my non-work life and developed hobbies that I love, and I want to spend my spare time on them; and I find myself kind of conflicted about legal scholarship and the purpose it serves. (I could say more about this but won't right now or this post will never end.) The only thing I'm really interested in writing about (at least for now) is unionization of contingent faculty - and I'm not interested enough to spend any of my spare time on it when it's not my job to do so. 

Initially, it was hard to give up the idea of being a writer. But I feel less and less conflicted about it as time goes by. I watch NLLDH carve out time to do research and write papers, and be tired all the time. I offer to edit drafts for him, and find myself completely irritated by giving my time to such work (even though I offered. Never claimed consistency). 

I may well find myself in a place in the future where writing becomes appealing again. I don't know what kind of writing that would be, but it's possible. Right now, it's more of a relief than a disappointment to let the label "writer" go, slipping into the ether with the rest of my academic identity. 

Comments

[Attorney At Large]

Oh, I wish you were closer so we could have coffee and chat!

My experience is a bit different (I had a career in tech, not academia) and I was on the fence about grad school for history or law school. Anyway, I made the same transition in writing that you did. Perhaps the best advice anyone ever gave me as a legal writer was "your job is to make it as easy as possible for the court to agree with you." Once I accepted that, I would never write without headings again. Lots of headings. Look, judge, look how easy I am making it for you to agree with me! You can write your opinion just based on my pithy little headings!

In any case, I have zero patience for poorly written (IMHO) historical scholarship now. Nearly everything I read gets a favorable review in the LRB or I don't bother. (That sounds so snotty from just a JD.)

There is an online forum for the particular area of history that I spend most of my time studying, and I just can't stand subscribing to it anymore. So much pedantry, so little substance. What's the point?

BTW: I couldn't write fiction again until I took a break from practicing. I wrote the better part of a historical sourcebook for an RPG after the bar/starting work as a newbie lawyer, but there was a long dry spell until I had the mental distance from practice. I think practicing/clerking uses the same energy that scholarship does, and there's just only so much in that well.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Yes, I totally agree about making it easy for the court to agree with you! I so LOVE headings now. (Though not when they're long and in all caps - that's annoying. But otherwise!)

The funny thing about historical writing now is that I don't have the patience to read the really scholarly stuff, but a lot of the popular stuff still annoys the former scholar in me - so I just ignore it altogether. But honestly, that's just fine with me right now! I sold all my history books when I went to law school and I'm totally thrilled not to have them hanging around.

I also agree that scholarship/practice/clerking all draw from the same well. I think about the unionization project and if it were something I did as part of my work I'd be raring to go. But it's not my job anymore, and it really is work, not (just) pleasure. And no one's paying me to do it, so...

[WTF have I done with my life?]

I am not sure if I have ever posted a comment to your blog before or not... anyway, it was one of the first "postacademic" blogs I ever read and I absolutely poured over your old posts for hours. I wish I had read this post before I wrote my own just now about feeling ambivalent about moving on from academia!

[JaneB]

I love headings too - despite still being an academic! My preference for clarity as the primary goal of writing is probably one of the factors that led to me choosing a STEM approach rather than a historical/sociological one in my studies, despite a love of the subject matter. Now I work in a 'mixed disciplines' department, and reading memos from the sociologist/humanities folks can be extremely painful...

[Janice]

There is Nancy Drew fanfiction. Some of it's pretty fun, too.

It's strange: I've been reinventing myself as a scholar-writer-editor after years of concentrating on teaching and outreach. I still do lots of teaching, obviously, but I've severely dialed back on my commitment in terms of time and energy in order to carve out the hours needed to research, write and polish.

I think we all go through cycles in our professional development where we move in and out of interests and outlets. Your cycles may have been more extreme than some others but I don't think they're unprecedented.

[Anastasia]

I love headings. And you know what? In addition for being praise for the clarity of my dissertation, that was also counted among its chief flaws. Clarity as a flaw. Unbelievable.

[Mary Anne]

If you want to write again, I'd go back to the writing that brings you joy. Hooray for fanfiction. Have you tried slash? :-)

[Horace]

Not to point out the obvious, but isn't this blog a vestige of your academic writing? or at least para-academic writing? I keep coming here because your post-academic practice shines light on my experiences still-in-academia. You are an illuminating writer, just not on medieval history.

[smalltown prof]

I think if you had had a mentor in academia like you do now with your judge, you would have enjoyed academia a lot more.