My friend Khanh Ho asks a good question in a piece today in the Huffington Post. How do you balance “work” and “writing.”
Excellent, and impossible question. First of all, what is work? Is it teaching? Of course it is, as Khanh makes clear. He loves it and won’t give it up. But writing is our work as well. Those of us who go into books and ideas for a living don’t ever want to stop writing. We teach miserably if we just teach the last the thing we heard in graduate school, no matter how good the graduate school was. (And ours was damn good.)
But time management’s such a huge issue. I can write a book every year. Or I can teach 6 classes every year and go to a lot of meetings. But can I do both? Not yet, apparently.
The book’s moving along, and I’m happy with it. The teaching’s getting into shape. I have a couple of lilac shirts that should make an impression while I’m teaching why Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can be seen as both racist and anti-imperialist. As the French would say, c’est compliqué, quoi? And they’d say it rightly.
But half of me wants to teach Conrad. The other half wants to write about Libya, Paris, 2011, the Arab Spring, and make it cool and fun. That’s the “writing.”
My favorite thing in Khanh’s post is that he didn’t say “teaching” and “work.” In academia, you often hear that distinction. Your teaching is something you have to do, your research is your real “work.” Nothing could be further from the truth for a real thinker. It’s all work. I like “work” and “writing” as a dichotomy. The people I hung out with at the Daniel Defoe Conference this weekend would get that completely. Teachers, thinkers, writers. They all taught me a lot, and they understood the centrality of teaching. But there’s writing to do, and tomorrow we get back to it.
Keep up with Khanh’s successes and travails here: http://www.losangelesmystery.com/
Parkinson's Disease Diary 
SO, I am determined to find out if it is it possible for a real thinker to teach FOUR classes, go to a bunch of meetings, and write one book within one year (not on the lofty topics you suggest, but important nonetheless!)
Four as in 2-2? Yes, very possible. I’ve written with a 3-3 load, and (badly, but still) with a 4-4. I don’t think it’s easy at all. I need a system to do it. An undergrad prof who mentored me walked me through his, and it’s workable. He was the 3 by 5 card type. He had his library hour, where he wrote his cards. Then he had his writing hour where he turned each card of notes into prose. He published 42 books. I’m working on number 2, so I haven’t internalized the system.
And … This was a Distinguished Professor at a top R-1 school. One of the foremost Truman scholars ever.