Writing grants is one of those things that we (or at least some of us) in the worlds of higher education and non-profits do a lot. There are obvious benefits to being good at grant writing, which might help you to fund your research, an initiative in your department, of your very salary, depending on where you’re working.
And yet, even though grant writing is important, I don’t recall getting a whole lot of formal training in it as part of my journey through graduate school. I did get some good advice from my dissertation adviser—that I should mirror key language from the call for proposals in my application—that I still use to this day. But what about putting together the proposal itself? What are the key components that make up a good grant narrative?
For that, I’ve been using the same resource for the past ten years: Karen Kelsky’s Foolproof Grant Template. I’ve gone back to it more times than I can count, and I’ve had a fair amount of success in winning grants (if I do say so myself) as a result. One of the things that I like about it is that it gives you a framework for writing your grant narrative as a narrative, i.e., as a story. To me, that’s much more compelling than the dry or disorganized proposals that people often put together.
Which is to say: although I have been rejected for plenty of grants over the last ten years, I’ve also won quite a few. I think the Foolproof Grant Template has worked well for me, and I hope it works well for you, too.
I love to write, and over the years I think I’ve gotten pretty good at writing a lot. That wasn’t always the case, but over the time I found an approach to writing that works well for me. In this post I’m going to share some insight into my writing process. Maybe that process will work well for you too, and maybe it won’t. I hope that at least it will help you to think about your own approach to writing—whether you’re a student, a scholar, or just someone who loves to put pen to page or fingertips to keyboard—so that you can make the most of your craft as a writer.
Distraction-Free Time
The first, and most important thing, is setting aside or carving out time to write, free of distractions. This looks different for everyone, because we all have different obligations that pull at our time, and we might feel more or less focused at different times of day. I tend to be a night owl, but I like to write soon after I get up in the morning, when my mind feels fresh and I can drink a cup of coffee while I get some words down. I also try to get as much writing done as possible before picking up my phone, or checking my email or social media. These things end up feeling like distractions when all I want to do is focus on the piece at hand. I also almost always write with earplugs in—and sometimes noise-canceling headphones on top of them—to shut out any distracting noise.
This—that writing requires distraction-free time—was a hard lesson, and it took a while for me to learn! When I was in high school and college, I used to put my papers off until the last minute, in part because I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I had this idea that writing was an act of genius, and that I had to wait until I was struck by a good idea in order to get started. What I learned later is that writing is a way of thinking, and it’s often while writing that I figure out what my argument is, or get some new insight into whatever it is I’m writing about.
So writing is work that takes time, but not just any time—focused time. When I was an undergraduate I would often go to the library’s computer lab to write. I secretly hoped to run into a friend to chat up, to distract me from whatever work I was supposed to be doing. But even if I didn’t know anyone in the computer lab, I could always—and did always—turn to AOL Instant Messenger (dating myself, I know) to take my mind off work. The result was that I spent much more time “writing” than I needed to, lost out on a ton of sleep, and wrote papers that should have been a lot better than they were.
Starting Longhand
Almost anything I write, whether it’s an op-ed, a journal article, or part of a book, starts on paper. Especially when I’m just getting started on a piece of writing, typing feels excruciating, and the temptation to constantly delete and rewrite is just too great. But when I’m writing longhand, usually with a gel rollerball pen (right now I love the Uniball Signo 207 Ultra Micro) on a legal pad, I’m much more able to get into something like a flow state. And since I’m not writing on a screen, there’s much less temptation to click over into another app or to look up some detail that I’m unsure about. As such, my handwritten drafts are full of question marks, inexact dates (“in 19XX”), and placeholders (“[insert quote here]”).
My next step is to type up whatever I’ve written longhand into Scrivener, which is my preferred word processor. I’ll often take a first pass at editing while I type, tweaking my prose, adding new ideas as they come, and filling in details that I can easily check online. After typing up my longhand section, I’ll either go back and write something else out longhand, or move on to editing and revising. For me, this is a matter of feeling. If I feel like I have more ideas that I need to get out, I’ll go back to writing longhand. If not, I’ll move on, even if I know that I’ll still have to come back and draft more new material later.
Editing and Revising
Once I feel like I’m at a place where it makes sense to revise what I’ve drafted and then typed up, I’ll take what I have, print it out, and mark it up. I like to use something that stands out on the page—either pencil or colored ink pen—because it makes it easier to see my corrections and notations later on.
At this stage I might be doing one or more things at once: reverse outlining to understand what order my ideas should go in, drafting new prose right there on the page, and/or line editing what I already have to make it more polished and precise. This is an iterative process, so I’ll usually go through a couple rounds of revisions—moving pieces of a draft around, adding sections, and tweaking language—before I’m happy with what I have. Sometimes key points—even my overall argument—will change during this process, and that’s okay. Again writing is a way of thinking, and revising is a critical phase of the process of writing.
And that, in a nutshell, is it. If you’re not sure what approach to writing works best for use some trial and error to figure it out. Try writing at different times of day, different strategies for cutting out distraction, and with different writing platforms. And if you like, feel free to share your approach to writing in the comments.
Some Notes:
My approach to distraction-free work comes in part from reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. I highly recommend it if you want to learn how to do meaningful work amidst a lot of distraction.
I like Scrivener because it makes it easy to chop up a draft and rearrange or combine chunks of a larger piece. This works well for me, since I almost never sit down and write something from start to finish.
Some writers like to start their day with morning pages. I haven’t found that it works especially well for me, but maybe it works for you!
