Legal Commentary

I am in the second week of my second sabbatical, and I find myself beset by sabbatical anxiety.  Ideally, I would be using the sabbatical to write a highly theoretical, paradigm-shifting monograph, an extended discourse pulling together the various strands of my previous scholarly works into one coherent and compelling whole.  But that's not how I roll, I guess.  Instead, I've got five projects going, and several of them promise to be largely doctrinal.  I worry that this is a "waste" of my sabbatical.  After all, shouldn't a sabbatical be used to think great thoughts or to try something new and different rather than to pursue business as usual?  I even thought about postponing my sabbatical until the Muse spoke to me about what highly theoretical monograph I should write, but I felt very acutely the need for a break to re-invigorate my classroom performance.  

 My sabbatical anxiety is tied to a more global anxiety about the scholarly process.  No matter how experienced I've become in this business, I still imagine that all you other scholars are out there cranking out page after page of brilliant thoughts in an assembly-line-like fashion.  It is at times like this that I have to remind myself that not only is scholarship personal, but so is the process of producing it.  I have known one and only one colleague and co-author who appeared to be able to come up with an idea, make a detailed outline of an article, and then simply follow that outline in writing the article.  He is so brilliant and so efficient that I've often envied the process he uses to produce scholarship.  But I will NEVER be able to follow that process.  My process looks more like the following.  Come up with an idea.  Question whether it is a good idea or not.  Talk to a few close colleagues about it.  Agonize.  Read the cases and the scholaship in the area.  Agonize some more. Write the introduction to the article.  Then re-write it roughly ten times until I'm sure what I want to say.  Write the rest of the article, at every increasing speeds and with ever increasing fluidity.  The last ten pages will be written at breakneck speed, and they will probably be the best ten pages of the article.  By the time the draft is finished, it isn't really a draft, except for the introduction, which now has to be re-written.  This process is not efficient, but (as I'm trying to remind myself as I embark on this sabbatical) it has served me well for 15 years, and it is probably too late to change it now.  

I am sure that some of the readers of this post won't be able to relate.  But for those who can, perhaps it helps to know that you're not the only scholar out there whose creative process isn't efficient.  Regardless, I'd appreciate any sabbatical tips and tricks you have to offer.