Six Questions with Faculty Writer Christopher Campo-Bowen
Christopher Campo-Bowen is an assistant professor of musicology in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design. He recently finished writing his first book, Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2025. In this interview, he shares how he got it done and what writing advice helped him along the way.
Do you have a writing routine?
I teach Tuesday and Thursdays, so I try to set aside time when I can write Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. One thing that I've learned over the years is, I’m a much better writer in the morning than in the afternoon. If I can get four solid hours of writing done between 7 a.m. and noon, I can spend the afternoon doing email or working on teaching stuff. I also try as much as I can, when I leave the office, to be like, “Okay, we're done.” It's just trying to set a boundary. Obviously, I will occasionally break it if a student emails me at the last minute and is like, ‘Hey, where's the assignment portal for this thing?” I'm not fully unplugged, but I try to just let my brain kind of rest. I think that actually helps because it’s more like, when I’m here, my brain is on, and that’s what’s going to happen. When I'm home, it's not doing that, which means it gets to recuperate and rest a bit, so then when I do come back, I'm like, “Alright, let's do it.”
What’s your approach to sitting down to write?
For me there's this initial kind of inertia to get past. Once I'm in it, I'm like, “Yes, let's do it,” but it takes me a while to get spun up. Even if you do the “park on the downslope” thing that Monique talks about, you still gotta get the car in gear; you gotta rev it a little bit before you can peel out. I need to know it's going to go slow at first. Sometimes I’ll do a Pomodoro, but for 50 minutes plus a 10-minute break. Maybe my brain works slowly, but if I break at 25 minutes, then I'm just like, “Ah, I didn't actually get into anything!”
Do you like to research first, then write?
Yes, I want to have everything at my disposal so I can put my brain in that writing mode and just do it. When I was in grad school, I had a Fulbright grant to live in Prague for a year to research my book. I remember my advisor told me, “You're not going to have time to write over there, just go and do as much research as possible.” It was actually really good advice for me, because I took like 30,000 pictures over there and wrote notes about them in a Pages document: “Here's what I did today, here's what I found.” All the photos are automatically dated in the metadata, so later I could go back to that part of the notes and go, “What did I care about here?” When a big chunk of the research is done, I can start to write.
What about low-tech writing tools?
I like printing things out, especially now that things are mostly done. I just printed literally the whole thing and then laid it out. I was like, “This section is doing this thing, so let me put it over here. And that relates to this thing over here.” Having it physically in front of me helps me think about it architecturally.
Not only do you regularly participate in writing retreats, you’re also in a Faculty Affairs–sponsored writing group with five other faculty members. What do you like about writing with other people?
There's just something about having somebody else in a space with you that is equally invested in doing their thing, right? Having that energy really motivates me and helps me to get over that initial inertia of writing. In my writing group, we'll check in at the beginning, we'll write for some time, then take a break and write a little more. We’re also trying to do more movement. Recently Rachel [Rugh, adjunct instructor of dance] led us through a movement improvisation to help us understand how our writing process makes us feel in our bodies. I remember doing a lot of scrunched-down motions, and I thought, “I feel very trapped by this, don't I?” It was very revealing. So that's been really cool.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve received?
“Writing is a global verb.” Monique likes to say this—that writing is not just typing words or composing, writing is also editing, it's rewriting, it’s looking at archival sources, it's reading books or articles, because that work all contributes to the final product. It’s a way of being kind to yourself, because it allows you to think about what you're doing in a much more holistic way than just, Did I bang out words today? Think of writing as a global verb and let that guide how you judge your progress. We're getting a lot more done than we think we are just by being present and working on whatever we need to work on.