Guide Rails and Road Blocks: Your Roadmap to a Publishable Paper

I used to open my workshops with a bunch of writing advice I thought was useful. Turn off your email notifications. Make yourself a good cup of coffee or tea. Put on background music if it helps you settle in. And, my favorite: set a timer for 15 minutes.

Fifteen minutes, I'd tell a room full of expectant graduate students, is the key. It removes the pressure of writing an entire paper in one sitting. It gives you a boundary small enough that your brain can't talk you out of starting. A few sentences, maybe a paragraph, fifteen minutes at a time, every weekday — and in a few weeks a real draft will take shape. Everyone has fifteen minutes, right?

But…during the Q&A at one of those early workshops, a student raised her hand and asked, politely, if I write for fifteen minutes every day.

I paused.

No, I admitted. I don't. Fifteen minutes doesn't work for me — it makes my brain scatter before it's even had time to settle. I need three or four hours, uninterrupted; I need time to hyperfocus. One half-day a week is what actually works for me: a slow half hour or so to warm up, and then real progress once I've dug in.

I had been pitching a room full of writers a rule I didn't follow myself. Not because the rule was bad — fifteen minutes a day is, for plenty of people, exactly the guide rail that gets a paper written. It just wasn't mine. And I hadn't thought to say so until someone asked me directly.

That's the thing nobody tells you in graduate school: there's a standardized destination for your journal paper — IMRAD, a clear core argument, a paper a reviewer can navigate without getting lost — but there are as many paths to a finished draft as there are researchers walking them. I wrote a while back about how the rigidity of IMRAD is, paradoxically, what gives a writer permission to be iterative everywhere else. The format is fixed so the process doesn't have to be.

The boundaries around writing come in two tracks that look identical from the outside. One kind is a guide rail: a structure that holds you up while you move, that narrows the field of possible next steps until the next one is obvious. The other is a road block: the same road rules, except it stops you instead of moving you forward. Fifteen minutes is a guide rail for plenty of writers, but was also a road block for some that I handed out as a rule. A deadline works the same way. So does an outline, a writing group, a rule about scientific language. As a behavioral scientist, I've spent as much time thinking about why people don't do the things they know how to do as I have thinking about how to structure a results section — and it’s rarely about motivation or discipline. It's a specific, identifiable, addressable mechanism unique to the person.

Before we get into what those mechanisms are: if you want the fast version, five minutes, no theory, open the Writing Blocks Diagnostic and identify your block with a quick-fix to try out today. Then come back to get more specific about what your own roadmap might look like.

The size of the task in front of you

Li had so much data. Too much data? Is that possible? It was a lot. She was trying to organize her results to support a new theory she wanted to propose. When she described it to me — which case to open with, how to move from that case to the broader pattern, how her new theoretical lens should reframe the whole thing at the end — it was clear (to me). It was, frankly, already organized. She just had so many cases in front of her that she couldn't see the forest for the trees. Every time she sat down to write the results section, she was trying to decide, all at once, which of the dozens of cases belonged, in what order, at what length. The decision itself was the thing she couldn't do.

She wasn't missing the plan. She'd just articulated it to me instead of typing it. What she was missing was a task small enough to get her started. So we took the decision off the table. Write a mini-summary of every case, I told her. All of them. Don't decide yet whether it's staying in the paper. Just describe it. By the next week, she had two dozen short paragraphs, and buried inside the task she'd assumed was procrastination, the three strongest cases had already sorted themselves to the top and the argument crystalized. (If you want a longer list of small-tasks like this one, I put together a whole post of them here.)

Peter had the opposite problem, and it looked, from the outside, like the easier problem to have. He knew exactly what his argument needed to show — which evidence, how the whole thing was supposed to hang together theoretically. He could talk about his paper's forest for an hour. What he kept avoiding was the trees: the specific empirical summaries, the actual writing-up of what the data showed, case by case. Elaborating the argument felt like progress, and in a sense it was: it was the writing he already knew how to do. The empirical summaries were the part that could be wrong, and so every time he sat down to write up the details, he stared at a blank page.

Some guide rails and road blocks sit closest to the actual moment of writing. It’s not about whether you want to write, but whether the task in front of you is the right size and shape to get started. In the language of behavioral science, I’d call them environmental constraints and habit. These are the scaffolding around a behavior, and whatever's become automatic about approaching it. Most people assume that when they're stuck, the problem must be motivation. It's rarely motivation. It's usually that the task is either too large to hold, or that circling it has become its own habit, replacing the task itself.

Ask yourself: are you stuck because you can't find the forest? Or because you keep circling the forest so you don't have to count trees?

If it's the first (too much data, too many cases, too many decisions at once) the way forward is to manufacture a smaller task on purpose. Write the mini-summaries before you decide what belongs. Chop the wood directly in front of you and let the pile sort itself out once there's an actual pile to sort. If it's the second (you can recite the theory in your sleep and you're still not writing) the constraint you need isn't a stronger argument, it's a boundary against building it further. That's what got Peter's paper moving: a rule that the next hour was for writing up what one result actually showed, with no returning to the theory section to explain why it mattered.

What you believe you're allowed to claim

Katrina had spent years on a manuscript — data collected across multiple field seasons, revised through two full rounds of reviewer comments, a language editor on every draft. When we sat down after she received a revise and resubmit, she should have felt relief that she’d overcome the first major hurdle to getting published. Instead she was stuck on a single offhand comment from one of the reviewers, not on her data, on her claims, and it had unraveled confidence she'd built over years of diligent work. “I trust the material,” she told me. “I trust the work.” What she didn't trust was herself, on the page, arguing in a second language, under scrutiny.

It showed up in her sentences before it showed up anywhere else. Her draft was littered with statements of “this could suggest,” “this may indicate,” “it seems to imply” — even in the places where her evidence was unambiguous. I know that reflex. My own dissertation defense included a committee member asking me to define, precisely, a term I'd used forty times without ever pinning it down. And the honest answer wasn't that the definition was unclear; it was that I hadn't yet given myself permission to state it plainly. (In case you are curious, the question was how did I define relational power? It was literally the crux of my thesis and yet I found myself babbling with insecurity.)

Back to Katrina. Personal agency is the road block at work here, and it's narrower than confidence in general. It's specifically your belief in your own ability to do the task in front of you, weighed against your actual ability to do it. Katrina's actual ability was not in question. Her methods were sound, her data clean, her argument defensible. The gap wasn't in the work. It was in her belief that she was the one allowed to state claims without qualification.

Count the hedges in a paragraph you've already revised twice. For each one, ask honestly: does the evidence actually require this qualification, or does it just feel safer to include? If you can't tell the difference between the two, the issue probably isn't your data. It's this personal agency.

As a road block, this looks like chronic under-claiming — a hedge that shows up even where the evidence is clear, not because the science calls for humility but because the writer doesn't yet trust themselves to be the one saying it plainly. As a guide rail, hedging is real and it protects rigor: a reviewer genuinely expects epistemic caution where the evidence is actually uncertain. The line isn't hedge-or-don't. It's whether the qualification is protecting the data or the writer. One useful exercise: draft the section, then go through and delete every hedge phrase once. Only put back the ones where the data genuinely doesn't support certainty. Do the calibration on purpose, instead of by default.

Who you think is watching

Yuki was writing up a qualitative study with interviews she'd conducted. She sent me her introduction. Every sentence had three qualifications stacked on top of it. She was trying, in a single paragraph, to satisfy a methodologist who'd want to see more rigor named up front, a colleague who'd want more attention paid to her own positionality, and a participant who might read the piece someday and feel reduced to data. Three real, legitimate concerns, all packed into one sentence, that ended up saying almost nothing, defensively, at impressive length.

I told her what I tell most people writing to a crowd: nobody is actually reading the draft yet. Write it in your own voice first. Let real feedback — an actual reviewer, an actual participant if she chose to share it with them — tell her what needed qualifying. You can't pre-empt an audience you're inventing out of anxiety instead of meeting in reality.

Perceived norms are about exactly that gap: what you believe others expect of you, and what you've actually observed them expect, are not the same thing, and the writers who get stuck here are almost always responding to the first. The imagined reviewer in your head is a composite of every critical comment you've ever received or anticipated, all objecting at once, to everything, simultaneously. No real reviewer reads like that. Real reviewers object to specific things, one at a time, and you find out which ones by submitting, not by guessing in advance.

The same norm shows up in word choice, not just qualification. There's a belief that a more complicated word signals a more intellectual mind. For example, that “utilization of” is somehow more rigorous than “use.” And that a paper reads as more expert the harder it is to get through. I commonly see this sentence-level tell: three extra syllables doing the work one plain word already did. But complexity of thought and complication of language are not the same thing, and conflating them is its own perceived-norm performance. One is your actual expert lens, hard-won and specific. The other is a costume, put on for an audience you're imagining as more impressed by density than clarity. (I've written before about why academic writing performs authority through complexity instead of earning it through clarity.)

Ask yourself: whose voice is in your head when you delete that sentence, or substitute in a longer word? Do you actually know what they'd say? Or are you guessing, and calling the guess caution? Try reading the sentence out loud. If you wouldn't say it that way to a colleague over coffee, ask why your written words needed more armor than the conversation did.

As a road block, this looks like pre-emptive self-censorship and reflexive jargon at the same time: writing defensively against a critic who doesn't exist as one coherent person, and reaching for inflated language to sound legitimate to them. As a guide rail, real audience awareness is genuinely useful, and real technical language is too. Choosing words with meaning economically is what makes it a rail and not a block. The test isn't simple-versus-complex. It's whether the word is clear, or just signaling effort.

Here's something I probably shouldn’t say, but it’s better you keep this in mind: there is just as much risk in over-explaining as under-explaining. Everything you write down becomes something a reviewer can push on — every hedge, every caveat, every pre-emptive defense is a sentence you now also have to defend. Leave something out, and one of two things happens. A reviewer asks you to add it — an easy, specific revision, cheap to make. Or they never think of it at all, and you've saved yourself a debate you were about to start with yourself. Omission isn't always just a shortcut. Sometimes it's the more rigorous choice.

One story, not the only one

There's a story we tell about what academic writing is supposed to look like — in habit, in attitude, in practice, in the words on the page, even in what a finished paper is allowed to sound like. Wake early. Outline first. Hedge appropriately. Obfuscate language. Follow the process your advisor followed, or the one the productivity book swears by, and the paper will come. It's a good story. It's also just one story.

Here's the thing about every case I’ve mentioned: the constraint that blocks writing isn't always too many rules. Sometimes it is…too many internal rules, the kind Peter kept generating for himself long after they'd stopped being useful; too many external ones, the kind Yuki was writing against, an imagined committee objecting to everything at once. But just as often, the block is the opposite: not too many guide rails but too few. Li needed someone to hand her an external one — a task small enough to take the next step — because the material in front of her had none. Katrina needed to build an internal one, a permission she hadn't yet given herself, because no one else had either. Four people, four blocks — too much structure, or not enough, internal or external — four pathways forward.

Some of us have high levels of executive functioning and do our best work inside a plan. Some of us are more adept at intuitive navigation and do our worst work inside one. Neither is more disciplined. We just need different roadmaps. (I've mapped a version of this in another blog post as internal versus external motivation)

So ask yourself, honestly: what resistance comes up when you think about sitting down to write? Where do you get stuck? Or where do you find yourself working hard, for a long time, without actually moving forward? That last question matters more than the first two. Motion isn't the same as progress, and plenty of us have mistaken one for the other for years.

Just like there's a journal out there waiting for your paper, there's a roadmap out there for your unique brain, in your particular situation, right now. Get curious about where yours has guide rails, and where it encounters road blocks.

I still run workshops with a list of advice. I've just stopped pitching the list as the answer. These days I ask a different question earlier — not what you should do, but what you've already figured out on your own, the thing you do instead of the thing you were told to do, because somewhere along the way you noticed it actually worked.

That's usually where the real path forward already is. Not in the advice you were given, but in the habit you adopted for yourself.

I don't have a five second formula for you to tell a guide rail from a road block. I'm not sure one exists. What I trust more than any framework is the noticing itself: are you moving forward or just working hard?

So what have you already figured out, on your own, that actually works? And what would it look like to lean into it?

If you read through Katrina's hedges, Yuki's imagined committee, Li's forest, and Peter's trees, and found yourself starting to diagnose your own guide rails and road blocks — yay! Creating your own roadmap is not an easy task. Especially if you’ve been trying to navigate the map given to you by someone else. We all have the same destination to publish a paper, but we have to chart our own way to get there. Well, you don’t have to chart it alone. That’s why Draft It!, my 10-week self-paced course to draft your journal paper, starts with a 1-hour intake session with me. 

When you register for Draft It! you get ten weeks of self-paced guidance to write a complete draft at your own pace according to your schedule. But before you dive in, you get a one-on-one session with me to identify your guide rails and road blocks, and to build a roadmap through the courses based on what works best for you. There is no one way to write a paper. Figure out your roadmap and follow it from now on. 

Footnotes

Don’t forget to check out my new videos this month. I upload a new one each Wednesday.

You can find them in the Publish It! Library 

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If you are ready to Draft It! check out The Essential 10-Week Workshop – a self-paced course with tutorials, community discussion board, and workbook designed to guide you in preparing your first draft in 10 weeks for submission to a peer reviewed journal! Don’t forget that it starts with a 1-hour intake session with me to lay out your unique road map!  

And while you are at it—join the watering hole, a Publish It! Community where you can share your experiences with other academic writers. It’s free!