By Josiah Beharry, Graduate Student Researcher, UC Merced Center for the Humanities

A quiet ritual at UC Merced’s Center for the Humanities turns writing from a private test of willpower into a shared practice of showing up. 

There’s a lie that floats through graduate school: writing is a solitary ordeal. You, your laptop, the blank page whispering, prove yourself. I don’t buy it, and it’s never worked for me! Scholarship is communal. It moves when we move together. That’s why every Monday, 9 a.m.–12 p.m., the Center for the Humanities opens a room and makes a simple promise: you won’t have to start alone. 

We don’t run a bootcamp with speeches and performances. Just a table, coffee, an outlet, a chair, and a culture of showing up. The room fills with scholars from every discipline—sharing a nod, parking the chaos at the door, and building an interdisciplinary calm around the one assignment we all share: writing (and grad school stress of course).  

Time Is the Real Barrier: Body Doubling, Minus the Hype
For many graduate students, the hardest part of writing isn’t craft—it’s time. And time is never neutral. If you’re teaching, caregiving, commuting, doing community work, or juggling jobs, the myth of the six-hour “ideal writing day” isn’t a strategy; it’s a mental prison—for anyone who can’t contort their life to fit it. Our room is the opposite: a low-barrier, three-hour block that respects life as it’s actually lived. You don’t need to clear your week to be a writer; you just need a door that opens  and fills with community. Call it co-working. Call it body doubling. The psychology is simple: when we work alongside others, the cost of beginning drops. The mind stops bargaining. The cue: quiet but firm, people here are writing—and your brain falls in line. No public check-in. No shame. Just the unglamorous mercy of co-presence. 

As someone with ADHD, body doubling isn’t a fad; it’s harm-reduction for attention. Clinicians and ADHD coaches note how co-presence lowers the “activation energy” to start and softens time-blindness and task-switching. I feel that in my bones. K–12 told me “good writing” meant sitting still, alone, and “just focusing”—a setup I routinely failed. Put me in a quiet room with other people working and the calculus changes. In this shared space the laundry/YouTube/TikTok spiral loses its grip; the shame soundtrack goes quiet; I borrow the room’s momentum. The accountability is gentle and external—no performance, just proof that starting is possible. For me, body doubling is the structure that makes showing up doable and staying put humane. 

The Schedule (and Why It Sticks) 

We draw, unabashedly, from Paul J. Silvia’s slim manifesto, How to Write a Lot. His premise is disarmingly simple: pages come from schedules, not inspiration. I agree and will  add this: schedules stick when they’re humane. Our room doesn’t tell you how many words to hit or which method to use. It gives you a recurring appointment and gets out of your way. Discipline, yes. Drills, no. 

How I Use the Room 

• Arrive with one concrete task. Not “work on a chapter,” but “draft methods paragraph” or “clean up footnotes 8–12.” 

• Draft messy on purpose. Brackets are my best friend: [check citation], [add quote], [figure out later]. 

• Change the task, not the room. If I stall, I outline for ten minutes, then return to drafting. 

• Leave a path back. I end by writing the first sentence I’ll tackle next time. 

None of this is required. It’s just how I make the most of a space designed to protect attention. 

Why It Works 

Humanities writing asks for depth. STEM writing asks for precision. Creative work asks for stamina. All three need uninterrupted stretches where attention can land and stay. That’s what this room provides. It lowers the temperature on productivity theater and raises the odds you’ll finish the paragraph you’ve been avoiding. 

And something else happens, harder to quantify: relief. The kind you feel in your shoulders. Relief that you didn’t postpone it again. Relief that you kept faith with your future self. Relief that the draft you feared is now a document you can actually revise. 

It works because the decision is already made. By the time Monday starts, you don’t have to negotiate with yourself: Will I write today? The answer is on the calendar. Week by week, your pipeline moves—drafts lift off the starting blocks, paragraphs find shape, and submissions leave your hard drive for someone else’s desk. 

Pages don’t pile up because we force them. They pile up because we return—to the same room, at the same time, with the same quiet intention. 

Mondays, 9 a.m.–12 p.m.: Center for the Humanities. The door is open. Bring your purpose and project. Stay for community and coffee. Leave with motivation and momentum.