Why is grant writing no fun (compared to paper writing)?

• Not a document that has any long-term value to society
  Success rates are low so it is rational to expect your grant will be rejected. It’s hard to motivate yourself to write material that’s likely to go nowhere. Papers can get resubmitted and eventually accepted. Grants typically can’t. It is quite motivating to be writing a paper with knowledge that it will be out there for a community to read and get value from.

• No resubmission
  EPSRC has a no resubmission policy. EU allows resubmission, but in practice a consortium will break up and not have stamina for many resubmissions. Also the field and the funder’s requirements change, so sometimes resubmissions require substantial new work (and scrapping old work). Writing a paper is more motivating because your effort will end up going somewhere, even if not this time.

• Constant rewriting You get one shot and anyone can shoot you down for a tiny thing. Therefore you really have to get opinions from mock reviewers to try to pre-empt the problems reviewers may raise, and you have to address every comment you get from a reader/mock reviewer during your writing, which means constant rewriting. Perfectionism is very time consuming. Papers are more relaxed. If you have a solid work it should make it. It’s unlikely to get thrown out for some minor nitpick by a reviewer, but a grant will. Even if your paper does get unreasonably rejected, you easily and quickly find a new good venue. Not so for grants.

• Premature detailed planning Detailed planning makes sense when funds are promised. It’s a waste of time to make a detailed plan for a project that has e.g. 10 or 20% chance of happening. 

• Not so much actual research content Apart from your main research idea you spend a lot of time on details like costs of equipment, every trip you will make, salaries, detailed timeplan, impact activities. Papers in contrast are all about research.

• Other people

  (a) You need letters of support from companies - I have found these hard to get. Even when someone agrees to give a letter it can take a long time to get it. (b) Most grants I have written relied on other academic collaborators (those that didn't were easier). In general it is good to have other people to work with, but sometimes it has been hard to get collaborators on board for grants, sometimes they have been hard to convince, and even during writing they may not be very committed. Of course there can be good collaboration experiences - it's mixed, but it's certainly easier to do something on your own than with someone weakly committed.
  (c) You need to jump through some hoops in your uni. You need to work out costs from research finance. All of this can leave you waiting for other people, sometimes for a long time, which can interrupt your momentum.

• Space constraints The space requirements are severe in an EPSRC grant. There are a lot of mandatory sections: National importance, risks, management, academic beneficiaries, hypotheses/objectives. Miss any section and someone will shoot you down. Little space is left to explain your idea. Papers have a page limit too but you are more free in what bits you can skip, and how you manage the space. Lack of space means lots of time spent in compressing paragraphs; rewriting to try to fit the idea in less space. I would call it wordsmithing. It's like some sculptor who keeps being told to make some change to his sculpture, to add something, but he has a fixed limit on the material weight of the finished sculpture, so any addition requires reworking of other parts. It's a big time cost.

• Artificial requirements Bureaucrats make up strategies and priorities for their funding. You need to pander to them, and read their nonsense and parrot it. (I don’t believe anyone can confidently know what the next big thing will be. It is ridiculous to try to manage national or European research development top down and expect that to bring any benefit over bottom up.) Furthermore when you actually read what these agencies write and see what vacuous nonsense it is... let me give an example:

Here is a funding body's terminology:  “the Shaping Capability exercise”

 

Check out this paragraph. I don’t know if I’ve ever had to deal with something so vacuous. I mean you could say the same about any research area, in any discipline, in any country. Because it doesn’t really commit to anything specific.

 

“ICT Strategy for Balancing Capability

Balancing capability is one of three EPSRC core strategies and is key to achieving the EPSRC delivery plan goals and vision. The ICT Theme adopts a holistic approach that considers the overall funding landscape and the multiple interconnections between research areas that form the ICT portfolio. Our aim is to reach a balance in the portfolio that will maintain key UK capabilities while providing space for new areas to emerge. Our strategy is formed and delivered through specific positions on research areas, the development of which is detailed in the Theme’s Our Approach page and a refresh of the cross-ICT priorities."

 

“reach a balance”

 

Is that actually meaningful?

You can balance a scale. That’s clear.

But apply "balance" to anything else, with no explanation...

What does it mean?

Whatever happens, you could afterwards say “we achieved a balance that maintains key UK capabilities while providing space for new areas to emerge.”

I guess Yes Minister covered this ground pretty well.