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October 26 - November 11, 2022
Writing productively is about actions that you aren’t doing but could easily do: making a writing schedule, setting clear goals, keeping track of your work, rewarding yourself, and building good habits.
How to Write a Lot views writing as a set of concrete behaviors, such as (a) scheduling time to write; (b) sitting on a chair, bench, stool, ottoman, toilet, or patch of grass during the scheduled time; and (c) slapping your flippers against the keyboard to generate paragraphs. Let everyone else procrastinate, daydream, and complain—spend your time sitting down and flapping your flippers.
Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write. People who write a lot make a writing schedule and stick to it.
The key is the habit—the week-in, week-out regularity—not the number of days, the number of hours, or the time of day.
Binge writers spend more time feeling guilty about not writing than schedule-followers spend writing.
After researching the work habits of successful writers, Ralph Keyes (2003) noted that “the simple fact of sitting down to write day after day is what makes writers productive” (p. 49).
The bad habits that keep them from getting down to writing also keep them from doing the prewriting (Kellogg, 1994)—the reading, outlining, organizing, brainstorming, planning, and number-crunching necessary for typing words.
Writing is more than typing words. For me, writing’s endpoint is sending an article to a journal, a book to a publisher, or a grant proposal to a funding agency. Any activity that gets me closer to that goal counts as writing.
As Keyes (2003) put it, “Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend to them than inspiration” (p. 49).
academics should schedule time for writing much like we schedule time for teaching and tackle writing’s many tasks during that time.
Day-level goals should be concrete, the kind of goals that you can judge if you meet them.
Self-monitoring—keeping tabs on your own behavior—is one of the oldest and best ways of changing behavior (Korotitsch & Nelson-Gray, 1999).
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1945) once quipped that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (p. 69).
On Writing Well (Zinsser, 2006), Sin and Syntax (Hale, 2013), and The Practical Stylist (Baker, 1969) are good places to start.
Perfectionism is paralyzing.
Instead of “writing an article,” we should always “write an article for . . .”
The Results section is where you display and describe your findings. Your statistics should be like paintings in a museum hallway that readers walk through—each major piece gets plenty of space and some handy interpretive text. Order, emphasis, and selectivity are important.
When describing your findings, use a remind-describe-explain format. At the start of a segment, remind readers of your hypothesis, describe the outcome of the analysis, and then briefly explain what it means.
For scholarly books, I particularly recommend Getting It Published (Germano, 2016) and Developmental Editing (Norton, 2009).
You don’t need special traits, special genes, or special motivation to write a lot. And you don’t need to want to write—people rarely feel like doing unpleasant tasks that lack deadlines—so don’t wait until you feel like it. Make a writing schedule and show up for it. Want less and do more.
“Decide what you want to do,” wrote Zinsser (2006), “then decide to do it. Then do it” (p. 280).
