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March 25 - April 2, 2022
don’t write in the evenings, on weekends, or during long stretches of the summer; I keep track of my writing;
Working on this book next to a shelf labeled “Large Print HORROR” was both apt and inspiring.
The only thing that a writer’s room needs, according to Stephen King (2000), is “a door which you are willing to shut” (p. 155).
Because thinking of ideas is easier and faster than writing about those ideas, most professors have writing backlogs.
Writing is a skill, not a gift. No one is born a great writer, let alone a great academic writer.
In the humanities, you often need to publish a book to get tenure, so you would think that one of the many tenured, book-writing professors in grad school would have offered a class on how to do this—perhaps called “How to Do the One Thing That Determines Whether You Get Fired.”
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.
Don’t mistake people with a lot of publications for people with a lot of good ideas.
When they talk about writing, professors and graduate students usually sound thwarted. They want to tackle their article or get to their book, but some big and stubborn barrier is holding them back.
It’s reassuring to believe that circumstances are against us and that we would write more if only our weekly schedule had more big chunks of open time.
Do we need to “find time to teach?” Nope—we have a teaching schedule, and we don’t fail to show up for our classes.
Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write.
If you have a friend who would like to sit and write with you in a quiet room every Friday from 9:00 a.m. to noon, perhaps the two of you could prove that misery does love company.
For now, think of writing as a class that you teach. Most classes are around 3 to 6 hours each week, so schedule 4 hours for your “writing class” during the normal work week.
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.
Having kids put an end to that idyllic writing schedule, so I shifted to writing from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. at home every weekday—sticking to that schedule for a few years merits a barbed wire neck tattoo.
Instead of scheduled writing, most academics use a stressful and inefficient strategy called binge writing (Kellogg, 1994).
And then the binge-writing cycle begins anew—more waiting, more worry, more eyebrow-singeing. Binge writers spend more time feeling guilty about not writing than schedule-followers spend writing.
There are some options you could consider—irrational hope, cussed stubbornness, or intensive hypnotherapy that transforms you into the kind of person who finds writing fun and easy—but, for most of us, making a writing schedule and sticking to it is our best option.
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).
In time, you’ll find yourself committing unthinkable academic heresies. You’ll submit grant proposals early; you’ll revise and resubmit manuscripts quickly; and, one day, you’ll say something indelicate when your pal in the department says, “This semester is killing me—I can’t wait for the summer so I can finally do some writing.”
But binge writers are also binge readers and binge statisticians. 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.
Even now, I’m writing this book on a “state-contract special” that is so old that it occasionally scowls and shakes its fist at me from its porch rocker.
only making a schedule and sticking to it will make us productive writers.
Inspiration is like a slot machine. The problem isn’t that inspiration never strikes, it’s that inspiration strikes erratically and unpredictably.
Writing breeds more good ideas for writing.
Successful professional writers, regardless of whether they’re writing novels, nonfiction, poetry, or drama are prolific because they write regularly—usually daily. 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). One might say that they make a schedule and stick to it.
When you use a weekly writing schedule, you stop seeing some weeks as lost causes. The first week of class? Follow your writing schedule. The last week of class? Writing schedule.
academics should schedule time for writing much like we schedule time for teaching and tackle writing’s many tasks during that time.
You’re both the teacher and the student, so it will probably be your fault if the end-of-semester teaching evaluations are hostile.
Not surprisingly, around two thirds of adults are morning people (e.g., Carrier, Monk, Buysse, & Kupfer, 1997), so Perry’s writers are respecting their brains.
Writing every weekday is nice, but the best writing schedule is the one you can stick to consistently.
Make a big list of everything you’d like to write—your project goals—in the next year or two. These goals will range from definitely to fantasy, but don’t judge them just yet.
Once you have all your writing goals in one place, it’s time to pick one and get writing.
At the start of your writing period, after shooing the bats away, take a couple moments to think about what you want to accomplish that day.
Day-level goals should be concrete, the kind of goals that you can judge if you meet them. Goals starting with phrases like work on, get started, or think about are too mushy. Consider goals with obvious end-points, like completing a fixed unit of writing.
Those of us who aren’t writing romantic political novels might consider 50 to 200 words an hour. I’m happy if I can get one great sentence.
Write at least 200 words. Print the first draft I finished yesterday, edit it, and finish the second section. Write the first two paragraphs of the Discussion. Add missing references and then reconcile the citations and references. Read a collaborator’s draft, give comments on it, and e-mail it back. Make an outline for my next journal article. Finish the Specific Aims page. Read and take notes on three background articles. Read the reviewers’ comments on my paper and make a list of things to revise. Correct the page proofs and submit them. Read some sample grant proposals to get some tips.
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Self-monitoring—keeping tabs on your own behavior—is one of the oldest and best ways of changing behavior (Korotitsch & Nelson-Gray, 1999).
But beware the temptation to reward writing with not writing. We don’t reward a great day in the classroom by canceling the next class;
When people have several pressing goals, you often see what motivation scientists call behavioral chatter (Atkinson & Birch, 1970)—people flit from goal to goal, dabbling and switching without making much progress on any particular one.
When people tell me they have writer’s block, I ask, “What on earth are you trying to write?” Academic writers cannot get writer’s block.
Writer’s block is nothing more than the behavior of not writing.
Struggling writers who waited until they “felt like it,” in contrast, wrote almost nothing.
Just as aliens abduct only people who believe in alien abductions, writer’s block afflicts only writers who believe in it.
how our dissertation is going so badly that we suspect that it’s planning to break up with us.
History may be written by the victors, but it’s revised by historians who didn’t meet their writing goal.
But when we write about our ideas, something goes awry from the brain to the page—some dark alchemy transforms our glittering ideas into dull, leaden words.
On Writing Well (Zinsser, 2006), Sin and Syntax (Hale, 2013), and The Practical Stylist (Baker, 1969) are good places to start.
