How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (APA LifeTools Series)

by Paul J. Silvia

Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write. People who write a lot make a writing schedule and stick to it.

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.

commitments. 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. It doesn’t matter if you pick one day a week or all five weekdays—just choose regular times, chisel them into the granite of your weekly calendar, and write during those times.

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. For the past few years, I write on campus after dropping the kids off at school, roughly from 7:50 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.

Binge writers spend more time feeling guilty about not writing than schedule-followers spend writing.

If you allot 4 hours a week for writing, you will be astounded at how much you will write in a single semester. 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.

My laser printer is now old enough to run for a city council seat.

Scholars wrote lots of books—big, fascinating, profound, important books—before digital “productivity tools” were invented. Indeed, one wonders if writing was easier for them. They could simply write, happily hunting-and-pecking away without the itchy suspicion that someone, somewhere, just said something on the Internet.

Unproductive writers often bemoan the lack of “their own space” to write. Perhaps parenthood has shifted my standards, but any space where stuffed animals are unlikely to hit the back of my head will suffice.