How to Write a Lot Quotes

“Revising while you generate text is like drinking decaffeinated coffee in the early morning: noble idea, wrong time.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Never reward writing with not writing. Rewarding writing by abandoning your schedule is like rewarding yourself for quitting smoking by having a cigarette.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“You don't need special traits, special genes, or special motivation to write a lot. 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. Productive writing comes from harnessing the power of habit, and habits come from repetition

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― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Writing time is for writing, not for checking e-mail, reading the news, or browsing the latest issues of journals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to download articles while writing, but I can do that at the office. The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Do you need to "find time to teach"? Of course not---you have a teaching schedule, and you never miss it. [...] Finding time is a destructive way of thinking about writing. Never say this again. Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Equipment will never help you write a lot; only making a schedule and sticking to it will make you a productive writer.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Remember, you’re allocating time to write, not finding time to write.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Academic writers are bad writers for three reasons. First, they want to sound smart. “If the water is dark,” goes a German aphorism, “the lake must be deep.” Instead of using good words like smart, they choose sophisticated or erudite.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Writing is more fun when you have a partner, so find friends who share your research interests. Two authors can write faster, can complement expertise, can help with hard decisions, and understand context of decisions made.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Binge writers spend more time feeling guilty and anxious about not writing than schedule followers spend writing.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Put your "inner writer" back on its leash and give it a chew toy.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“The goal of text generation is to throw confused, wide-eyed words on a page; the goal of text revision is to scrub the rods clean so that they sound nice and can go out in public.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Writing is more than typing words: Any action that is instrumental in completing a writing project counts as writing.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“People who claim that they’re “not the scheduling kind of person” are masterly schedulers at other times: They always teach at the same time, go to bed at the same time, watch their favorite TV shows at the same time, and so on.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“To write a lot, you should rethink your mental models of rejection and publication. Rejections are like a sales tax on publications: The more papers you publish, the more rejections you receive.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Decide what you want to do," wrote William Zinsser. "Then decide to do it. Then do it" (Zinsser, 2001, p. 285).”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Vanity is another reason. Academic writers want to sound smart.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Psychologists know that people use essentialist, “I’m not that kind of” explanations when they don’t want to change (Jellison, 1993).”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Serious writers write, inspired or not.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Our books, our articles, our ideas are important, without a doubt—but we are more than writers, so we should protect our real-world time just as we protect our scheduled writing time. Spend your leisure time hanging out, finding new trails, building canoes, agitating against The System, perfecting your apple fritter recipe, or holding a staring contest with your inscrutable cat. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you don’t spend your free time writing—there’s time during the work week for that.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic 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.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“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.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend to them than inspiration”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“A professor's decks are never clear: there will always be barnacles to scrape, cannons to polish, and scurvy-stricken grad students to free from the brig.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Writing a book is like injecting anabolic steroids: it if doesn't kill you, it'll make you stronger and hairier.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Writing books hurts like no other kind of writing.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Writing involves many [acts] tasks, not just generating text”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“(I used to hang a “Do Not Disturb” sign on my office door, but people interpreted this as “His door is closed, but he wants me to know he’s in there. I’ll knock.”) Be”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“When confronted with their fruitless ways, binge writers often proffer a self-defeating dispositional attribution: "I'm just not the kind of person who's good at making a schedule and sticking to it." This is nonsense, of course. People like dispositional explanations when they don't want to change [...]”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing