How to write a lot– in theory
January 29, 2008 1:12 pmI’m in the process of updating/upgrading my RSS feeds on blogs and my own blog spaces– look for an alert to a new blog address soon– and through this process, I stumbled across an entry on Nels “A Delicate Boy” Highberg’s blog (and he cites a much longer and detailed entry at the pseudo-anonymous blogger’s “New Kid on the Hallway” site) about a book called How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J. Silvia. I think both of these other blogs do a much better job than I can in terms of a review/explanation, particularly NKH.
What I take from these reviews is that Silvia is trying to make two basic points. First, write every day/often/just do it/etc. Second, put writing time into your schedule, and he (apparently) argues that academics ought to schedule the time of their writing just like they would schedule the time of their teaching. No excuses.
Now, this is all fine and good advice, it’s one of the main lessons I learned as a writer over the years, it’s advice I give my grad students working on projects, and it’s advice I have been trying to follow myself in my own writing this last year. But I’ve struggled lately to follow this advice, and it makes me think about it a bit. In the opening pages Style, Lessons in Clarity and Grace, one of my favorite books on writing style (and writing advice of a sort, I suppose), Joseph Williams kind of mocks this sort of simplistic advice. He says something like “Telling me that I need to ‘be clear’” (and here Williams is making a not so veiled reference to Strunk and White’s famous advice book) “is like telling me to hit the ball squarely. I know that. What I need to know is how.”
It also seems to me that the advice on scheduling writing time and sticking to it no matter what is the sort of advice that either a) works in theory better than in practice, and/or b) is advice that comes from someone who doesn’t teach courses that involve a lot of time spent grading/responding to student writing. Interestingly enough, b) might very well be correct: Silvia is a Psychology professor, and he might not have to spend as much time reading and commenting on student writing. Time and the teaching of writing expands and contracts. The time I would have spent this morning writing I spent instead on commenting on short student projects– and thank God I’m just teaching one class (the other half of sabbatical lite is perhaps kicking in) and these were short essays. When I’m teaching a full load next year, this issue will be even more significant, though conversely, I hopefully won’t have to spend as much time with service/administrative stuff, which also has a way of expanding and contracting.
Anyway, then there is also the “bags of shit er, timesuck” that drop from the sky on academics everywhere: the request from some administrator for a detailed report that is due in two days, the brouhahas that get stirred up from nowhere and that demand immediate and exquisite attention, the emergency a student advisee has in terms of some kind of graduation audit or fee. Not to mention life in general.
And then, then there is also the distraction of other writing that takes away from “THE WRITING,” things like, well, this blog post.
Anyway, none of this is to discount Silvia’s advice. I am sure it is sound.
And be sure to eat write er right, don’t drink too much, get plenty of exercise, get plenty of sleep, spend quality time with your family and friends, read good books, watch good movies, recycle. And just write.
Categories: Sabbatical Lite, BAWS, Writing, Scholarship
3 Responses to “How to write a lot-- in theory”
Right on, Steve. And on one of the things that such advice always leaves out is that it makes time for sitting down to write, but not the gestation time that I find important. I need to focus drive time in the car, walking between class, and/or other such non-writing times to think about my topic in between writing sessions. Otherwise, I just am not that productive sitting at the computer. In fact, some of my best ideas about a writing project come when I am away from the computer doing something else. It’s the old Eureka principle.
So for me–and this is advice I have given to grad students about their dissertations–it’s really about focused attention, some of which happens at the computer, but some must happen at other times as well.
Just to be fair to Silvia though: I do think the advice of writing every day and scheduling your writing is right. I guess I would just alter/expand it in two different ways:
* Write every day, but be flexible/open-minded as to how and when you fit writing into your schedule. I suppose it kind of depends on how your life works, but mine is such that I can’t rigidly schedule much of anything beyond a teaching schedule, and since I’ve been doing a lot of teaching online as of late, I can’t even do that very well.
One of the lessons I learned indirectly from my MFA advisor, Lee Smith, was to take advantage of writing whenever and wherever you can. The story she always used to tell was she would write while she was watching her kids’ little league games or whatever. So while I have my preferences (in the morning and at my desk in my home office), I try to write whenever and wherever I can (laptops in coffee shops, during department meetings, in my school office during office hours, etc.).
* This might sound goofy, but I think it is really a good idea– especially when working on a large project– to do something to at least “touch” that project every day. When I was working on my diss, I found that if I did as little as five or ten minutes worth of writing/thinking about it for four or so days in a row, then I could spend some quality time with it on the fifth day or so and pretty much pick up where I left off last time. On the other hand, if I completely blew off my diss for four so so days in a row– I mean not even opening the word processing file or shuffling through the photocopies of articles I needed to read for it– it took me hours to even figure out where the heck I was with the thing on that fifth day.
Since I’m on sabbatical, I read Silvia’s book, too, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how my life will change when I return to full-time teaching (right now it’s easy to write at the same time every day, and I dread next year’s two-hour commutes and eight-hour days on campus).
But I get the feeling Charlie, there, who like me needs to gestate, hasn’t read the book himself (am I right, Charlie?). Silvia provides good empirical evidence (usually citing Boice, a much better author whose guides I find more helpful) that when one writes every day, one is actually -more- likely to have eureka moments at the computer, and gestates much more of the day. Silvia also doesn’t limit his scheduled time to write to merely writing, which I like; he acknowledges that the daily hour is often well-spent reading, writing free-style in a journal, etc. And I think we can all agree that when one gets those bursts of inspiration away from the desk, one must somehow grab a pen and just scribble down what you can. (I get a lot of ah-hah moments in the classroom, alas! I think I’ve lost a few inspirations in the hallway between classrooms.)
Steven and I seem to have in common a tendency to put teaching duties ahead of writing duties, because getting papers back a day sooner seems more pressing and important than daily writing. I don’t expect I’ll change, but Silvia’s likely correct that we’re just plain wrong to think our daily teaching emergencies are more important than writing. After all, I don’t tell my students to call me at home at 1 a.m., because sleeping is non-negotiable time which I don’t allow anyone to interrupt. If I were really dedicated to doing scholarship as much as teaching, I suspect I would see my hour a day of writing as just as non-negotiable as my lovely sleeping time.
Last, good call, Steven!, on the fifteen minutes a day! My favorite writing-advice book even after all these years is still _Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day_, by Joan Bolker. So true!
Care to comment?