How To Write A Lot

(In a shameless crib of Mike Migurski‘’s “Blog all dog-eared pages” meme, I present “Blog all Sticky Tabbed Pages“.

Like Adam, I am somewhat mortified by marking up a book or dog-earing pages. Doubly so when the book in question isn’t mine. As most of the books I read are from one library or another, I have recently started using sticky tabs to mark pages for follow up.)

Paul Silvia’s book, How to Write a Lot was recently reviewed on Academic Productivity so I picked it up from the library at work. Silvia is a psychologist who studies emotion and in particular what makes things interesting so he seems like an ideal bloke to write a book about something that most academics find mind-numbingly dull.

I found a lot in it to like in How to Write a Lot. This, from pg16 would seem to be the central message:

As an academic [...] you’re a professional writer, just as you’re a professional teacher. Treat your scheduled writing time like your scheduled teaching time.

You’d never skip out on a class, so Silvia says that you should similarly schedule writing and stick to it.

When unproductive writers complain that they don’t have fast Internet access at home, I congratulate them on their sound judgement.

Silvia and Merlin would get along great. Minimise distractions. Firewall time to write.

There is a great picture in the book of Silvia’s writing table, which is little more than a sheet of fibre board on legs and hard plastic writing chair. He quotes Bill Stumpf, who worked for Herman Miller and co-designed the Aeron chair: “I’m not sure there is direct correlation between a piece of furniture and productivity.” So, stop complaining about your slow computer or bad chair. Sit down and write.

The corollary to Silvia’s main point is that writers who schedule time to write write more (duh) and have more creative ideas per day than “binge writers”. (Something tells me that the same could apply to industrial designers with respect to sketching.)

The second chapter, Specious Barriers to Writing a Lot identifies four specious barriers:

1. I don’t have time (schedule it!);
2. I need to do more analysis first (analysis counts as writing, see point 1;
3. I need a better computer/chair/desk/coffee mug (see Stumpf quote); and
4. I’m waiting for inspiration.

Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend to them than inspiration. (Silvia quoting Ralph Keyes’ The Writers Book of Hope (2003).)

Silvia is a huge fan of clear, structured, achievable, quantifiable goals, an idea familiar to GTDers. He provides examples, which are too extensive to quote here. He also provides his own list of writing priorities for career academics and a second list for post-grad students. The central thrust of the career academics list is that writing that is closer to completion has priority over writing that has not yet begun. So, he says, do that last edit on your accepted journal paper before starting the outline for your next paper. Geeks will identify with this FIFO strategy.

“But what if I have nothing to write?” It’s rare that professors (in the America sense) have nothing to write. To the contrary, most faculty I know have a dark, vast backlog of unpublished data. Collecting data is easy; writing about data is hard.

Damn straight.

There’s a great chapter on staring an Agraphia group. Agraphia is an actual psychological condition–the pathological loss of the ability to write–but Silvia says that this is how many people feel about writing anyway, so it’s a good name for a writing support group.

The goal of text generation to to throw confused wide-eyed words on a page; the goal of text revision is to scrub the words clean so they sound nice and make sense.

That is, to publish, you need to revise and to revise, first you must thrown words on a page. Merlin, quoting Anne Lamott, calls this the Shitty First Draft approach.

Silvia has a dry sense of humour that is used through the whole book. On setting goals, which he says are essential to writing):

Some academics are so enamoured of goals, initiativges and strategic plans that they become deans and provosts.

And on science-ese:

“If the water is dark,” goes a German aphorism, “the lake must be deep.” [...] I ought to have said, “Bodies of water characterized by minimal transparency are likely to possess significantly high values of the depth dimension (p < .05)”.

There’s a lot more in How to Write a Lot than I mentioned here. Silvia is well published and admits to being a reluctant writer. He says the power of scheduling writing time cannot be underestimated. To paraphrase:

How to write in one easy step and one hard step:

1. plan to write
2. write.

I was, and am, inspired.