How to Write a Lot
Paul J. Silvia
Quotes
The only thing that a writer’s room needs, according to Stephen King, is “a door which you are willing to shut”.
Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write. People who write a lot make a writing schedule and stick to it.
When you find a nice place, stick to it. Habis come from repetition – doing the asme behaviors with the same stuff in the same place at the same times. Our brains settle in for writing faster when they detect that they are in the writing place at the writing time.
Beware the temptation to reward writing with not writing. We don’t reward a great day in the classroom by cancelling the next class.
Academic writers cannot get writer’s block. […] Saying that you can’t write because of writer’s block is merely saying that you can’t write because you aren’t writing. It’s trivial.
Generating text and revising text are distinct parts of writing – don’t do both at once. The goal of text generation is to throw confused, wide-eyed words on a page; the goal of text revision is to scrub the words clean so that they sound nice and can go out in public.
Let’s commit to using the active voice instead of the passive “things will change” and “it is going to be different”. I’ve been around long enough to know that it will not be different unless we choose to make it so. If we don’t shoehorn our writing into the normal work week, no one will do it for us.
Productive writing involves harnessing the power of habit, and habits come from repetition. Make a schedule and sit down to write during your scheduled time. You might spend the first few sessions groaning, gnashing your teeth, and draping yourself in sackcloth, but at least you’re not binge gnashing. […] And a few months later, once your writing schedule has ossified into a weekly routine, the notion of “wanting to write” will seem irrelevant.
Want less and do more.
On grant writing
When you write grant proposals, you want to compete on your home field. […] Grant proposals are funded relatively. It doesn’t matter if your proposal is good, or even great, in its own right – it must be better than most of the other proposals, and nearly all of them are pretty good. And once you realize that the best-known researchers in a field are always applying, you see why you need to compete on your home field.
If your home field isn’t especially fertile for funding, you can cultivate skills that make you an effective collaborator. Pepole with expertise in complicated, technical topics – especially methodological and statistical expertise – who can write quickly will attract more offers to collaborate on proposals than they can handle.