{"id":976,"date":"2012-04-11T00:43:03","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T06:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/?p=976"},"modified":"2012-04-11T18:42:14","modified_gmt":"2012-04-12T00:42:14","slug":"on-writing-some-anecdotal-observations-in-no-particular-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/11\/on-writing-some-anecdotal-observations-in-no-particular-order\/","title":{"rendered":"on writing: some anecdotal observations, in no particular order"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Early on in graduate school, I invested in the book &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/How-Write-Lot-Practical-Productive\/dp\/1591477433\">How to Write a Lot<\/a>&#8220;. I enjoyed reading it&#8211;mostly because I (mistakenly) enjoyed thinking to myself, &#8220;hey, I bet as soon as I finish this book, I&#8217;m going to start being super productive!&#8221; But I can save you the $9 and tell you there&#8217;s really only one take-home point: schedule writing like any other activity, and stick to your schedule no matter what. Though, having said that, I don&#8217;t really do that myself. I find I tend to write about 20 hours a week on average. On a very good day, I manage to get a couple of thousand words written, but much more often, I get 200 words written that I then proceed to rewrite furiously and finally trash in frustration. But it all adds up in the long run I guess.<\/li>\n<li>Some people are good at writing one thing at a time; they can sit down for a week and crank out a solid draft of a paper without every looking sideways at another project. Personally, unless I have a looming deadline (and I mean a <em>real<\/em> deadline&#8211;more on that below), I find that impossible to do; my general tendency is to work on one writing project for an hour or two, and then switch to something else. Otherwise I pretty much lose my mind. I also find it helps to reward myself&#8211;i.e., I&#8217;ll work on something I really don&#8217;t want to do for an hour, and then <del>play video games for a while<\/del> switch to writing something more pleasant.<\/li>\n<li>I can rarely get any &#8216;real&#8217; writing (i.e., stuff that leads to publications) done after around 6 pm; late mornings (i.e., right after I wake up) are usually my most productive writing time. And I generally only write for fun (blogging, writing fiction, etc.) after 9 pm. There are exceptions, but by and large that&#8217;s my system.<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t write many drafts. I don&#8217;t mean that I never <em>revise<\/em> papers, because I do&#8211;obsessively. But I don&#8217;t sit down thinking &#8220;I&#8217;m going to write a very rough draft, and then I&#8217;ll go back and clean up the language.&#8221; I sit down thinking &#8220;I&#8217;m going to write a perfect paper the first time around,&#8221; and then I very slowly crank out a draft that&#8217;s remarkably far from being perfect. I suspect the former approach is actually the more efficient one, but I can&#8217;t bring myself to do it. I hate seeing malformed sentences on the page, even if I know I&#8217;m only going to delete them later. It always amazes and impresses me when I get Word documents from collaborators with titles like &#8220;AmazingNatureSubmissionVersion18&#8221;. I just give my documents all the title &#8220;paper_draft&#8221;. There might be a V2 or a V3, but there will never, ever be a V18.<\/li>\n<li>Papers are not meant to be written linearly. I don&#8217;t know anyone who starts with the Introduction, then does the Methods and Results, and then finishes with the Discussion. Personally I don&#8217;t even write papers one section at a time. I usually start out by frantically writing down ideas as they pop into my head, and jumping around the document as I think of other things I want to say. I frequently write half a sentence down and then finish it with a bunch of question marks (like so: ???) to indicate I need to come back later and patch it up. Incidentally, this is also why I&#8217;m terrified to ever show anyone any of my unfinished paper drafts: an unsuspecting reader would surely come away thinking I suffer from a serious thought disorder. (I suppose they might be right.)<\/li>\n<li>Okay, that last point is not entirely true. I don&#8217;t write papers <em>completely<\/em> haphazardly; I do tend to write Methods and Results before Intro and Discussion. I gather that this is a pretty common approach. On the rare occasions when I&#8217;ve started writing the Introduction first, I&#8217;ve invariably ended up having to completely rewrite it, because it usually turns out the results aren&#8217;t actually what I thought they were.<\/li>\n<li>My sense is that most academics get more comfortable writing as time goes on. Relatively few grad students have the perseverance to rapidly crank out publication-worthy papers from day 1 (I was definitely not one of them). I don&#8217;t think this is just a matter of practice; I suspect part of it is a natural maturation process. People generally <a href=\"http:\/\/psycnet.apa.org\/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&amp;uid=2006-00818-001\">get more conscientious<\/a> as they age; it stands to reason that writing (as an activity most people find unpleasant) should get easier too. I&#8217;m better at motivating myself to write papers now, but I&#8217;m also much better about doing the dishes and laundry&#8211;and I&#8217;m pretty sure that&#8217;s not because practice makes dishwashing perfect.<\/li>\n<li>When I started grad school, I was pretty sure I&#8217;d never publish anything, let alone graduate, because I&#8217;d never handed in a paper as an undergraduate that wasn&#8217;t written at the last minute, whereas in academia, there are virtually no hard deadlines (see below). I&#8217;m not sure exactly what changed. I&#8217;m still continually surprised every time something I wrote gets published. And I often catch myself telling myself, &#8220;hey, self, how the hell did you ever manage to pay attention long enough to write 5,000 words?&#8221; And then I reply to myself, &#8220;well, self, since you ask, I took a lot of stimulants.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>I pace around a lot when I write. <em>A lot<\/em>. To the point where my labmates&#8211;who are all uncommonly nice people&#8211;start shooting death glares my way. It&#8217;s a heritable tendency, I guess (the pacing, not the death glare attraction); my father also used to pace obsessively. I&#8217;m not sure what the biological explanation for it is. My best guess is it&#8217;s an arousal-mediated effect: I can think pretty well when I&#8217;m around other people, or when I&#8217;m in motion, but if I&#8217;m sitting at a desk and I don&#8217;t already know exactly what I want to say, I can&#8217;t get anything done. I generally pace around the lab or house for a while figuring out what I want to say, and then I sit down and write until I&#8217;ve forgotten what I want to say, or decide I didn&#8217;t really want to say that after all. In practice this usually works out to 10 minutes of pacing for every 5 minutes of writing. I envy people who can just sit down and calmly write for two or three hours without interruption (though I don&#8217;t think there are that many of them). At the same time, I&#8217;m pretty sure I burn a lot of calories this way.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that I much prefer writing grant proposals to writing papers&#8211;to the point where I actually\u00c2\u00a0<em>enjoy<\/em> writing grant proposals. I suspect the main reason for this is that grant proposals have a kind of openness that papers don&#8217;t; with a paper, you&#8217;re constrained to telling the story the data actually support, whereas a grant proposal is as good as your vision of what&#8217;s possible (okay, and plausible). A second part of it is probably the novelty of discovery: once you conduct your analyses, all that&#8217;s left is to tell other people what you found, which (to me) isn&#8217;t so exciting. I mean, I already think I know what&#8217;s going on; what do I care if <em>you<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0know? Whereas when writing a grant, a big part of the appeal for me is that I could actually go out and discover new stuff&#8211;just as long as I can convince someone to give me some money first.<\/li>\n<li>At a a departmental seminar attended by about 30 people, I once heard a student express concern about an in-progress review article that he and several of the other people at the seminar were collaboratively working on. The concern was that if all of the collaborators couldn&#8217;t agree on what was going to go in the paper (and they didn&#8217;t seem to be able to at that point), the paper wouldn&#8217;t get written in time to make the rapidly approaching deadline dictated by the journal editor. A senior and very brilliant professor responded to the student&#8217;s concern by pointing out that this couldn&#8217;t possibly be a real problem seeing as in reality there is actually no such thing as a hard writing deadline. This observation didn&#8217;t go over so well with some of the other senior professors, who weren&#8217;t thrilled that their students were being handed the key to the kingdom of academic procrastination so early in their careers. But it was true, of course: with the major exception of grant proposals (<em>EDIT: and as Garrett points out in the comments below, conference publications in disciplines like Computer Science)<\/em>, most of the things academics write (journal articles, reviews, commentaries, book chapters, etc.) operate on a very flexible schedule.\u00c2\u00a0Usually when someone asks you to write something for them, there is some vague mention somewhere of some theoretical deadline, which is typically a date that seems so amazingly far off into the future that you wonder if you&#8217;ll even be the same person when it rolls around. And then, much to your surprise, the deadline rolls around and you realize that you must in fact really <em>be<\/em>a different person, because you don&#8217;t seem to have any real desire to work on this thing you signed up for, and instead of writing it, why don&#8217;t you just ask the editor for an extension while you go rustle up some motivation. So you send a polite email, and the editor grudgingly says, &#8220;well, hmm, okay, you can have another two weeks,&#8221; to which you smile and nod sagely, and then, two weeks later, you send another similarly worded but even more obsequious email that starts with the words &#8220;so, about that extension&#8230;&#8221;\n<p>The basic point here is that there&#8217;s an interesting dilemma: even though there rarely <em>are<\/em> any strict writing deadlines, it&#8217;s to almost everyone&#8217;s benefit to pretend they exist. If I ever find out that the <em>true<\/em> deadline (insofar as such a thing exists) for the chapter I&#8217;m working on right now is 6 months from now and not 3 months ago (which is what they told me), I&#8217;ll probably relax and stop working on it for, say, the next 5 and a half months. I sometimes think that the most productive academics are the ones who are just really really good at repeatedly lying to themselves.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m a big believer in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.structuredprocrastination.com\/\">structured procrastination<\/a> when it comes to writing. I try to always have a really unpleasant but not-so-important task in the background, which then forces me to work on only-slightly-unpleasant-but-often-more-important tasks. Except it often turns out that the unpleasant-but-no-so-important task is actually an unpleasant-but-really-important task after all, and then I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night thinking of all the ways I&#8217;ve screwed myself over. No, just kidding. I just bitch about it to my wife for a while and then drown my sorrows in an extra helping of ice cream.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m really, really, bad at restarting projects I&#8217;ve put on the back burner for a while. Right now there are 3 or 4 papers I&#8217;ve been working on on-and-off for 3 or 4 years, and every time I pick them up, I write a couple of hundred words and then put them away for a couple of months. I guess what I&#8217;m saying is that if you ever have the misfortune of collaborating on a paper with me, you should make sure to nag me several times a week until I get so fed up with you I sit down and write the damn paper. Otherwise it may never see the light of day.<\/li>\n<li>I like writing <a href=\"http:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/tag\/fiction\">fiction<\/a> in my spare time. I also occasionally write <a href=\"http:\/\/sadboneinstitute.bandcamp.com\">whiny songs<\/a>. I&#8217;m pretty terrible at both of these things, but I enjoy them, and I&#8217;m told (though I don&#8217;t believe it for a second) that that&#8217;s the important thing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Early on in graduate school, I invested in the book &#8220;How to Write a Lot&#8220;. I enjoyed reading it&#8211;mostly because I (mistakenly) enjoyed thinking to myself, &#8220;hey, I bet as soon as I finish this book, I&#8217;m going to start being super productive!&#8221; But I can save you the $9 and tell you there&#8217;s really &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/11\/on-writing-some-anecdotal-observations-in-no-particular-order\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">on writing: some anecdotal observations, in no particular order<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21,3],"tags":[693,484,584,585,254],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEZxN-fK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=976"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":991,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions\/991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}