I recommend spending at least 15 minutes a day in contact with your writing project. This offers frequent, brief, low-stress daily contact with your writing project which helps keep the project “write-sized.” It can include “ventilation,” which is spending 15 minutes writing about how you don’t want to work on your project at all.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I don’t ventilate. Instead, sometimes I change the subject. If I have a project that is stalled, I might write about something else completely, like folk dancing. A few times I’ve even started to write short stories. Interesting characters and situations, weak plots. I seem to stop writing before I get to any action scenes.
I need long walks and bicycle rides to get writing done. I put ideas together in my head, and then I transcribe them when I get home. That way, I have built up momentum before I sit down at the computer.
Blogging is a form of “write no matter what.” A significant proportion of my longer projects began as blog posts.
That is I rationalize my nonsense comments on blogs. It is “Write No Matter What!” (And I am not a particularly good writer and do need practice.)
One reason why do I continue to believe in college education is good for society is because it forces the students to read and write a lot on their own. And good writing is an important skill for any job.
As Scott Adams says (hehe, just to trigger the haters) all his good ideas happen when he is doing some mindless rote task like showering or driving a known commute.
Another one of God’s practical jokes that those are the least convenient situations to write it down.
Agree. I get a lot of ideas while walking the dogs. Adams dares to be wacky, which generates a lot of ideas, some of which are nuts.
Your comment is irrelevant. But anyway, Adams is just self-taught. He just doesn’t know the lingo because he’s one of only a handful of people doing what he does. The list is Cialdini, Charlie Munger, Adams….ummm….the guy with the facial scars….sort of?
By the way, bad ideas and good ideas may come from the same birthing process.
That seems like sound advice. A couple of years ago I attended a guest lecture by the screenwriter David N. Weiss at UMBC. His philosophy was that successfully completing any large project in which the end product was months or years away depended upon chopping it up into a series of small, manageable tasks, and so his writing process involved forcing himself to write at least one page of a screenplay per day, even if that page was garbage and he ultimately never used a word of it. I thought that made a great deal of sense.
I very much agree. It’s the same with programming. Writing a program to perform an elaborate task seems very daunting and I’d spend a lot of time just sitting and thinking about how to do it (and, of course, procrastinating). The more you break it up into simpler subtasks, the more straightforward it becomes and the more time you spend working instead of head-scratching.