Right after you’ve written a paragraph or drawn a picture, the struggle to get it right is still fresh in your mind. You can still remember the effort of putting every word and line on the page and you see the moves you are least sure of most clearly. They stand out. When drawing, you are looking at the picture from the same point of view that you were looking at the object and, since you probably didn’t get it perfectly right, its perspective seems distorted, wrong. When writing, you still have the same criticial reader in mind, trying to address exactly their difficulty, and it is painfully clear that you’ve only partially succeeded. Before you evaluate it, put the work away for a few hours, even a few days. Then look at it with fresh eyes.

Or maybe it’s your hands that need to relax. You need to get the feeling of making something out of your body so you can decide what you’ve made. Often, I find the hand looks fine the next day, perhaps just from a slightly different perspective. The paragraph is clear and strong, but makes a slightly different point in a slightly different way. Sure, ideally, I’d want to express my intention exactly, but the important thing is that my lines, my words, aren’t nearly as messy as I thought when I put the task away. You have to remember to enjoy what you have accomplished.

Just a quick one today. I spent the morning making sure my audio equipment was working for a lecture capture I was doing and it ended up taking up my writing time. As I said on Monday, under ordinary circumstances I would just let it go and not write at all today. But the whole point of this exercise (for me) is to loosen things up a bit. So I’m just going to jot down the little idea I had thought to write about. I may expand tomorrow.

In order to develop my empathy for people who are learning how to write effectively, I’ve given myself two things I’m not good at to do with my hands on a regular basis. I’m composing a short piece of music on the piano and practicing it, and I’m drawing a picture of my hand in various positions. I spend only a few minutes every day on each and, in addition to the little improvements I’m making, it is developing my sense of the difficulty people have when training their skills. Like I say, I’ll write some more about this later, but, today, I just want to say that it’s a good idea to work at a manual skill every day. It’s good, I think, for the brain too.

There must be some science that supports this somewhere. But for now I’m happy to assert it on the basis of a hunch.

One very popular approach to writing travels under the somewhat unattractive banner “shitty first drafts”. Jonathan Mayhew and I have tried to push back on it a little, but it has undeniable appeal for many students and scholars.

The idea is simply not to worry about quality in the early stages of a writing project. Instead, just set your mind to filling up pages with words and resolve to revise them later. Good writing, on this approach, emerges from editing bad writing. Jonathan and I object to this ethos because it doesn’t afford you the pleasure of writing a good sentence or a clear paragraph in a single moment. If you’re always writing “shitty” drafts and then editing them into shape, you never feel the joy that comes from putting a strong sentence together with your own hands, composing a solid a paragraph in your own mind. It really does mean you’ll be spending most of your time suffering through the badness of your writing as you edit it.

Anne Lamott, who is often credited with the idea, but of course did not invent it and should not be blamed for it, would probably object to my caricature of it. But it’s the caricature I’ against, not the very sensible idea of sometimes just letting your sentences flow out of you. This experiment of writing light, breezy prose every day can be taken as an example and, in fact, it could be argued that I recommend writing “shittily” for ten out the twenty-seven minutes it should ideally take you to compose a paragraph. My point, however, is that if you do this often then even your most careless sentences will feel like they mean something, like you are writing deliberately to say something you know. You’ll feel the (growing) confidence of your prose in every line.

Don’t denigrate your first efforts just to give yourself the freedom to write. Resolve to write as well as you can on a regular basis. You’ll get better at it.

I advise students and scholars to do their writing in the morning. If you can find between half an hour and three hours every weekday morning two write between one and six paragraphs, you’ve got a good basis to build a healthy writing habit. It occurred to me the other day that, by following this advice, I am these days also writing always in my fasting window. As I mentioned on Friday, I’m trying “intermittent fasting” and I now only eat between noon and eight in the evening.

This idea of limiting certain activities to particular times of day seems sound to me. For one thing, it takes a lot of the guilt out of not writing — and not fasting, i.e., eating. When you’re trying to get a piece of writing (a paper or whole dissertation) finished, you have a tendency to think of every hour that you don’t spend writing as a betrayal. Likewise, when you’re trying to lose weight, you start thinking of every bite as cheating. But this strategy of “intermittent” fasting or writing let’s you control your conscience simply by looking at the clock. Are you not writing? Did you just have a snack? Well, is it after noon? If so, don’t worry about it.

Consider writing plans that don’t quite turn out like you had hoped. If you had planned to write between, say, 8:00 and 10:00 and suddenly discover that it’s 10:20 and you have accomplished nothing, remind yourself that today’s writing window has now closed. Don’t carry the task with you for the rest of the day; don’t try squeeze a paragraph or two in between meetings. Just plan to try again tomorrow morning. Put the burden down.

You have other things things to do. Organize your life so that you only have about five hours every day when you could possibly be writing. It’s fine not to be writing outside of that window.

Nulla dies sine linea.

I want to try something this semester. I have changed my morning routine so that I’m usually in the office by 7:00 AM. (This is mainly a result of restlessness brought on by intermittent fasting. It’s not that the hunger is making me restless, on the contrary, but rather that, after getting up at 6:00, as is my wont, and not having a breakfast to eat, I feel like I may as well just get out the door and take my morning coffee at work, a short walk away.) So here’s my idea: I’m going to write a little every morning and post the result. I will not promise to take a full moment, nor to write a proper paragraph, but I will compose a few lines of prose about what I happen to have on my mind. I will try to keep things light and breezy but perhaps the paragraphs will have a cumulative effect and add up to something around the middle of October, when I will be taking a one-week break. This is something I recommended just yesterday to a student who has a report due early next year. “Don’t put off the writing hoping ‘go deep’ later,” I said. “Writing is inexorably superficial. Begin to construct the surface of your text now.” I’m going to see what happens when I take my own advice.