My advice to students and scholars who want to take control of their writing process is to imagine the academic year as four eight-week periods of discipline, separated by short, one-week breaks in the fall and spring, and longer six- and twelve-week breaks at Christmas and over the summer. During those 32 weeks of discipline, the idea is not to be maximally productive but to be maximally deliberate about your writing. You will write, or not write, on any one of the 160 working days (I’m assuming, on average, a 5-day work week) only when and what you have decided to write. You will not demand of your muse the spontaneous, miraculous production of prose during that time. You will, as Stephen King advises, simply tell your muse where s/he can find you and show up at the appointed time.

For many people, this all seems well and good “in an ideal world”, but assumes a degree of control over their time that they don’t feel they have. My first answer is to remind them that, whether they are teachers or students, they probably expect to be able to show for class on time on most days. They know where and when they will be for their lectures. Also, they surely expect to have time out of class to read. That is, for an academic (whether student or scholar) a semester is period when they expect to be able to “attend” their classes, that is, apportion their attention to some degree. If you want to improve your discipline, you have to begin with an image of your conditions that make it possible.

Next, appreciate the finitude of the problem. We are talking about 160 days and you will be writing at most 3 hours (6 paragraphs, 3 pages) on any given day. You may write for only half an hour (or even twenty or fifteen minutes) or you may write nothing at all, but you will do so — you will write or not write — deliberately. And we can define exactly what we mean by “deliberately” here. At the end of every day, you will decide what to write about something you knew to be true last week or you will decide not write. You may decide you don’t have time tomorrow or you may be unable to think of anything to write about. But you will spend a few minutes at the end of your day making a conscious decision.

That moment at the end of the day is the key to beginning to build your discipline. I have come to calling it Discipline Zero. It actually isn’t the discipline of starting but the discipline of stopping. End your day of study deliberately. And end each of your writing moments deliberately too. Knowing that you are are able to stop will make it easier to begin. So, the easy answer to the question, “How do I get started?” is introduce that moment at the end of the day to your regular routine. Take a few minutes to think about what you will write tomorrow. Even (and especially) if you think you lack the time and knowledge to begin writing, end your day by deciding you won’t write tomorrow. Look in your calendar, think of your knowledge base as it looked last week, decide that you lack the necessary resources to compose half a page about something you know. Then call it quits for the day and enjoy your evening.

If you really do want to get your writing under control, I suspect you won’t let many days pass like this. One afternoon or evening, when you end your day, you will realize that half an hour is not a lot to ask of yourself, and that you’ve known thousands of truths for many years, any of which could well become a paragraph given a deliberate moment. Decide to write one of those.