article advice follow-up

It didn’t feel like such a productive night, though actually it was. This is a follow-up post for those who like writing advice.

I used today’s bus rides to and from campus to think through the introduction to my Bristol paper. On the way in I jotted down a lot of notes about the various ways in which objects are belittled by all “radical” philosophies in our time. I was only mildly worried at the time that it was a mere list without a central organizing principle, since I figured that would come soon enough once I had an actual list.

On the bus ride home (which took much longer, as usual), I realized that for all the diverse approaches of banishing objects from a starring role in philosophy, all boil down to two basic possible strategies. I started to type that out here, but prefer to save the point for Bristol.

Upon returning home at around 5:30, I slowly started work on the introduction to the paper. It’s now not quite 5 hours later, and I even had time for dinner and a brief nap and a little bit of web-surfing. Yet I was able to write the first full 7 pages of the lecture.

The key to writing 7 workable pages in a couple of hours is not to care at all about the style. Just follow the outline and get the words on paper. I love crisp, polished style as much as anyone, but this is not the stage at which to do it. I learned this the hard way during dissertation years by doing unwise things like polishing my first paragraph for three weeks before moving on. It’s extremely inefficient. It doesn’t matter if the style in your initial draft is junk, as long as everything is approximately in the right order. (And it will be, provided you move quickly enough, because your unconscious mind has remarkable organizational skills, and whatever you feel the urge to type next probably belongs there, even if the connection seems tenuous at first.)

Translating books helped me learn this quick-drafting skill as well (which several of my fellow graduate students had already mastered by age 23, though it was a long and difficult lesson for me). When you translate, it’s almost impossible to make any progress unless you try to get a more or less accurate translation on the first draft and go for style only on the second and succeeding drafts.

There are two great advantages of having 7 pages already under my belt on this paper, even though the style is atrocious.

(1) Nothingness is the source of all anxiety. 0 pages is highly anxiety-inducing. With 7 pages, there is no anxiety at all. There’s something to work with now.

(2) I now have two options for tomorrow’s work. Either I can press onward from page 8 and new material, or I can polish the first 7 pages for style. The two tasks require different moods, and now I know that whatever tomorrow’s mood may be, it will be well-suited for one of the two options. In other words, there will be no moody procrastination tomorrow (God knows there was plenty of it on the dissertation). Progress will occur on this paper. Even if I’m not in the mood for either of those two options tomorrow, I’ll surely be in the mood for further reading. That should always be the last resort once you get this close to a deadline, since reading is the ultimate procrastination technique for writers, but in the present case it may actually help my cause.

Furthermore, having 7 pages means that the lecture now has a distinguishable “voice”. Before you actually start writing something, it’s hard to know what the tone of it will be. That tone emerges to a large degree from the contingencies that link one sentence to the next, but you have to get things rolling to discover what those contingencies might be.