repeating one of my favorite tips

As often stated here, I swear by outlines. There are at least two reasons for this.

1. It’s possible to write extremely quickly if your outline is good enough. All of my personal best crazy days writing 20, 25, or 30 pages (my personal record is 31 double-spaced pages in a single good day, but in my youth, 15 pages was usually the ceiling before I started losing my mind) have been on the basis of very detailed outlines.

2. Outlines can be done away from the computer. Go for a walk, get an iced tea somewhere in this heat, and sit down and think how you want to organize your piece of writing.

3. No one else would organize the outline exactly the same way you do, so your article/thesis/book is guaranteed to have a very original backbone as long as you’re saying things you really think and not just blowing smoke to impress other people.

4. A junk first draft is fine, as long as everything is in the right order. This gives you another chance to work away from the computer, if you want to print the draft and mark it up away from home to set the table for the next draft. Equipping yourself to be able to work in multiple locations can be just as important as yesterday’s advice to give yourself multiple options for which chapter/section to attack in any given mood. Having to sit in the same place and work on the same section day after day leads to fatigue, and fatigue is a morale-sucker, and low morale means you’re automatically going to get less done and think less clearly and imaginatively.

The most important thing is getting everything down in the right order, even if you think some of it isn’t tightly argued enough yet. Finish the whole thing first, since what comes at the end may well teach you how to argue the weak intermediate steps better. There’s always the fallacy in the air that things have to be done perfectly if they’re worth doing. No, there’s no such thing as a perfect book or even perfect paragraph. You get the whole thing done, and then you polish it.

And by the time the deadline hits, you may still wish you could polish a few things, but we don’t have infinite time in this world. It’s better to write an excellent thing than to procrastinate because you think you can write a perfect thing. You cannot write a perfect thing, but most likely you can write an extremely good one that will set off chain reactions in other people.

if Gibbon were writing about the debt ceiling crisis

Opening sentence from the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

“A backup plan to cut the federal deficit and keep the U.S. government from defaulting gained momentum on Capitol Hill as President Barack Obama and congressional leaders took a break in negotiations to determine if they can reach a deal.”

The reincarnated Edward Gibbon, writing one thousand years from now:

“As the thunderstorm neared, the public slept. Obama’s orations from Pennsylvania Avenue were obstructed and perplexed by the speeches of Boehner and his minions, as Norquist gestured from the shadows. The reasonable spoke words of compromise, only to find them snuffed by the officers of faction. An ill-placed confidence in their rulers had insensibly laid dormant the minds of America. Widowed grandmothers awaited their medicines, and capitalists allotted coming windfalls, soon to be rendered equal in their penury.”

a reader response on procrastination

H. writes, concerning my recent post on the topic:

“Getting tips like this help to beat procrastination, but ultimately it’s up to oneself to go through with it. In my experience the act of procrastination is curiously detached from the task one is avoiding — it’s not about the work itself. Actually doing the work is much more fulfilling than the agony of procrastinating. I think that procrastination is more about avoiding the pain of starting to do the work, rather than the feeling of doing the work itself, which feels much better.”

This rings true. It’s a bit like pushing a stalled car. The hardest effort is in the first couple of seconds, and then the momentum is on your side.

Lovecraft theater

At first I couldn’t get back into where I’m staying this evening, because the door was blocked from the inside by 20 or so people. It turned out to be one of those tourist murder mysteries, as I learned from someone’s whisper, so I went into the dining area and killed time.

Afterward, one of the actresses unexpectedly walked into the dark dining room, and being in a murder mystery frame of mind, she was scared momentarily by my shadowy form in the corner. I got to asking about the mystery, and it turns out to be based on Lovecraft. [ADDENDUM: If I’d know that from the start, I would have answered her in a slopping or buzzing voice and then walked out of the room with a shambling gait.]

I was invited for tomorrow’s show, and of course will attend. It’s hard to believe he’d be a good basis for a mystery, but you never know.

one of Lovecraft’s best passages

I’m not sure which one is my absolute favorite, but this one from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is pretty good. It concerns the mass detention of Innsmouth, Massachusetts residents following a huge federal raid on the decayed seaport town:

“Complaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent.”

The residents of Innsmouth are so degenerate that even the liberals want to throw them in a gulag. That’s how bad things are in Innsmouth.