Few things in a writer’s life are worse that staring at a screen groping for words for what seems like an eternity. Some writers can compose as fast as they can type, but most mortals’ writing process is more of a struggle. There may or may not be a way to escape the struggle entirely, but there is a way to consistently keeping the groping process from leading to a dead end. You can keep writing without being fatally stuck.

Notes from a pulp writer

10 years ago I saw a screening of Pulp Fiction where writer-director Quentin Tarantino appeared live for a Q-and-A after the film. Someone in the audience asked the impish auteur if he had any advice to keep up the daily discipline of screenwriting. “Q” swore by the tip he was given by a mentor.

He said organized his writing sessions so that, whatever the last scene was for that sitting, he would stop writing in the middle of it — not at the end. Since he knew how to continue the scene, he had no problem kick-starting the next writing session. His only task at the beginning was to finish the last scene, which was a downhill stroll. While he was typing out the rest of that scene, he would usually start getting ideas for the next scene.

This piece of advice was a godsend, since I was tasked to write eight 400-800 word articles a day at the time, and was seriously getting burned out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put off each article for the next day, but what I did do was get started on the first third or half of the ninth article. This ninth article would be the first article of the following day.

So each morning began by completing the previous afternoon’s article. The piece was, as Gina Trapani would put it, “parked on a downward slope.” The workload was the same (still eight articles, not nine), but the extra momentum changed the whole tenor of the writing process throughout the day.

Stop writing before you’re at a loss for words. Start each session with something to say.

Variations on a theme

A minor problem with this method is that you have to willingly stop yourself from writing precisely at the moment when everything’s flowing. You’re naturally inclined to want to stop when your creativity is spent, not when it’s peaking. Some days I would inadvertently continue the ninth article, then realize it was basically finished, aside from copyediting.

If this becomes a problem, use time-based or task-based quotas. In a time-based session, you write for X number of minutes or hours. In a task-based session, you write X number of words. Writers love to endlessly debate which approach works better.

I prefer time-based quotas, since they’re absolute. If I’m writing about something that’s new to me, I have no idea how long it will take complete a word count — I could be off by a factor of two or three. But I always know how long four hours takes. The examples I’ll be using are time-based, but if you prefer the task-based approach, go for it.

The Short-Time Method

First, decide how long you would ideally like to write each day. Suppose it’s four hours. Just like running, writing for that length of time daily require conditioning. So start writing one hour, using a timer (as I never tire of insisting) for the first week, two hours the second week, three hours the third week, and four hours the fourth week.

Here’s the instruction that people will ignore, since everyone wants to be Superman. If everyone was Superman, he wouldn’t be extraordinary.

If you run out of thinking before your allotted time, cut your allotted time for the next session by half. In other words, if you can’t fill an hour with reasonably consistent writing output, ratchet the session back to half an hour, then do that for a week; then double it the following week, and so on, until you reach your target daily writing time. I say “reasonably consistent” because there will inevitably be spells of staring into empty space. But if most of your time is spent staring and not writing, then you’ve overcommitted.

Rinse and repeat. If you’re still struggling to fill 30 minutes, cut the following session down to 15. Even if you can only write for five minutes initially, you’re beginning a process that all the daydreaming in the world won’t set in motion.

Knowing when to quit

It’s perfectly fine to sit and do nothing during the time you’ve allotted to write. It’s not fine to do anything else. You have to choose between being bored and being productive. In most cases, if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll get off to a slow start, then gradually gain momentum. The first three minutes of a 10-minute session might be tough, but by the tenth minute, you’re anxious to keep going.

That’s where deliberate nonfinishing comes in. When the timer goes off, you must stop writing, even if you’re in the middle of a sentence. Finish it the next time you sit down to write, and you’ll probably find that getting started and continuing is much more fluid than the first time.

If you prefer the task-based approach, it should be easy enough to adapt the instructions above. If you have a daily writing goal, like one blog post a day, trying writing the first half of the following post afterward and see how it changes the writing experience.

(Photo credit: re_birf)

Technorati Tags: Creativity, Writing

Whether you’re a writer, artist, scientist, or just a sentient human being, almost nothing helps stimulate the thinking and creative process more than good notebook — provided it’s actually used. In a recent post, Time, Attention and Creative Work, Merlin Mann issued the following warning about notebooks for erstwhile creatives:

A notebook is basically the creative equivalent of the NFL jersey you picked up at Macy’s; unless you fill it with a lot of hard work and sacrifices, you’re just a dilettante with poor spending patterns. An aspiring something.

Bottom line: notebooks are for writing, not buying. The worst practice for handling a creative block when using a tool is to run out and buy another tool. The fact that a Moleskine doesn’t have Bluetooth doesn’t make buying more of them any less of a gadget fetish. I suspect that many geeks convert to paper media to deny or feel better about their consumerism.

Let’s look at a few ways to decrease the whitespace in the notebooks that you already have.

Review your buy-to-use ratio

If you only buy a new notebook after filling the previous one, feel free to skip this part. For everyone else — you know who you are. Gather up all your notebooks and take a look at how many pages you wrote on in each one. If you moved on to a new notebook after using only a fraction of it, it’s time to reexamine either your motives for acquiring new notebooks, or the appropriateness of the notebooks you’re currently using.

Assess the usability of your current notebook

All notebooks are usable in theory, but we’re concerned with determining the notebook that lends itself to use in practice. That means it should not only encourage you to write in it, but it shouldn’t discourage you from writing in it. The standard cardboard-bound Moleskine pocket notebook, at least for me, is a great example of a notebook whose sheer elegance discourages me from writing in it. If you find yourself hesitating to put your pen down on that nice Levenger paper in your looseleaf notebook, consider replacing it with Mead paper.

After years of wasting my time and money with Moleskine and similar notebooks, I found that I wasn’t only resistant to writing in expensive notebooks, but to notebooks in general. As much as I loved the image of writing in one, the process always incurred unnecessary mental friction. There was something about writing in a bound notebook that made me feel like whatever I was wrote was going into a “permanent record.” When I switched to writing on index cards and legal pads, the problem vanished. I can compose faster on a legal pad than with any other medium.

Distinguish between jotting and drafting

We may use the same notebooks, but how we use them can be entirely different. Clarify what you use a notebook for. What process does the notebook facilitate? We have a habit of amalgamating everything associated with the writing discipline as “writing,” but there are distinct, separate processes that need to be identified.

What most of us call “writing” is actually drafting. In most cases, before you can draft a piece of copy, you have to first collect, then organize your raw material. Collecting can entail doing research, or summoning your existing knowlege. Organizing entails rearranging what you’ve collected into some kind of throughline, either an outline or at least a list. Drafting entails your initial efforts at converting your material, guided by your thoughline, into copy. Editing, of course, entails refining your copy, either through local revisions or successive drafts.

When you use a notebook for “writing,” are you collecting, organizing or drafting or editing? The notebook you’re using make be ideal for one of these phases but suboptimal or completely inappropriate for another. You might be better at collecting and outlining longhand, but drafting by computer.

Determine the best modality for working out your ideas

Back in the dot-com era I worked for a content site with a team of writers, most of whom weren’t exceptional at the craft of writing. That’s not as much of a liability as it might seem. I was assigned to write about technology news, one team of writers wrote about pop culture news, another about political news, and so on. What mattered more than writing ability per se was domain knowledge. If you read a specialty publication like “Road and Track,” you’ll notice that much of the prose is subpar, even though the information is probably very insightful. You read “Road and Track” to get information about cars, not to study article writing.

I mention this because many niche writers, especially bloggers, are too self-conscious about their composition when they should be focusing on mining their domain knowledge. Your core competency is in the ideas you have to share, not (primarily) how they’re articulated. When I read an article from Warren Buffet about investing, I couldn’t care less about his writing ability.

What does any of this have to do with notebooks? Emulating the creative process of writers whose core competency is writing (those who write on demand with exceptional skill, regardless of topic) may actually be blocking you from leveraging your strengths if they don’t involve putting pen to paper. Ultimately, you’re going to have to convert your ideas into copy, but initially, your first priority is to get collect and work out your ideas.

You might have better results with something other than a notebook, like a voice recorder. If you’re a primarily visual person, written outlines lack the schematic representation that would best facilitate the organizing process; so use mind maps or diagrams instead. Experiment to find out whether this is best done with a notebook, or a computer application like MindManager.

Try using index cards to capture individual ideas or key points prior to organizing them. When many non-writers see a full-size blank page, they feel obligated to fill it. So reduce the whitespace you need to fill. Put down one idea per card, using the smallest cards you can find.

Keep a second sheet, card or notepad nearby

Whichever phase of the writing process you’re currently engaged with, you’re inevitably going to have unrelated thoughts surface. Trying to ignore these thoughts will further interrupt your creative process, so prepare for them in advance by having a separate capture tool nearby. Write down the unrelated thoughts, and when you’re done writing, either process what you’ve captured right then, or throw it in your in-basket. For instance, I keep a junior legal pad next to my laptop.

Consider elimination

Not everything idea you capture is going to be useful, either now or in the future. Don’t be an idea packrat. If something you’ve collected is clearly not compelling enough to be developed into something more substantial later, then it’s clutter. The more clutter you have in your notebooks, the less value you’ll perceive in the collection as a whole. If 80 percent of a notebook, for instance, is uninspiring but kept on the grounds that it’s “potential,” you probably won’t be motivated to sift through the notebook to find the useful 20 percent. Collect liberally, but triage regularly.

(Photo credit: sskennel)

Technorati Tags: Writing, Productivity, Creativity