Reflections On Writing Blog: Thoughts, Tips, and Suggestions

Sailing into the Wind, or Writing against Resistance

The Fastest Route Forward is not Necessarily the Most Direct

The boat in the foreground is tacking into the wind. The boat in the background left is sailing downwind using a spinnaker. (image: Johann-Nikolaus Andreae [https://www.flickr.com/photos/jnandreae/] from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:420er_003.jpg)

Sailboats can’t sail directly into the wind. To sail upwind, they tack — they sail at angles to the wind, zigzagging back and forth, moving far off the direct course they wish to set, so that they can make progress in the face of the wind’s resistance. It’s not the shortest route in terms of distance traveled, but it will get you there. Sailing directly into the wind won’t.

What’s the quickest route to a complete draft? Will you complete a draft more quickly by writing only the draft? Or can you speed completion of the draft by doing writing exercises that aren’t included in the draft?

Last Thursday, while talking with a writer who spoke of hitting a variety of points of resistance. In response, I suggested a handful of different exercises, and recommended approaching the exercises as standing outside the book they’re writing: “Don’t worry about fitting it into your manuscript,” I said. “Just explore and understand the concern that’s interrupting your flow.” This suggestion worried them: “I’m trying to write a book; these exercises don’t advance my manuscript” (paraphrase).
But the fastest route to a complete first draft manuscript may not be through an unrelenting focus on the manuscript.

Complete first drafts are good

If you want to write something, it’s great to hammer out a first draft that gives you a sense of the overall scope of the work, even if that first draft is low quality.. If you are making good progress towards such a draft, then keep at it. But what if you’re getting stuck on that first draft?

Measuring the distance to a first draft

When we’re writing a draft, there are basically to ways to measure how long it takes: the amount of time it takes, and the number of words we write to get the complete draft done. Most people are consciously more concerned with the first: “Of course I want to get it done as soon as possible.” But the second measure often comes into play unconsciously: “Writing more words takes longer; writing an exercise delays progress on the draft.”

But writing more words doesn’t necessarily take longer. It depends on the relative pace of writing.

What’s your writing speed?

At the small scale — in the course of a single writing session — most of us write at a variable pace: sometimes, things flow quickly; other times, we struggle over a single word.

Whether you’re the kind of person who writes a page each day or ten pages, you will have moments when the words are flowing smoothly and others when you’re sticking.

When you’re getting stuck, an exercise that gets your words flowing more quickly can be worth the time it takes. If you write 1,000 words on a good day, and you’re currently getting bogged down on individual sentences, then n exercise that lets you write more quickly might be worth the effort.

Exercises to get around points of resistance

If you’re making great progress on your manuscript, maybe there’s no need for you to do any exercises.

But if you’re feeling stuck for some reason, a writing exercise to explore that feelings and ideas where resistance arises.

Exercises increase in value as the emotional weight of the resistance increases. If you’re sinking into despair looking at your manuscript, an exercise is an opportunity to step away from the larger project and explore possibilities for a single sentence or passage.

Lexical Resistance

One concern expressed by this writer was uncertainty about use of certain terms: “I’m using words X, Y, and Z because they’re common in the literature in my field, but I have some reservations about their use.”

I differentiate this from resistance to jargon: resistance to jargon is a stylistic consideration (“This term will be hard to read for many”), while the lexical resistance to which I refer here is a theoretical concern (“This term has connotations that are problematic”).

Uncertainty Resistance

Another concern expressed by this writer was the desire to do more reading to strengthen their understanding of the academic discourse in which they are participating.

As a general matter, I encourage people to write on the basis of what they already know and have already read, because so many academics get stuck with the feeling that they don’t know enough, even when they have lots of knowledge already.

But it’s not good to fight through resistance too much, either: the practice of research benefits from positive emotional states. In this kind of situation, the exercise I recommend is to take a few minutes before reading to write briefly about why you want to read a specific source, what you’re looking for in it, and how that source relates to other sources that you have read or might want to read in the future. By giving yourself permission to read, you reduce emotional resistance to writing. By writing about what you want to read and why, you’re focusing your own ideas and developing your own vision of both a larger theoretical discourse and the place of a specific work in that discourse.

Stylistic resistance

I’ve worked with other writers who would get stuck on stylistic issues. “I don’t like my use of jargon here,” or “I don’t like the sentence structure,” could often become harrowing dives into the depths of frustration and despair about her ability as a writer.

Exercises like rewriting a sentence several times with different structure and different words may not feel like a direct contribution to the manuscript — “I’m going to throw away most of what I write in the exercise” — but if you find one good version of the sentence, isn’t that worth the effort that went into writing the versions you don’t use?

Exercises can interrupt the flow of big ideas

When we write, what really matters is the big picture we’re trying to create. As we write, we want to be focused on the big picture, so that each individual sentence contributes meaningfully to that big picture.
If the big ideas are flowing, it’s good to stay with them and to try to step around resistance by just moving on to the next big point. I wouldn’t recommend breaking the flow to work on an exercise. But if resistance is keeping you out of the flow, then it’s time for exercises.

Exercises give you insight into your writing project. They don’t need to contribute directly to help you make progress. If you’re facing resistance, exercises allow you to approach the resistance at an angle, like the sailor, who makes progress zigzagging from side to side, rather than trying to advance directly into the resistance.

Interesting? Helpful? Buy me a coffee!

Originally posted at https://medium.com/@thoughtclearing/sailing-into-the-wind-or-writing-against-resistance-772a82d121df

Several More University Libraries Recommending My Book

In late 2024, I first discovered that many university libraries were recommending my book Literature Review and Research Design: A Guide to Effective Research Practice.

I recently looked to see whether that had changed. The libraries that had previously featured my book were still recommending it. And I found a few additions to the list:

It’s nice to be recognized! I worked hard on that book. I had novel perspectives that could help early career scholars, and it’s nice that other people think so, too.

The Opportunity in Gratitude Journals

Finding the good; Avoiding the bad

Gratitude Journal, April 30, 2026 (image: author)

A few days ago, I read an article about gratitude journals that brought me back to the idea that we deal with things very differently depending on whether we see an opportunity (and a choice) or we see an obligation. The article opened with the author mentioning a friend who expressed scorn for gratitude journals, which led to explicit and implicit engagement with the question of obligation and opportunity.

The author’s criticisms and recommendations suggested to me that the general frame used was one of obligation. To me, the problems identified were generally tied to obligation framing. Since the practice of gratitude journaling has been a tremendous support for me, I wanted to put in some good words for gratitude journals and explore the the way framing as obligation or opportunity impacts the use of the tool.

Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional. The discussion here is based on personal experience and a brief literature review.

Obligation Framing

The very first sentence explicitly gives us an obligation frame: “A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned she was dealing with depression and had to start journaling” (emphasis added). Later, the author wrote “pushing them at the wrong person can backfire.”

The obligation frame also seemed implicit in the comment that “Ten things is too many. The sweet spot. . . is three. Three things feels achievable even on bad days, without triggering the performance anxiety that a longer list creates.” The idea that the gratitude journal sets a target — the “right” number of responses — is essentially an obligation framework.

The author also mentions the possibility of a negative feedback loop that follows from a sense of obligation:

producing a list of everything you have to be grateful for and still feeling terrible can deepen the shame spiral rather than interrupt it. . . . the message can quietly shift from “here’s something that might help” to “your failure to feel better is a gratitude deficit.” That’s not just ineffective. For some people, it makes things worse.

In addition to the obligation issues mentioned by the author, a little literature search revealed another dimension of obligation that can arise in gratitude journals: the sense of indebtedness. (1) When gratitude shifts to indebtedness, a sense of obligation is introduced. With gratitude, there’s no need to respond; with indebtedness, there is. A no-strings-attached gift comes with no obligations; a “gift” that creates obligatory indebtedness isn’t really a gift at all; it’s a transaction, an exchange.

As the author correctly observed: pushing stuff at people (i.e., creating an obligation) can backfire. People view obligations with resentment. Getting people to resent stuff doesn’t seem like the best path towards greater mental health. So if gratitude journaling is accompanied by a strong sense of obligation, that’s a sign to skip the journal, or at least rethink your reasons for doing it.

Opportunity

The emotional landscape changes when we view something as an opportunity instead of an obligation. There is a vast emotional difference between being ordered to do something and choosing to do that thing. Thinking “I can do a gratitude journal if I want” is very different from thinking “I should do a gratitude journal.”

For me, writing a gratitude journal is not an obligation. I first adopted the practice because of the extensive research that suggests that gratitude contributes to better mental health, and I want to break my cycles of negative rumination. Having already benefited from cognitive behavioral work, and believing in the importance of developing new patterns of neural activation through practice, I felt that long-term, repeated work on a gratitude journal would help strengthen my positive gratitude neurology while also giving less fuel to the negative neurology.

As a writer with a good relationship with writing (I usually feel better for writing, even when the writing doesn’t go well), the gratitude journal is also accessible: I don’t struggle to write stuff and don’t have bad feelings about writing stuff. On days when I am struggling to write more significant projects, the gratitude journal is a good way to get started. I can write in my journal until some other idea comes to me.

Academic research

A quick review of academic literature shows that gratitude journals generally show modest positive effects. A 2025 meta-analysis stated: “We found that gratitude interventions led to small overall increases in well-being,” (2) and a 2020 study said “Our results suggest the effects of gratitude interventions on symptoms of depression and anxiety are relatively modest.” (3)

With results like this, we cannot expect gratitude journals to resolve our mental health issues. But then what single therapeutic modality does that?

The fact that gratitude journals have even a small impact suggests their value as one potential tool in a wider toolbox of approaches, with due caution for potential adverse impact. And it should be noted that neither of the surveys mentioned any negative impact of using gratitude interventions, including in cases where some negative emotions are present:

prior research has indicated that Asians tend to experience not only positive emotions but also negative emotions (e.g., indebtedness, guilt), when expressing gratitude toward someone rather than something…Although most types of gratitude interventions generally enhanced well-being, expressing gratitude to others (e.g., writing a gratitude letter) did not yield a statistically significant effect. [2] emphasis added

Indebtedness

A study examined the possibility that gratitude interventions triggered feeling of indebtedness (a negative psychological impact). (1) The study compared Korean and American (US) participants, with Koreans generally expressing more indebtedness. And it compared American participants expressing gratitude for people and those expressing gratitude for non-people, with those expressing gratitude for people feeling more indebtedness.

With this information, we can approach gratitude journals with greater knowledge into what will be effective. We might, for example, limit our gratitude journal to inanimate objects or events (e.g., I’m thankful for this coffee; I’m thankful the sun is shining), or we might try to separate out the emotional threads of gratitude and debt: “I’m very thankful for my mother, and I also feel indebted to her.” A separation like that might allow a person to focus on the gratitude without getting dragged down by the indebtedness. People do separate such emotional complexity all the time. It might be an experiment to try (if you’re already interested in trying a gratitude journal): does a feeling of indebtedness come along with expressing gratitude for a person? If the exercise is unpleasant, don’t force yourself into it. You don’t have to do gratitude journals.

Opportunity, not Obligation

As discussed above, when we have a choice, we feel better. Don’t do a gratitude journal because it’s being forced on you. Do it because you think it might be something small and easy that can help in the long term.

Long-term Practice

For me, gratitude journaling is a long-term practice that has been with me a long time. When I have moments of difficulty, it’s often useful to write in my gratitude journal: It’s helped me feel better in the past; it helps me calm down and look past the present “disaster” that looms in my life.

One of the surveys noted “many researchers argue that seemingly small effects can lead to significant consequences over time and at scale…. Therefore, when practiced regularly in daily life, the effects of gratitude interventions could be nontrivial.” (2)

Conclusion

If you’re interested in trying a gratitude journal, you should try it. There are reasons to believe they can help you feel better. They often help me feel better. Expecting them to resolve all your problems is too much to ask, but they’re low risk.

And, of course, don’t do them if you feel like you’re acting out of obligation. If a gratitude journal feels difficult or annoying or frustrating, that’s a sign to look for other tools.

References

(1) Oishi, S., Koo, M., Lim, N. and Suh, E.M. (2019). When Gratitude Evokes Indebtedness. Appl Psychol Health Well-Being, 11: 286–303. https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12155

(2) H. Choi, Y. Cha, M.E. McCullough, N.A. Coles, & S. Oishi. (2025). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of gratitude interventions on well-being across cultures, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (28) e2425193122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2425193122

(3) Cregg, D.R., Cheavens, J.S. Gratitude Interventions: Effective Self-help? A Meta-analysis of the Impact on Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety. J Happiness Stud 22, 413–445 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00236-6

This story was initially posted on Medium: https://thoughtclearing.medium.com/the-opportunity-in-gratitude-journals-f1a65ed2f93c

Can Large Language Models Think?

Revisiting the Turing Test in the Age of LLMs

NASA Computer Room (ca. 1958). (https://catalog.archives.gov/id/278195)

In his famous article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1), Alan Turing proposed “the imitation game” as a way to address the question “can machines think?” The basic concern of the imitation game is whether a computer can hold a conversation with a person without the person knowing whether they’re conversing with a person or a computer.
Today, with the growth and deployment of LLMs, it is clear LLMs are capable of having conversations that are accepted by humans as comparable to human conversation. There are many people who would ay that LLMs are intelligent.

But this just returns us to the earlier question: what does it mean to think? Or, alternatively, what does it mean to be intelligent?

Detecting LLMs

For many, LLM detection is important. Teachers, unsurprisingly, are concerned that their students are using LLMs to do homework rather than doing the homework themselves. On Reddit, I’ve seen academics lamenting both that articles they’re reviewing might be LLMs and that the reviews they’ve received on their submissions were generated by LLMs. Such behavior reflects a lamentable decay of academic standards (a decay, IMO, more about the general decline of support for academia than about professors acting in bad faith: professorial workloads are, as far as I can tell, absurdly high).

Many people say that they can recognize LLM output because of clues like use of em-dashes, bullet lists, and lack of minor grammatical errors. Recently, I read an article (can’t remember where) that talked about people in positions of power who are intentionally making errors in their writing so that their work is not mistaken for AI.

Personally, I don’t try to detect LLM use, and I certainly don’t assume LLM use due to types of punctuation that have been used by good writers for long years before LLMs were ever a thing. I am 100% confident that Laurence Sterne did not use an LLM to write The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (2) in the 18th century. But he sure does use a lot of em-dashes (whether they were called as “em-dashes” at the time is a historical fact I’ve not researched), and my writing is influenced by Sterne and other old writers.

Does the Source Matter if Quality is Low?

Recently, I got some unhelpful feedback on a manuscript. One of my first thoughts was that it had been generated by an LLM, and two people to whom I lamented the situation both immediately said (paraphrasing) “That was an LLM.” Although I agree, it seems to me that the real problem was that the feedback did not do anything to help me improve my manuscript. It was not intelligent feedback in the sense that it did not address the question that was asked. (I specifically asked “do the diagrams I’ve added improve my manuscript or should I remove them” and got the response “simple diagrams can be very useful in a book like this,…I would favor keeping them where they clarify process, decision points, or distinctions that are harder to grasp quickly in prose.” That’s all reasonable, but it’s not an answer focused on my specific manuscript; it’s just a general principle.)

On Reddit, I’ve seen people say “I was reviewing an article that I think was an LLM. It had the following problems… How should I respond?” My thought is always: “If the quality of the article is low, then just point out the problems; point out the ways that the reasoning is unintelligent, and leave it at that.” Why worry about who wrote the article if it’s just conventional generalizations without any new ideas? If the reasoning is bad, that’s enough reason for a negative review.

It doesn’t matter to me whether the feedback was generated by a human or an LLM: whatever the source, it’s just low-quality feedback.

Can Machines Think?

Attempts to define terms are always trouble because different people use words differently. Do LLMs think? That depends on how we define “think.” Are LLMs intelligent? That depends on how we define “intelligence.”

Can machines think? Can dogs think? Humans can, but I’m sure there are many who would say that humans don’t think nearly enough. Are machines intelligent? Are dogs intelligent? Humans are. Sometimes. This all depends on how we define the terms.

I do feel confident in saying that if LLMs think, it is a very different order of thinking than my own.

LLMs generate output by calculating probabilities based on their training corpus. To generate an answer to a question, the LLM compares the question to previously written stuff and then calculates what a likely answer would based on the training data. “The insight of large language modeling is that many practical NLP tasks can be cast as word prediction,…We can cast the task of question answering as word prediction…we ask a language model to compute the probability distribution over possible next words.” (3)

I can safely say that my responses to questions are not, except in rare cases, the result of calculating probabilities. The mechanisms of my thinking — the whole range of human experience, the natural attempts to maintain coherence, as well as to manage cognitive dissonance — are not calculations. (Indeed, is it even possible to have cognitive dissonance if you’re just calculating probabilities?)

You Are More Original than LLMs

Turing’s test is no longer relevant because LLMs can have conversations that are satisfying or convincing to many. But the underlying question remains, and becomes more important: how often will we trust computers to make decisions for us?

Intelligence, at least on one level, is an ability to add something new and interesting to an ongoing conversation. By their very nature, LLMs, aren’t going to generate new ideas, at least not in the way that humans generate new ideas.

The best that LLMs can do is re-mix old stuff, and they will do it in a way that best matches what they have already seen. That’s not a route to originality. It’s not even a route to copying the best examples of anything (which are rare compared to the bulk or examples). LLM judgements are entirely based on comparisons with what has been done in the past.

Humans, however, create new stuff all the time. A lot of the new stuff that humans create is junk. And a lot of the stuff that humans create has already been created — hence the desire to not “re-invent the wheel.”

The more you trust your own intelligence, and the more you work to develop it, the more likely you are to do something that is both original and good. So trust yourself, not an LLM, which is literally a device to re-create that which is already commonplace and conventional.

This article was originally posted on Medium. Please check out my writing over there!

References

(1) Turing, A.M. 1950. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, LIX(236): 433–460

(2) Sterne, Laurence. (1759–1767). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39270/39270-h/39270-h.htm

(3) Jurafsky, D. & Martin, J. H. (2026). Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition with Language Models (3rd. edition draft). https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/ed3bookaug20_2024.pdf

The Project Pipeline and Interruptions in the Writing Process

Maintaining a Regular Practice

War emergency pipeline from Longview, Texas to Norris City, Illinois. Pipeline approaching canal. Wooden plug in end of pipe will keep dirt and animals out. (https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8d09020/)

It’s good to focus on a single project, but most projects hit periods when it’s inefficient to work on them. At those times, it’s good to have other projects to which you can profitably turn your attention.

The pipeline

In academia, it’s pretty common to talk about the “pipeline” of projects, a set of projects in different stages of maturity: some you’re just beginning; some you’re developing as a project proposal; some you’re actively writing/creating; some you’re editing; some are in the hands of other people and you’re waiting to hear back. Maybe you don’t have all of these at once, but having multiple projects keeps the overall writing process smoother for writers, whether academic or not.

Natural interruptions

There are good reasons to put aside a project for a time. If you just completed a draft, it’s useful to set it aside for at least a few days before diving into revision. If you’re collaborating with others, hiring an editor, seeking publication, or in the publication process, then there are periods when working on your manuscript may be inefficient, for example if you decide to change something that someone else liked, or you fine-tune something that needs major revision. And sometimes we just get frustrated with a project, and would benefit from taking a break from it.

Continuity of practice

Many writers have a regular writing practice. They write every day or almost every day. Their writing time is built into their calendar. This regularity of practice is a huge benefit to the writer, not only because it keeps the writing space in your schedule occupied, but because it keeps your neurophysiology in a more consistent rhythm: you’re used to writing, which helps you turn your attention to writing and away from other distractions.

When an interruption arises, whatever the cause, if you have other projects, then you can keep working without an interruption to your writing practice.

Switching focus from one project to another has some difficulties: you may need to remind yourself of what you were doing with a project that hasn’t gotten attention for days or weeks. In such moments, distractions have an easier time grabbing your attention, and the continuity of practice helps manage the switch between projects without the practice being interrupted.

Emotional stability

Interruptions can be frustrating and emotionally challenging. Waiting to hear back about a submission can be stressful. Waiting for colleagues to respond can be frustrating. There are also times when the frustrations within a project also motivate taking a break. Whatever the cause of the interruption, your other projects offer a chance to work on something that interests and motivates you. (Hopefully you have some projects that do interest you and motivate you; if you don’t that’s a different problem.)

Since a good emotional state facilitates writing, having these other projects present will help prevent frustration. To be sure, there are times when it’s important to work through frustration, and I’m not suggesting switching projects every time you get frustrated, it’s easier to work through the specific frustrations of one project when you have a good relationship with writing and you don’t feel trapped by your project.

Projects, big and small

The bigger the project, the more likely there will be an interruption. The smaller the project, the more often you need to start a new one. Often it can be nice to have some of both in your pipeline. The big ones let you go deep; the small ones fill the cracks. A combination of big and small projects will commonly arise for professional writers and academics. There are books, articles, requests (e.g., query letters, applications for grants/fellowships), presentations, and possibly blogs and social media.

Satisfaction and a flowing pipeline

Getting projects out into the world, whether small or big, helps me feel like I’m making progress. It helps me feel like my efforts are more than spinning my wheels. I mostly write to help other writers, and when I do help others, that provides positive feedback. (I consider writing editorial feedback to an author to be one of the forms of writing on which I work. I don’t limit my view of writing to only material for publication.) You may have other motivations — to entertain, educate, express yourself, etc. — whatever the motivation, if your pipeline is producing stuff, or at least moving toward production, that feels good. And, again, a good mental state facilitates writing.

So keep your pipeline flowing. Yes, focus on one project when that project is moving. And yes, start new projects, or work on others, when you come to an interruption.

How many projects do you have in your pipeline at present?

Originally posted on Medium: https://thoughtclearing.medium.com/the-project-pipeline-and-interruptions-in-the-writing-process-40a59fcd8de7

Come visit my Medium for more writing! Follow and subscribe, please! https://thoughtclearing.medium.com

How to Become a Better Writer

Effective Writing Practice

Writing is an invaluable tool with a range of uses, from informal texting with friends to carefully crafted social media posts to career-shaping communications. Writing is also hard. Many struggle to write, especially as the stakes increase. Texting your best friend is probably easy. Writing a novel as a hobby is a lot harder. And writing is even harder in more formal settings like school and work.

For the past 20 years, I’ve been working as a writing coach for graduate students and professors. In the course of that work, I’ve thought, read, and written extensively about how to write more effectively. In 2007, I started my first blog on blogspot. Since then, there’s a second blog on my website, an academic book co-authored with my dissertation advisor, a self-published dissertation-writing book, and an academic guide to writing literature reviews that is (as of March 2026) featured on the UC Berkeley library website.

In this, my first article on Medium, I invite you to join me as I explore the question of how to become a better writer.

What is a Good Writer?

How would you answer this question? The most common answer, I imagine, is that a good writer is someone who produces good writing. This answer leads to the question: what is good writing? But I want to pursue a different idea of being a good writer, one that isn’t as common.

The idea I want to pursue is that a good writer is someone who gets more out of the process than they have to put in: their benefits outweigh their costs. A related description is that a good writer is someone who gets what they want from writing. That answer focuses only on the desired goal.

If that’s our view, then to answer this question, we have to know why we’re writing and what we hope to get out of writing. The better you understand what you want to do, the easier it is to achieve that goal, and therefore the easier it is for your benefits to outweigh your costs.

Know Your Purposes

Why do you write? Do you write for work? For school? For pleasure? Are you writing to entertain? To inform or educate? To heal yourself? For a good writing exercise, write out the reasons you want to write.

Human motivation is complex. Different needs and desires drive each of us. We want success; we want to shape our social position; we want to get our professor or boss off our back. The child may write a thank-you note for a birthday present because their parents told them to, or because they’re really grateful and excited to write their thanks. The scholar might write because they want a job or tenure, because they’re excited to share interesting ideas, because they want to teach and help others grow, or because they want to solve some social problem. The novelist might write because they want to express themselves, audience be damned, or because they want to entertain. These are the kinds of motivations that first come to mind when we talk about purposes.

Another set of purposes that are less often considered are in how the writing is used. All the purposes discussed in the previous paragraph are for some sort of social outcome — one centered on writing as a tool for communication. But writing is not always for communication: two valuable roles for writing are to support memory and to support development of new ideas. By recognizing these various purposes, writers can more effectively apply their efforts.

Effective Writing Practice

Every writer is different, so precise details about what makes an effective writing practice will vary. But we’re all human, so we also share a great deal, too. Especially, we all share the potential for learning and growth; indeed growth and change are inevitable. This constant change means that our purposes change too.

With this in mind, I like to focus on the question of “effective writing practice,” to highlight both the immediate moments and the long-term picture. The idea of effective research practice invites both the question of how to use the next minute effectively and how to use the next year or decade effectively.

Please come check out my Medium account (https://thoughtclearing.medium.com), where this was originally posted.

University Libraries Featuring My Book

A little over five years ago, my newest book, Literature Review and Research Design: A Guide to Effective Research Practice, was published. It didn’t get a lot of notice, and my efforts at promotion were hampered by the fact that the COVID lockdown hit just after I had sent out promotional materials while the book was still new.

Recently—over the past 18 months or so—it has started to sell more copies. We’re not talking huge numbers, by any means, but its ranking on Amazon, which spent most of its first three years languishing at 2,000,000 or 3,000,000, is now spending most of its time now at around 1,000,000 or 1,500,000.

Curious about this, I went looking on the web for reviews. I didn’t find many actual reviews (a few on Goodreads), but I did find that several universities were featuring it on webpages dedicated to giving guidance on doing literature reviews. These libraries have chosen several books to feature from among the dozens on the subject of literature reviews, and it is quite gratifying to see mine among the few chosen.

Here’s the list of library webpages that I found:

Obligation and motivation

Obligation and motivation have a complex relationship. On one hand, obligation will lead us to do things that we don’t want to do. We don’t necessarily want to get up to go to work, but we do because of our obligation to do so, for example. On the other hand, obligation can turn pleasure into pain—the event we might have chosen from interest, suddenly becomes a burden when it is an obligation.

I think of this dynamic in the a writing practice and particularly in my relationship with writers with whom I work. Writing is hard and requires a lot of effort. When it starts to feel like an obligation, that sense of burden can really start to weigh.

Psychologist Neil Fiore, who for many years worked (and perhaps still works) with graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that procrastination often arises from resentment—the sense that the research is an obligation keeping the writer from other things.

For people who have become writing-averse, especially for people who have started to struggle with writing anxiety after enjoying it earlier in their lives, this obligation-fueled distaste becomes a real problem.

Internal and external sources of obligation

Some obligations are external—the commands of parents, teachers, work superiors, etc.—are external obligations. A speed limit, for example, is an unwelcome external imposition on the impatient driver sure they can drive twice as fast and still be safe. These external obligations are typically unpleasant and source of resentment.

Some obligations are internal. If, for example, I feel much better when I consistently practice yoga, I feel an internal obligation—it is only my own desire for long-term well being that I put up with the short-term discomfort of a yoga practice. These internal obligations may have a touch of unpleasantness, but they do not generate the same resentment because of their fully optional nature: I am not trapped by them in the same way that I am trapped by an external obligation.

Some obligations have a mixed provenance that can make them emotionally complex. For me, personal correspondence often falls into this category. There is an emotional residue from my childhood when I hated to write and was forced by my parents to write thank you notes—the unpleasant external obligation. But there is also the more mature internal obligation stemming from gratitude that is only unpleasant in the sense that I will feel better for thanking people to whom I am sincerely grateful.

Discipline vs. obligation

There is a gap between discipline and obligation, especially between an external obligation and a personally chosen discipline. Choice is a key factor—the emotional state related to the external obligation compared to the internal personal choice is huge—when one has made a choice, it’s much easier to feel enthusiastic about it.

To be sure, we can feel trapped by our choices. We may choose a job or relationship and later find that we need to leave that job or relationship. That can be true of a discipline, too. A person who enjoyed eating meat might choose to become a vegetarian for personal convictions, maintain that discipline despite temptation, and then give up their decision a decade or more later.

We want to engage with writing and our work as a discipline, not an obligation. If our writing and work are both a discipline and an obligation, we can choose a perspective on which to focus.

Discipline and obligation

If you are in academia, it is likely that you are motivated by things like curiosity/the desire to gain knowledge and/or social service (perhaps while also getting rich/famous, as, e.g., inventor of a new technology both serves society and can also get wealth/fame).

Being in academia, however, creates obligations. You have to meet the expectations/demands of the institution in which you work. You have to satisfy professors when you’re a student. When you’re staff or faculty, you have to satisfy hiring committees, grant funders, journal editors and reviewers, etc.

The obligations make it too easy to lose sight of the internal motivation for the discipline. Unfortunately, this can really poison the experience of work in much the same way that negative feedback can kill motivation to work on a project.

Can you choose to focus on the discipline instead of the obligation?

This is not to suggest that you fail to meet obligations or ignore them, but, to the extent that they are overlapping, to focus on the aspects of them tht grow out of the personally chosen discipline rather than on the externally imposed obligations.

For example, there is pressure to publish on the scholar or researcher. On the one hand is the obligation of the publish-or-perish environment of academia. On the other hand is the desire to share valuable knowledge. The researcher who has evidence for evidence-based practices, or the scholar who identifies some important theory both do some sort of service to society by advancing the scholarly discourse. They can only do that by getting published through peer review.

Focusing on the potential help to society, or even just on selfish personal interest an curiosity, makes it easier to work than focusing on the demands of a peer reviewer or editor or professor or dean or whoever is making demands of you. If you see what you’re doing as helping people (or yourself), it’s easier to work as if you see your work as a response to someone else’s demands (especially if you feel their demands are unreasonable).

Choosing the positive focus

The world is complex. Things in the world are imperfect. The people we love appear to be imperfect at times. The activities we love or enjoy are sometimes disappointing or frustrating. So, too, is the work of writing or research or teaching, whichever it is of these that motivates us to work and write.

We have some choice in where to turn our attention. If your supervisor is yelling at you to meet a deadline, you can still remember that your work is going to serve society.

Try to avoid looking through the lens of obligation and remember, whenever possible, the lens of discipline.

Don’t let a sense of obligation poison an experience you would have otherwise enjoyed. That’s a challenge, but working on it can pay off in peace of mind.

It’s Never Too Early to Start Writing

The older I get and the more writers I work with, the more I become convinced that if you want to write, it’s never too early to start writing.

In academia, which is most familiar to me, the main reasons people offer for why they aren’t writing is that they need to learn more—they need do more reading or they need to do more other research (e.g., gathering data; analyzing data; etc.).

In the world of artistic writing, such excuses are perhaps less common, but still, looking at social media forums on writing, like on Reddit, there are people who ask “Have I read enough to start writing,” and people who assert “You will be a better writer if you read more, regardless of when you start writing,” which implies that you can improve as a writer just by reading, even if you don’t write.

We can always learn more, so more reading/research always seems a viable, even necessary, next step. The greater the self-doubt, the more likely it is that a person will avoid writing in favor of trying to learn more before writing. But, because we can always learn more, there is no point at which it is too early to start writing: if we will never know “enough,” then waiting another day or week or month or year, and reading another article, or book, or entire library, will only leave us in much the same place: we won’t know everything; we won’t know enough.

But the writing we do on any given day does not inevitably commit us to some course of action. I can start writing this morning, do some reading in the afternoon and decide to throw away the morning’s writing and start something new. Even if you throw away a draft, I assert that the time has been well spent and that you become a better writer by writing. For this reason, it’s never too early to start writing.

A Bad Letter Early Is Better than a Good Letter Late

It could be argued that a good idea must be incubated sufficiently before it can be presented in an effective form, and that writing too soon will damage or destroy the idea. It’s possible that there is some abstract “idea” that the writer captures, and then somehow damages by writing poorly. This does not seem like a realistic explanation to me. Writers build and refine their ideas by writing. The idea is within the writer, and the writer must cultivate it by thinking about it and exploring it (including writing about it).

Although we can stop writing too soon—we can be overconfident in our work and submit it to others while it is still a bad mess—starting to write early does not commit us to submitting our work to the scrutiny of others before it’s ready. It’s not as if a timer begins running when you first put words on the page. Starting writing early does not commit you to early submission. If there is an external deadline—a contract with a publisher, an assignment for school, even a Christmas card for your mom—that deadline doesn’t wait for you to start writing. It might be weird to write your mom a Christmas card in August, but you don’t have to mail it until December and it will be fine (assuming it doesn’t contain news that you have otherwise communicated to her).

Starting writing enables early submission and reduces the chance of late submission. There is absolutely no chance that you can submit your work before you have started writing. Starting early is unlikely to delay completion or submission. It’s possible that a writer who gets too absorbed in writing neglects some work of importance. But even such an error is unlikely to be missed during revision.

The sooner you start writing, the sooner you can finish a draft, and then the sooner you can start revising. If William Germano is correct in saying that revision is “the only writing that matters,” as the subtitle of his book On Revision claims, then we want to get to revision as soon as possible. The earlier we start writing, the sooner we can advance our project.

Generally, I think most writers would benefit from getting a bad manuscript out early in preference to delaying to work on the draft longer. Too many writers keep working on their manuscript, endlessly revising, when they should finish that work and move on to another. Academic writers are often tempted to get an extension on their work, but I discourage the practice.

As you write, you learn, and you make choices about which way to go

Writing alters our perception of the world. We may start writing with a certain image of the world and of our message in mind, but this image is imperfectly related to what we can put on the page, and the attempt to put ideas on the page generally reveals perspectives we have not seen before.

The learning of the writer lies on multiple level. At the physical level, there is the basic development of neurophysiology that comes with working on any task or any set of ideas, including the neurophysiology for putting words on the pae (whether that be by typing, handwriting, or dictation). At the purely intellectual level of writing, there are choices in many dimensions, including:

word choice
sentence structure and style
narrative structure
authorial voice
which ideas to include and which to exclude

With each draft, if we reflect on our options for all these different dimensions, we learn abot our choices as a writer.

The learning can be a problem: as you learn, you can be tempted to change what you did in the past; you can be tempted by new projects. We want to keep learning, of course; we don’t want to refuse learning because it maybe makes us dissatisfied with our earlier efforts. Despite the problems of learning, we want to learn, and writing enables more learning about writing than any other activity.

Note: Because of the “problem” of learning, I recommend trying to write quickly and to finish drafts quickly, but that’s a separate discussion.

Time Management

Our imaginations are essentially boundless. We can basically imagine anything, my mentor’s mentor, Horst Rittel argued: “there are no limits to the conceivable” (Universe p.129; p.172 “Reasoning of the Designer”). Knowledge, or at least the accumulated knowledge of academia and humanity, is practically boundless, at least within the capabilities of a human.

As humans, our time is limited. There may be uncounted paths of interest—uncounted research projects, uncounted novels or poems—but there is very countable, limited time, as expressed over centuries, including “Time’s winged chariot” in Marvell’s “To a Coy Mistress,” and rock band Pink Floyd’s song “Time,” which laments:

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines

We want our plans to come to something—they may start or incubate with half a page of scribbled lines—and it is for that reason that we want to start writing sooner than later. If we want to produce some good work, we have to be willing to produce our pages of scribbled lines that “come to naught.” If we want to achieve our plans, we benefit by writing sooner rather than later. The sooner we start, the better chance we have to improve our plans, and find people to support us as we try to realize them—particularly the professors, editors, reviewers, agents, publishers, and others who might facilitate our getting published or achieving other writing goals.

You are always making choices about what you do with your time. If you want to be a writer, it’s valuable to practice writing. There is no better way to improve as a writer. Unless you’re writing, other activities—reading, course work, etc.—won’t help you become a better writer or finish your manuscripts.

If you want to be a writer, choose to spend time writing now so that you can finish your writing projects.